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.
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, formerly Xara Xtreme, is a fast graphics software with versatile illustration tools and advanced photo management. It streamlines creative tasks, allowing users to retouch images, create social media posts, and design website graphics in one...
Germany
EU
Chasys Draw IES is a suite of applications including a layer-based image editor with animation, icon editing support and super-resolution via image stacking (Chasys Draw IES Artist), a multi-threaded image file converter (Chasys Draw IES Converter), a fast image viewer (Chasys...
United States
Picozu Editor is a drawing and photo retouching application built on Javascript, HTML 5 and CSS3. Make sure you use a modern browser if you want to play with it.
Black Ink is a digital painting software that uses your computer's rendering hardware to provide a perfectly responsive experience no matter your picture's size.
FranceEU
You can use it to view your photographs and improve them. Showfoto is the standalone image editor of the digiKam project.
GermanyEU
Litrato is an app for editing photos and saving those changes to the gallery.
GermanyEU
Canvas 11 is the single most cost-effective, integrated solution for the creation, enhancement, presentation and sharing of technical illustrations and graphics.
Canada
PictBear is an image editor and paint program that is very friendly toward the beginning user, PictBear is very straightforward and easy to use no matter what your skill level is.
United States
RealWorld Paint is an free portable image/photo/animation editor. It supports layers with styles and can import and export Photoshop, GIMP and Paint.net images with layers.
CzechiaEU
Want to edit photos, create logos or make designs with ease ? You've found the perfect app for that. With easy to use editing tools you can add text to an image, make beautiful designs, create stunning graphics and much more with just couple of taps.
PixelStyle Photo Editor for Mac is an all-in-one photo editing and graphic design software, providing professional high-quality photo processing tools to edit the photos, enhance and touch up photos on Mac OS X.
China
