Adobe Photoshop is the most popular image editing software, very popular among photographers, graphic artists, and web designers, but also used by many other professionals that may need to edit images. Photoshop is a powerful tool where you can enhance images, apply effects, create graphics, project layouts… and much more!
Photoshop is a paid software and it can also be overwhelming when you are a beginner because it has so many tools that you might not know where to start. It will take too much of your time when all you need is just to crop or resize an image. If you are looking for software similar to Photoshop, in this post you will find the three best free alternatives to Photoshop.
Photopea
Photopea runs on your browser so it won’t occupy space from your disk. The interface is very similar to Photoshop, so if you are already familiar to PS, Photopea will be easy. You can open all these formats: .psd, .XD, .sketch, .XCF, RAW, JPG, GIFF, TIFF, SVG…
I tried loading a PSD and exporting it into a PNG and this process was really fast. Obviously, Photoshop has more tools but Photopea is a pretty advanced tool too, and you can make adjustments in a few clicks which makes Photopea a really handy tool. Also, you have tutorials on their site if you are stuck and need help.
Pixlr
Pixlr also runs on your browser and on a mobile app. I find this handy as you can edit images on the go from your phone. They have several apps built by them but in this tutorial, I am going to talk about Pixlr Photo Editor. This is maybe a bit less intuitive than Photopea, but it is another great free alternative to Photoshop. You can only open images and later save them in different formats like JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and PXD (layered pixlr image).
If you just want to make quick adjustments like crop, cut out or add filters, you might want to check Pixlr X.
Gimp
Unlike Photopea and Pixlr, you must download the software. You can do this from their site and it’s available for Linux, Windows, and MAC. The interface is much different than the others, so it will take a bit longer to figure out things for the first time. Gimp is the most popular open source photo editing software and it supports common file formats like of JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats.
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