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.
Livebrush is a drawing application. It employs an easy-to-use brush tool that reacts to your gestures through the use of velocity and other motion controls. By combining simple motion controls with customizable brush styles, Livebrush offers a fun and unique way to create...
United States
Professional perspective correction tool fixing lens distortion, horizons, and leaning buildings. Auto lens profiles, content-aware resizing, portrait reshaping, batch processing.
France
EU
LiveQuartz is aimed at all people that need a photo retouching tool to easy manipulate layers, transparency and non destructive filters.
FranceEU
With just one-click you can enhance and remove most common defects of any digital photo.
CodedColor PhotoStudio by 1STEIN is a Windows photo viewer and editor to organize, edit, resize, reformat, correct, compare, sort, watermark, annotate and print digital images, and to edit EXIF and IPTC data in digital photos.
Oloneo® PhotoEngine™ is the only HDR and Raw processing software offering digital photographers full control over light and exposure in real-time, as if they were still behind the lens.
FranceEU
Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. There are especial cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement - and these very...
Improve and play with your digital pictures at Pho.to site with easy yet powerful editing tools and services. Enhance your pictures, have fun with your photos online, retouch portraits and share your photos for free. Free Pho.to services:
Russia
Super Eraser magically remove unwanted elements and instantly fix your photos. A variety of experiments shows the intelligent Super Eraser will give you better and more natural, amazing results than any similar tools.
China
One click Image editing website. Increase resolution, remove background, compress images all at one place. More features coming soon.
Simple and advanced HDR photo editor to recreate high dynamic range photos as eye-view. Advanced tone mapping algorithm, customize HDR parameters, auto align and adjustment, support both JPEG and RAW files.
Wizardbrush is a natural media painting software which has a lot of brushes and paper with realism style. You can create realistic picture with it. You can not only use it to paint pictures, but also handle your digital photos, even use it to teach digital painting and image...
United Kingdom
