The 3rd best free photoshop alternative is “Pixelmator 3.8 Phoenix” is a powerful and fast photo editor for Mac operating system. “Pixelmator” doesn’t work for other Operating Systems.
Whether you want to design logos or edit photographs, professional graphic design software doesn’t come cheap. Photoshop is the first word in graphic design software, and like most leading software products, it demands a hefty fee from anyone who wants to use it. In fact, to access, you’ll need to fork out at least $19.99 every month.
But thankfully, there is a solution to this pricey problem. Free alternatives to Photoshop do exist, and they hold thieir own in terms of quality, too. Here they all are. Announced to the public in 1995, GIMP is one of the most popular image manipulation programs on the market. It’s also likely to be the most powerful graphic design tool on this list. It’s free and open source, but packs a professional punch nonetheless.
There are big similarities between Photoshop and GIMP in terms of functionality and user interface, so many find migration from one to the other to be easy. Inkscape is a free and open source vector graphics editor.
Despite being free, Inkscape looks and feels incredibly prestige. Some of it’s features include intelligent drawing tools, the ability to import and export multiple file types, add-ons, and multi lingual support. It’s also one of the few options on the list compatible with Linux. Pixlr comes in two distinct flavours.
Pixlr Express is ideal for quick fixes and simple edits, while Pixlr Editor is for power users. Both are both free, and both are browser-based web apps, so there’s never any need to download the software. This makes it ideal for Chromebook users, too. Also, if you’re looking to edit images from your mobile device, Pixlr has applications available on iOS and Android. Krita is an open source digital sketching and painting studio that is geared towards concept artists.
Illustrators, and designers who want to sketch from scratch. So, if you want to edit existing imagery, this one isn’t for you.
Krita also offers training material to kickstart your illustration career (or hobby), and can open PSD files, too. Canva is another browser-based web app that provides everything a graphic designer needs. Used by over 10 million people, Canva serves up millions of stock images, hundreds of fonts, and a wide range of filters, icons, and shapes. With their resources to hand, you can drag and drop imagees into place before editing them. Seasoned graphic designers may find Canva to be a little lightweight, though. Thanks to it’s image based tabs system which makes it easy to work on multiple projects at once, Paint.Net is a great free alternative to photoshop.
Also, the inclusion of layers – a feature normally reserved for expensive professional software – makes Paint.Net tough to beat. I see it as a halfway house between Microsoft Paint and Photoshop, making it easy for graphic design newbies to grasp.
And it’s for that reason – among others – that I’ve personally been using Paint.NET for all my image editing needs over the last few years. It’s bas news for Mac users though, as Paint.NET is available only for Windows. If you’re a dedicated Mac user, Seashore may be for you. Available only for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework, Seashore takes inspiration from GIMP (number one on this list) by serving up similar functionality and using the same native file format. However, unlike the GIMP, Seashore is aimed at a broader audience who just want to do some basic image editing. Last but certainly not least, SumoPaint’s slogan is, ‘Photoshopping in your browser’ – which is pretty self-explanatory.
It’s an incredibly powerful web app with an answer to most if not all of Photoshop’s best features. You can use it through your browser and tolerate the ads, or upgrade to SumoPaint Pro to use it without ads. SumoPaint Pro also allows you to download the software so you can use it offline. Free Graphic Design Software That Doesn’t Suck Photoshop is a powerhouse, but if you’re struggling to justify its rather heavy pricetag, then the eight photoshop alternatives listed above should tide you over.
Do you know of any other free photoshop alternatives? Share them with us in the comments section below!
Photoshop is the big daddy of image creation and editing, but it isn’t cheap: even the relatively wallet-friendly is US$99.99/£86.56/AU$145.19, while a student subscription to is US$9.99/£9.98/AU$14.29 a month. The excellent Photoshop alternative is a bit cheaper at US$49.99/£48.99/AU$79.99, but what if your budget doesn’t even stretch to that and the filters built into the Photos just don’t cut it? The good news is that it’s possible to get very powerful image apps for free. The bad news? There isn’t much really.
