The best Photoshop alternatives offer advanced photo editing solutions similar to Photoshop, but without the need to take out an expensive subscription with Adobe.
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Photoshop is definitely the most well-known photo editing software, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best one for you or your business. There are a few reasons that you may want to opt for alternative software, including price, special features, or a different workflow.
BeFunky is a uniquely powerful online Photo Editor. Think Photoshop, but simplified for everyday users. With BeFunky, you can easily create stunning, professional-quality images with a single click. The process might be simple, but the results are incredibly sophisticated. Thanks to BeFunky, there's no need to choose between a powerful, do-it. Discover free and premium online photo editor and graphic design tools! Effects, filters, overlays, simple to expert tools.Open almost any image format like PSD (Photoshop), PXD, Jpeg, PNG (Transparent), webP, SVG and many more.
There’s no shortage of options, so we’ve put together this list to help you find the best Photoshop alternatives to meet your needs. We’ve selected what we think is the best software based on four main criteria: ease of use, features and functionality, performance, and compatibility.
After reading, you should have a good idea of which is the best Photoshop alternative for you or your business.
We've also highlighted the best PC for photo editing.
The best open-source photo editing suite
Reasons to buy
+Highly customizable interface+Huge number of features, easily extensible+Raw and PSD compatible+Free and open source
Reasons to avoid
-Complex interface-Steep learning curve-No CMYK color mode (add-on available)
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open-source photography powerhouse that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
GIMP boasts a huge number of features and functions that rival Photoshop. There’s also a huge community of developers and artists who have created a wide array of plugins, making this a highly adaptable program. If you desire a specific feature, there’s probably an add-on for it.
The interface is highly customizable, so you can pare things back or leverage multiple windows and toolbars as needed. For this reason, GIMP has a similarly steep learning curve as Photoshop, but once you’ve made your way through a few tutorials, it’s quite comfortable.
In our experience, GIMP was slightly less responsive and used a few more resources than its proprietary counterpart, but this can be easily forgiven on the basis that GIMP always has been and always will be free and open source.
Read our full Gimp review.
A powerful HTML 5 free online photo editor
Reasons to buy
+Layer support+Web-app, available from any browser+Clean design+Intuitive workflow experience
Reasons to avoid
-Missing some features (e.g., custom brushes)-Limited filetype compatibility (no PSD)-Online only
Pixlr X is another free photo editor, available as a web app. This HTML 5 photo editing software can give native apps a run for their money.
The Pixlr X interface is more spartan than either Photoshop or GIMP, but that’s not a bad thing. The workflow is streamlined and intuitive: you can drag-and-drop a photo from your computer or add a URL, and then get to work adjusting images with familiar one-click filters and sliders.
Given that it’s a web app, Pixlr X has surprisingly robust layer support. However, important features are still missing. Custom brushes, for example, are slated for development in the future but don’t exist yet.
Overall, Pixlr X gives you a super clean and intuitive interface for basic to medium-complexity photo editing.
Read our full Pixlr X review.
A lighter alternative to Photoshop that still has many features
Reasons to buy
+Customizable interface+Many functions and one-click editing tools+Support for scripts and batch editing+Raw and PSD compatible
Reasons to avoid
-Limited set of filters-Limited keyboard shortcuts
Photos Pos Pro is a Photoshop alternative known for being feature-rich, with tools for editing images, web design, and document creation.
While it lacks the deep customization that professional photographers rely on, it’s still an excellent program for making adjustments to photos for presentations, marketing campaigns, or personal enjoyment.
One interesting feature is the customizable interface, which enables users to select either Novice or Pro layouts. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but essentially, the novice layout sacrifices power for usability, while the pro layout is feature-rich, albeit with a steep learning curve. Even if it’s not executed perfectly, this flexibility is commendable and practical.
With layers, masking, brushes, scripts, and batch editing, Photos Pos Pro is a feature-rich alternative to Photoshop.
Read our full Photo Pos Pro review.
