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.
Creative photo + video filter app developed by leading photographers and content creators. It’s time to take your edits (and Instagram) to the next level and achieve the photography aesthetic you have always dreamed of with this essential filter editing app which brings premium...
Love photo editing? Multi Layer is a full featured photo editor able to edit and compose images in multiple layers. It supports selection tool (manual and magic wand tool) to selective editing brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and RGB color levels.
iPiccy is an online photo editor with tons of powerful features to make your images beautiful. It takes commercial quality editing tools and wraps them in a simple and intuitive interface that makes editing as fast as possible, exposing the features you need only when you need...
United States
Fhotoroom HDR is an easy to use powerful image editor that can take your JPEG's, Digital Camera RAW and High Dynamic Range photos and help you fix exposure, color, and distortion problems or quickly and easily make your photos stunning.
Photopainter is both a natural-media painting software and an image processing system at the same time.
United Kingdom
Picture Window Pro is a powerful image editing tool designed for serious photographers with demanding creative and quality standards.
United States
Professional Photo Editor Online. Work with Google Drive. Paint by Touchscreen or Stylus Pen. Support Layers, Paths, and Pixel Art. Free, Fast, Easy to Use.
COLOR projects is your reliable partner to develop enduring images as quickly as possible and with the least stress
Germany
EU
PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu.
China
CinePaint is a deep paint application that edits EXR, DPX, 16-bit TIFF, JPEG, PNG and many other types of image files. CinePaint is available as a native application for Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD.
Comprehensive multimedia suite with over 20 integrated applications offering disc burning, video capture and editing, photo editing, file conversion, DVD authoring, and encryption, ensuring versatile media management and online sharing capabilities.
United States
IsoPaint is a quick, simple & fun isometric drawing app. It's designed to make isometric drawing easy for everyone, with no complicated layers, menus, filters or excessive tapping like similar apps.
United Kingdom
