Five Best Photoshop Alternatives Tested: Image Editing for Free

Adobe Photoshop has been around for many, many years and it has been the de facto standard used in the creative industries. Heck, when I was in college I learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and made my own magazine with Photoshop and Aldus Pagemaker. The problem with Photoshop has always been cost.

I have long spouted the idiom “the right tool for the job” to anyone who would listen to me, but I had to make a concession. Photoshop was just too expensive for me as a college student, and I didn’t need it enough to drop hundreds of dollars on a copy.

So I migrated to other alternatives. JASC Paint Shop Pro (before Corel) and Corel’s products did what I needed, but they didn’t meet all of my needs. I had to wait until GIMP arrived for something close to Photoshop.

Fast forward to today, and we have a myriad of Photoshop alternatives to choose from. Many are now cloud based, and either rely on advertisements or a subscription (just like Adobe Photoshop!)

I’ll admit, Adobe Photoshop is a powerful beast. It has effects, plugins and new AI features that make content creation and photography much easier. The free alternatives cannot compete with those features, but they do provide enough features for most users to get the job done.

Which Photoshop alternative is the best for you? I’ve tested five alternatives, some well known and a couple of curveballs that took me by surprise.

I tested the following alternatives.

1. GIMP
2. Krita
3. Pinta
4. PhotoDemon
5. Paint.NET

The goal was to test my image editing workflow in each editor. Which editors can be used with Photoshop’s native PSD file format, and can any handle RAW images from a DSLR? Can the editors work with layers? What effects are there? Can I crop and reframe images? How does it feel in use? Quick, sluggish? Can I move around the image, zoom in or select areas? Is the UI an approximation of Photoshop or does it have its own style? Let's find out!

1. GIMP

1. GIMP

The standard for free image editors

👍 Reasons to use

• Free
• Compatible with RAW and PSD files, along with many other formats
• Plugins extend the functionality

👎 Reasons to avoid

• User interface is daunting for newcomers
• A little slower than Photoshop

Open source image editing software and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is at the top of many lists. The cross-platform editor is often seen as one of the posterchilds for open source software and it is typically pre-installed on a plethora of Linux distros.

I’ve used GIMP for well over 15 years and on a diverse range of machines (an original Asus eeePC being one) and it remains one of the most used applications in my workflow. I can do it all with GIMP, crop and reframe an image, add layers to alter the image / add elements. It just works, but it does take a little extra effort.

GIMP looks and feels like a Photoshop alternative. The interface is yours to customize; you can even make it look more like Photoshop. Sure it will take a little while to get used to, and that requires effort but once you do, you’ll be tweaking photos and creating content with ease, and without paying Adobe big bucks for the privilege.

Taking things further, GIMP has a plugin ecosystem that can automate many tasks. Batch processing or image manipulation: all can be achieved using a plugin written in languages like Python or C/C++. You can even call GIMP from the command line / terminal to batch edit images without pressing a button.

GIMP is what I have been using for a long time. It does feel a little “clunky” and slow when compared to Photoshop, but for zero cost, we get an extremely capable image editor that has plenty of power and features for most of us. Professional Photoshop users may find it difficult to transition over to GIMP, but it has all that you need.

2. Krita

2. Krita

For artists and photographers

👍 Reasons to use

• Excellent illustration tools
• Magnetic selection tool is awesome
• Plethora of tools on offer
• PSD and RAW support

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Slow to startup
• User interface is daunting for newcomers

This is more of an artist's tool for illustration than image editing, but don’t let that fool you as Krita has a similar depth of features to GIMP. Krita is geared to digital art, and it has been used in game development and illustration for many years.

The Krita user interface is just as daunting as GIMP. If you are proficient in Photoshop / GIMP then your muscle memory will need retraining for Krita. I got confused when trying to zoom into a section.

In GIMP we would use CTRL+ scrollwheel but this didn’t work in Krita. Instead I had to just use the scroll wheel. Moving around a zoomed area is achieved by pressing the spacebar and then holding left click, move around the image. Again, muscle memory kept tripping me up.

Krita’s overall speed is beautiful. I was able to move around, zoom and select brushes, filters and tweak layers as if I were gliding. The only friction I ever encountered was the aforementioned muscle memory. But, I am sure after using Krita for a while, that will melt away.

Krita has full support for opening and saving Photoshop PSD files. If you are working with RAW files, then you can open them, but you will obviously need to save the output as another filetype.

Krita’s strength is in drawing and illustration, but it can be used to tweak photos. There are filters and layers which can be used to alter images, but there are no exact tools for photo manipulation. There are filters for tweaking your images, much less than GIMP, but the core is there. Also, I loved the magnetic selection tool. It did a pretty decent job of selecting points around an object that I wanted to cut out. It wasn’t perfect, but I was able to tweak the points for a more precise selection.

Just like GIMP, Krita has plugins which can provide additional features such as finer control of brushes and automating processes like batch export of images. This means that we can tweak Krita to suit our workflow.

Artists and illustrators will love Krita’s tablet support. If you’ve got the kit, or have the money, then you can easily use Krita with a graphics tablet and get the best from its illustration and photo manipulation features.

Krita is great, but it leans more on illustration than photo manipulation, which isn’t a fault; that is its intended use case after all. It can do the job of Photoshop, but its strengths lie in illustration.