A clean, intuitive, and customizable interface
Reasons to buy
+Excellent tablet support for drawing+Highly customizable brush engine+Vector and raster capabilities+Large community
Reasons to avoid
Krita is open-source and free, backed by a huge community of developers and talented artists who share artwork and methods. If you’re looking for an active user base that’s invested in discussing and sharing art, Krita is a great Photoshop alternative.
Beyond the community, Krita is an incredibly powerful photo editing software, with hundreds of brushes and a brush customization engine, vector and text capabilities for comic strips, a wrap-around mode for seamless repeating images and patterns, and a powerful resource manager for importing tools from other artists.
We found the interface intuitive and familiar, with minor functions like being able to scroll sliders with the trackpad and having helpful tooltips that let us know to find the right tool.
Krita is more of a drawing tool than a photo editing tool, so certain features are missing: fewer photo filters, no automatic heal tool, etc. It does, however, support opening and saving PSD files.
Also, Krita has fantastic tablet support with custom sensitivity settings, so for artists looking to combine drawing and photos, it’s hard to beat.
Powerful photo editing software that leverages AI
Reasons to buy
+Leverages AI for impressive features+Available as standalone or Adobe/Apple plug-in+Sync AI edits across photos +Download new skies or upload your own
Reasons to avoid
-Can be heavy on system resources-No mobile version or web app
Luminar isn’t the cheapest option out there, but it’s a powerful photo editing software that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help artists create amazing photos in just a few clicks.
Luminar is available as a standalone editor or a plug-in for Adobe products, so this is an alternative that you can actually use in tandem with Photoshop.
Its impressive features include instant AI sky replacement, AI portrait and skin enhancer, sunrays, advanced AI structure and lighting filters, a smart contrast tool for preserving color and texture, and object removal brushes, some of the best we’ve used.
The layout is clean and intuitive, with most functions available in the sidebar. Clicking on one brings up sliders for customizing effects, with advanced settings available. From start to finish, the Luminar photo editing workflow is smooth and speedy.
Programs Like Photoshop online, free
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Whether you merely shoot with your smartphone or you're a professional photographer working in a studio, you need software to organize, optimize, and edit your digital photos. Camera technology is improving at a tremendous rate: Today's smartphones are more powerful than the point-and-shoots of just a few years ago, and pro-level cameras have passed the 150-megapixel mark. Photo editing software is keeping up, with ever-more-powerful features. People who shoot with a four-camera Galaxy S21 Ultra or with an advanced digital SLR both care how their photos look. To get the best results, you need to import the shots into your PC to organize them, pick the best ones, perfect them, and print or share them online. Here we present the best choices in photo editing software to suit every photographer.
Which Photo Software Should You Use?
Novice smartphone shooters want different software from those shooting with a $52,000 Phase One IQ4 in a studio. We've included all levels of PC software here, and reading the linked reviews will make it clear which is for you. Nothing says that pros can't occasionally use an entry-level application or that a prosumer won't be running Photoshop, the most powerful image editor around. The issue is that, in general, users at each of these levels will be most comfortable with the products intended for them.
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Our Experts Have Tested 17 Products in the Photo Editing Category This Year
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Note that, in the spec table below, it's not a case of 'more checks mean the program is better.' Rather, the table is designed to give you a quick overview of the products. A product with everything checked doesn't necessarily have the best implementation of those features, and one with fewer checks still may be very capable, and whether you even need the checked feature depends on your photo workflow. For example, DxO Photolab may not have face recognition or keyword tagging, but it has the finest noise reduction in the land and some of the best camera- and lens-profile-based corrections.
Are There Free Photo Editing Apps?
So you've graduated from smartphone photography tools like those offered by the smartphone operating systems and maybe Instagram. Does that mean you have to pay a ton for high-end software? Absolutely not. Up-to-date desktop operating systems include photo software at no extra cost. The Microsoft Photos app included with Windows 10 (and updated for Windows 11) may surprise some users with its capabilities. In a touch-friendly interface, it offers a good level of image correction, auto-tagging, blemish removal, face recognition, and even raw camera file support. It can automatically create editable albums based on photos' dates and locations.
