11 Outstanding (Free) Alternatives to Photoshop

by Bill Jones

I absolutely love Photoshop. It’s by far the best image editor out there but unfortunately you have to pay a premium for it. For those of you who are looking for a cheap alternative to Photoshop, look no further. I have gathered what I think are some great alternatives that will meet most if not all of your photo editing needs and at a great price…FREE.

GIMP

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s probably the most robust of the free alternatives listed here. It has support for GNU/Linux (i386, PPC), Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista), Mac OS X, Sun OpenSolaris and FreeBSD.

Paint.net

Paint.NET is free a image and photo editing package that runs on Windows only.

Krita

Krita, while not as robust as GIMP or Paint.net, is still a very powerful alternative to Photoshop.

Seashore

Seashore is more limited than the previous picks however it does a solid job with basic image editing. It only has supprt for Mac OS X

Cinepaint

Cinepaint is unique that it is used by major studios for editing feature films. It is also a great image editor. No Windows version available.

PhotoFiltre

PhotoFiltre is a small basic image editor

Active Pixels

Active Pixels has a lot of the same menus and keyboard shortcuts that Photoshop has. In my opinion it is one of the standouts of this list.

The next four are full featured online editors.

Please let us know your favorite Photoshop alternative.

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10 Comments

Aaron
December 8th
I would like to know a camera raw alternative. I use adobe DNG to overcome the NEF problem as I am still on Photoshop CS. Are there any other alternatives?
Thierry
December 14th
Alternatives to Photoshop, you forget PIXELMATOR
Bill Jones
December 14th
@Thierry
Pixelmator isn’t free is it?
Thierry
December 14th
@Bill oh sorry, yes it’s not free but very very cheap if you compare the price of Photoshop
Bill Jones
December 14th
True, if you compare prices it is practically free.
kirpi
March 21st
You might want to consider IrfanView as well.
Although definitely not a full substitute for Photoshop, IrfanView can perform a lot of very useful actions (also in batches).
It is really worth considering.
Mark
March 23rd
For Windows I recently discovered Photoscape, which has a unique, yet intuitive, interface and quite a few features particularly useful for photography. There’s even a portable version available.

http://www.photoscape.org
Mark L. Torrey
April 5th
I use Photoshop 2.0, a relic to be sure … but, am comfortable with it’s workings. I’m thinking about ‘Seashore’ for my Dad to use on his Apple desktop. Thanks for the above list of freebies!!
richard
April 7th
What about picasa?
Sharon
April 12th
Art Weaver is another free option.

http://artweaver.de