You’re not going to get a direct analog of everything you'd find in Photoshop, but you might be surprised by how powerful the best free alternatives are. Inevitably some apps will have issues – for example one of our picks, a web-based editor, doesn’t work properly in Safari; others can be a little difficult to learn – but the benefits massively outweigh any downside. The closest thing to Photoshop you'll find – and it's completely free As we say in, gives you most of the features of Adobe Photoshop completely free. It’s probably overkill for basic photo editing but if you like to create or edit complex images, work with a lot of unusual file formats or automate as much as possible it’s a very solid app indeed. It’s cross platform too, so you can use it on any Windows or Linux machines as well as on your Mac.
That’s handy if you need to collaborate with others. The interface isn’t the prettiest, and the app takes a little time to learn – and the help guide leaves something to be desired – but it’s very powerful and well worth the effort. It enables you to work across multiple layers, includes a good selection of brushes, filters and image enhancement tools and supports a lot of plugins too. It’s also extremely customizable, so you can arrange everything just-so to suit your own way of working.
If you've used GIMP In the past but thought it was too difficult or crashy, it’s worth taking another look. It’s become a much better program in recent years: the interface has been tidied up a bit, it runs much better and it’s considerably more stable. A browser-based Photoshop alternative that includes layers and masks is an excellent Photoshop alternative for Mac, though it loses points for two things: firstly it requires Adobe Flash Player, which Apple is doing its best to eliminate from Macs; and secondly, it doesn’t work properly in Safari so you’ll need to run it in Chrome. An HTML5 version is in development and it should solve those issues; we hope it can do so without removing any key features. When you do run it in Chrome it’s very good.
It’s ad-funded but not invasively so, and it’s more advanced than many desktop apps: it supports layers and masks, has a good selection of photo adjustments, can open photos from URLs as well as desktop files and doesn’t look too dissimilar to Photoshop. You get a decent selection of filters and customizable brushers, an undo history and a reasonably flexible interface too. It’s very good but if you feel it’s a little bit too much there’s also a stripped down version, on the same website. Another browser-based Photoshop alternative – this time with cloud storage Like Pixlr, runs in your web browser – but unlike Pixlr it’s in HTML5, so you don’t need Flash. The ads are a little more prominent than Pixlr, with banners to the right and below the main editing window, but they’re not flashing away so you get used to them. Just watch the ads on the main home page when you go to run it: at the time of writing there’s a big green 'Continue' button that links to a completely different app. Fotor is very good, and has a particularly user-friendly approach: it’s much more like Photos’ filtering than Photoshop.
The toolbar down the left hand side of the screen provides fast access to basic tools, effects, shapes, beautifying filters and text overlays, and you can save your work to the cloud so it’s accessible from anywhere. It may look simple but the available tools and filters are very good: if your main interest is in improving or adjusting photographs it’s a big toy box of useful tools. Fotor also offers a paid-for Pro version that removes adds, provides more effects and editing features and more beautifying tools.
If you're working with vector graphics, you won't find a better free tool As the name suggests, is dedicated to vector graphics, making it more like Adobe Illustrator than Photoshop. Unlike raster graphics (such as photos), vectors don’t lose any clarity when you scale them from tiny to gargantuan. While we wouldn’t use it in place of a dedicated desktop publishing app, Vectr is a decent solution for one-offs such as posters or leaflets. You can share online for real time collaboration (you need to register first, but doing so is free) and there’s a web-based version for anybody who doesn’t have the desktop app. For now Vectr is best suited to beginners, but development is happening very quickly and the roadmap promises more pro-friendly features such as image versioning. If it’s not quite right for you now it’s worth keeping an eye on its updates.
Vector graphic designed by. 5. A simple alternative to Photoshop Express, with masses of storage If all you want is some simple image fixing, cropping and photo storage then the web-based is very good.
You can crop and rotate your images, add filters, and adjust basic colour settings (including 'light', 'color' and 'pop'), and it supports Live Photos so you don’t lose the bits around your Live Photo’s key frame. The main draw here isn’t the app, though – it’s the storage. Provided images have fewer than 16 megapixels and your videos don’t exceed 1080p resolution, Google Photos offers unlimited storage for free. You can still store photos with higher resolutions but they’ll use your Google Drive space.