Apple Photos does those things too, though its automatic albums aren't as editable. Both programs also sync with online storage services: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft. With both, you can search based on detected object types, like 'tree' or 'cat' in the application. Apple Photos also can integrate with plugins like the excellent Perfectly Clear.
Ubuntu Linux users are also covered when it comes to free included photo software: They can use the capable-enough Shotwell app. And no discussion of free photo editing software would be complete without mentioning the venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, offers a ton of Photoshop-style plugins and editing capabilities but very little in the way of creature comforts or usability. Other lightweight, low-cost options include Polarr and Pixlr.
How Can You Edit Photos Online?
In this roundup, we've only included installable computer software, but entry-level photo shooters may be adequately served by online photo-editing options. These are mostly free, and they're often tied to online photo storage and sharing services. Flickr (with its integrated photo editor) and Google Photos are the biggest names here, and both can spiff up your uploaded pictures and do a lot to help you organize them.
These free options even approach the two entry-level installed programs here, but they lack many tools found in the pro and enthusiast products. The latest version of Lightroom includes a good deal of photo-editing capabilities on its web version. And Adobe announced a basic web version of its flagship Photoshop app, currently in beta. Other notable names in web-based photo editing include BeFunky, Fotor, and Photofx, and PicMonkey.
Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers
Most of the products in this roundup fall into this category, which includes people who genuinely love working with digital photographs. These are not free applications, and they require at least a few hundred megabytes of your disk space. Several, such as Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector, are strong when it comes to workflow—importing, organizing, editing, and outputting the photos from a DSLR. Such apps offer nondestructive editing, meaning the original photo files aren't touched. Instead, they maintain a database of edits that you apply and that appear in photos you export from the application. These programs also offer strong organization tools, including keyword tagging, color-coding, geo-tagging with maps, and in some cases face recognition to organize photos by people that appear in them.
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At the back end of workflow is output. Capable software like Lightroom Classic offers powerful printing options such as soft-proofing, which shows you whether the printer you use can produce the colors in your photo or not. (Strangely, the new version of Lightroom—non-Classic—still offers no built-in local printing capability, though the latest update lets you send image to a photo printing service.) Lightroom Classic can directly publish photos on sites like Flickr and SmugMug. In fact, all good software at this level offers strong printing and sharing, and some, like ACDSee and Lightroom, include their own online photo hosting to present a portfolio of your work.
The programs at the enthusiast level and the professional level can import and edit raw files from your digital camera. These are files that include every bit of data from the camera's image sensor. Each camera manufacturer uses its own format and file extension for these. For example, Canon DSLRs use .CR2 files and Nikon uses NEF. (Raw here simply means what it sounds like, a file with the raw sensor data; it's not an acronym or file extension.)
Working with raw files provides some big advantages when it comes to correcting (often termed adjusting) photos. Since the photo you see on screen is just one interpretation of what's in the raw file, the software can dig into that data to recover more detail in a bright sky, or it can fully fix an improperly rendered white balance. If you set your camera to shoot with JPGs, you're losing those capabilities.
Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize, and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Editors' Choice Adobe Photoshop Elements includes Guided Edits, which make special effects like motion blur or color splash (where only one color shows on an otherwise black-and-white photo) a simple step-by-step process. Topaz Studio offers a slew of fun photo effects, but it's completely lacking in workflow features.
Content-aware tools in some of these products let you do things like moving objects around while maintaining a consistent background. You can also remove objects entirely—say you want to remove a couple of strangers from a serene beach scene—and have the app fill in the background. These edits don't involve simple filters like you get in Instagram. Rather, they produce highly customized, one-off images. Another good example is CyberLink PhotoDirector's Multiple Exposure effect, which lets you create an image with ten versions of Johnny jumping that curb on his skateboard, for example.