3. Pinta

3. Pinta

A jack of all trades editor

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lightweight
• Quick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No RAW or PSD support
• Perhaps a little too simple for professional users

Feeling like a “beefed up “ MSPaint, Pinta offers features often found in more “powerful” image editors. The simple and clean interface is very “Microsoft” despite it having nothing to do with it. Pinta can be used to edit images, and has a basic suite of photo tools. It can also be used to illustrate and annotate images.

The user interface is simple, eschewing a myriad of buttons and tools in favor of providing just the essentials. There are no magnetic selection tools, not even a crop. Instead we have the standard rectangle, circle and lasso selectors. They get the job done, but I miss the crop tool.

We’ve got layers on which we can place content and / or manipulate the image. We also have an extensive history, accessible via the right hand side menu. Here we can see the actions taken on an image, and reverse them should an issue occur. This is quite a powerful tool for such a simple application.

There are add-ins, Pinta’s parlance for plugins, and installation is performed externally. There are add-ins for image uploading, night vision effects and dither effects. But there aren’t many add-ins so the choice is quite limited.

Pinta is a jack of all trades application. It does a lot of things well, but this isn’t a specialist application. It can’t open PSD or RAW files, so if you rely on those file formats, look elsewhere. But, if you need a simple editor that has most of the tools in an easy to use package, then Pinta is a great choice.

4. PhotoDemon

4. PhotoDemon

Good all-round Photoshop alternative

👍 Reasons to use

• Small application
• Lots of Photoshop features
• Open Photoshop, RAW and GIMP files
• Plethora of filters

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Muscle memory will be tested

This was the wildcard of the bunch. I’d never heard of PhotoDemon, but it turned out to be a solid performer. The application weighs in at under 10MB! But, in that small package, we get a lot of functionality. PhotoDemon can open and save PSD files, and it can open RAW image files. So photographers can tweak their images with relative ease. A nice feature is that PhotoDemon can also open GIMP XCF files, useful if you want to add PhotoDemon to your processing workflow.

PhotoDemon feels like a mash-up of Photoshop and GIMP and the user interface is clear and easy to use. The “Photo” part of its name indicates that it works more for photography than illustration. One issue I faced was the location of the color wheel.

I’m used to GIMP’s location on the left side, PhotoDemon has it in the top right corner. My muscle memory had a workout while testing PhotoDemon.

PhotoDemon has a plethora of filters under the Effects menu. Seriously there are a lot of effects that can be applied to your work. The usual suspects are there, blur, pixelate, render clouds. Also there are artistic styles and natural effects that make images look like they are underwater.

PhotoDemon has a selection of third-party libraries which offer extra functionality. They are managed in-app using a package manager of sorts. This is a nice touch and makes handling libraries really easy, I just wish there were more libraries!

If you need layers, you’ve got them! Layers work just like GIMP / Photoshop and enable images to be composed of multiple layers, like a portrait photo on a fancy background. Working with layers is easy, and the user interface is clean and easy to understand.

Could I use PhotoDemon on a day to day basis? Yes, but my one tripping point was an often overlooked feature. For annotating tutorials, I use Stroke Selection to put a colored border around an area that I wish to highlight. PhotoDemon has this feature, under Edit >> Stroke, but the dialog box used to configure it is a little clumsy for me. I just want to create a highlight using the selected color.

PhotoDemon is a good editor, once you learn its quirks. The tiny file size means that it loads in seconds, and it runs beautifully on my test system. All for zero cost!

5. Paint.net

5. Paint.net

Simple and great for annotations

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lots of effects
• Annotation tools are great
• Performs slick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No Photoshop / RAW compatibility
• Layer properties takes an extra step

Don’t judge a book by its cover also applies to websites. The Paint.net site is a cacophony of adverts and “download” buttons that instantly put me off. But I persevered and I was pleasantly surprised.

The general look and feel of Paint.net is that of MS Paint but with Photoshop levels of tools and widgets. I got really “Paint Shop Pro 7” vibes from the UI (and yes, I used that back in the day too). The UI uses floating palettes that can be “clicked” into the perimeter of the screen, and I really like this. I can move the widgets and set up the interface how I like it.

Well, the Stroke Selection issue that I encountered with PhotoDemon is refreshingly solved by Paint.net. In the Tools palette, I found a shapes option and from there I could draw vector shapes on the image. This works beautifully and I can see this becoming part of my workflow for tutorials.

The color of the shape's perimeter uses the foreground color and by default does not have a fill color. This can be changed so that the shape is filled with color, and there are a multitude of shapes to choose from. Very handy for how to writers who want to point out a specific section in a screenshot.

Sadly there is no compatibility with Photoshop or RAW files, so if you need those features, this isn’t the image editor for you. But you do get a plethora of other file formats at your disposal.

Using filers / effects is a joy. I marvelled at the realtime response when previewing an effect, it felt right that I should see exactly how it would apply without a long pause as the PC does the math.

The app does not support installation of plugins directly, but you can install plugins externally.

Layers work just like the other editors tested, but accessing the layer properties (for the blend mode) is a two step process, unlike GIMP which has the layer properties front and center.

I really enjoyed Paint.net and for most of my workflow it is perfect. If I need to work with RAW, PSD or XCF files then I am out of luck, but I mostly work in PNG, JPG, GIF and WebP. If you just need a simple, yet feature packed editor then Paint.net is for you.