Adobe Photoshop serves as a professional raster graphics editor for Windows and macOS, handling advanced image editing, retouching, and digital art. Users praise its extensive feature set for graphics and design, though many complain about high pricing compared to other editors.
GIMP tops the rankings as the leading Photoshop alternative, offering broad image-editing and retouching tools completely free and open-source. Many users switch to GIMP specifically to escape Photoshop's cloud licensing and subscription model. Affinity Photo ranks second with its polished interface and one-time purchase model, repeatedly highlighted as a cost advantage over subscription pricing. Luminar Neo brings AI tools like GenErase and GenExpand plus focus stacking and HDR merging for photographer-centric workflows.
Krita ranks third, focusing on digital painting with advanced brush control and animation support for artists. The alternatives landscape splits between pro photo editors and art-first painting apps, with Photopea standing out as a free, install-free option with PSD support and a familiar interface.
For open source transparency, GIMP and Krita lead with community-driven development and no proprietary licensing restrictions. Linux users have native options in GIMP, Krita, and MyPaint without relying on Windows or macOS-only tools. Windows-only picks include Paint.NET and Corel PaintShop Pro for desktop editing with layers, effects, and selection tools.
Web-based editors like Photopea, Pixlr, and Sumo Paint work in browsers when you can't install software on school or locked-down computers. Users avoiding subscriptions can choose Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for predictable one-time licensing. For PSD workflows, Photopea, Affinity Photo, and Pixelmator open Photoshop-format documents to maintain collaboration compatibility. iPad workflows benefit from Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, and Pixlr for editing on tablets rather than desktop-only setups.
WidsMob Retoucher is an excellent photo retouching program, which is able to reduce image noise, portrait retoucher, film pack, adjust effects, fish eye effects, vignetting and more other features to photos with ease.
software running on the Windows with the affordable price, provides a professional and efficient solution for all photographers to cover their main works from management to editing, touching up to re-composition.
Photivo is a multi platform photo processor for RAW and bitmap images with 16 bit precision. Photivo tries to give the user as much control as possible to express his creativity and to allow flexible adjustments for the various needs in photography.
Fine-tune, watermark, resize, rotate, crop, convert and apply artistic effects to your photos using Image Plus. If you have photos on your Mac that need to be adjusted and watermarked then you are in luck.
Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 8 enhances your photos at the click of a button! The program fully automatically adjusts colors, contrasts and exposure settings to perfection for individual images or entire collections.
Use ArcSoft PhotoStudio to enhance and edit all of your digital photos.ArcSoft PhotoStudio is powerful photo editing software featuring an array of advanced tools, filters and special effects inside a very friendly user interface.
QueekyPaint is a unique browser-based drawing tool for creating animated drawings online. Visit the massive gallerys and learn drawing by watching the process of your favourite artists. QueekyPaint is free and simple to use.
Hama is an AI-powered web application that lets you erase objects from your photo with a single brush.
Photo editing program that as well as the usual tools has some unique & cool features too.
openCanvas, popularly abbreviated as oC, is a popular Japanese image editing program.
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