Most of these products can produce HDR effects and panoramas after you feed them multiple shots, and local edit brushes let you paint adjustments onto only specific areas of an image. Affinity Photo has those features, but its interface isn't the most intuitive. Zoner Photo Studio X combines Lightroom and Photoshop features in a lower-priced subscription, but it's just not up to the level of the Adobe software.
Some of the products in this group have started adding what's sometimes termed AI style transfer—where the style of Picasso, Japanese watercolor, or another art mode is applied to the photo. The effect became a craze with the Prisma app several years ago, and it can still impress. PaintShop Pro and CyberLink PhotoDirector both offer this. PaintShop recently added other nifty AI features as well, including the impressive AI Upsampling, AI Denoise, and AI Artifact Removal tools.
Professional Photo Editing Software
At the very top end of image editing is Photoshop, which has no real rival. Its layered editing, drawing, text, and 3D-imaging tools are the industry standard for a reason. Note, however, that Adobe is in the process of removing the 3D tools because of the changing graphics hardware landscape. Of course, pros need more than this one application, and many use workflow programs like Lightroom, AfterShot Pro, or Photo Mechanic for workflow functions like importing and organization. In addition to its workflow prowess, Lightroom offers mobile photo apps so that photographers on the run can get some work done before they even get back to their PC. Photoshop recently got an iPad app, as well, but that's not yet capable of raw file editing.
Those who need tethered shooting—controlling the camera in the software from the computer while it's attached—may want Capture One, which is offers lots of tools for that along with its top-notch raw-file conversion.
Photoshop offers the most image editing capabilities, though it doesn't always make producing those effects as simple, and it doesn't offer a nondestructive workflow, as Lightroom and some of the other products do. Of course, users with less-intensive needs can get all the Photoshop-type features they need from other programs in this roundup, such as Corel PaintShop Pro. DxO PureRAW is another tool pros may want in their kit, because of its excellent lens-profile based corrections and unmatched DeepPrime noise reduction.
Online Photoshop Program
Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, PaintShop Pro, and Lightroom offer precise tools for local selections. For example, they let you select everything in a photo within a precise color range and refine the selection of difficult content such as a model's hair or trees on the horizon. Of course, you find all this in Adobe Photoshop, too.
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Photoshop (and its included companion, Adobe Camera Raw utility) is where you find Adobe's latest and greatest imaging technology, such as AI-informed Neural Filters, Content-Aware Crop, Camera Shake Reduction, Perspective Warp, Subject Select, and Detail Enhancement. The program has the most tools for professionals in the imaging industry, including Artboards, Design Spaces, and realistic, customizable brushes.
Professional Plug-ins and Subscriptions
Another advantage of pro-level photo editing software is that it supports third-party plug-ins such as the excellent Nik Collection by DxO and Editors' Choice winner RNI All Films 5 Professional (among many others). These can add more effects and adjustments than you find in the base software. They often include tools for film looks, black-and-white options, sharpening, and noise reduction. Indeed, some of the programs included here, like DxO and Topaz, can be added to the industry-standard Ligthroom and Photshop software as plug-ins.
Best Photoshop software, free download
Some users have taken umbrage at Adobe's move to a subscription-only option for Photoshop, but at $9.99 per month, it hardly seems exorbitant for any serious image professional, and it includes a copy of Lightroom, online services like Adobe Stock, an online Portfolio site, and multiple mobile apps. It makes the app more affordable for prosumers, too, when you consider that a full copy of Photoshop's top-end version used to cost a cool $999.
Great Photos Require Capable Cameras—and Skills
If you're an absolute beginner in digital photography, your first step is to make sure you've got good hardware to shoot with, otherwise you're sunk before you start. Consider our roundups of the Best Digital Cameras and the Best Camera Phones for equipment that can fit any budget. Once you've got your hardware sorted out, make sure to educate yourself with our Quick Photography Tips for Beginners and our Beyond-Basic Photography Tips. That done, you'll be ready to shoot great pictures that you can make better with the software featured here.