Adobe Photoshop is definitely the most powerful image editing software. It had a lot of great features and can be used by professional such as web designers and graphics designers. Its filters, plugins, actions, brushes and easy-to-use are the main reasons why most designers prefer Photoshop than other tools.
However, Photoshop is very expansive and not all designers afford to buy the original license of it. So, some designers try to look for free alternatives to Photoshop. If you are one of them, you consider yourself lucky as we are going to look into 15 Great And Free Photoshop Alternatives today.
1. GIMP
GIMP is probably the most popular Photoshop Alternative. It works across different platform – supports Windows, Mac and Linux. It probably doesn’t have every single features in Photoshop, but it is more than enough for a designer’s daily use.
2. Paint.NET
For Windows users, you may try Paint.NET. It is so powerful and has a very active community. If you look into the forum, you will found a lot of useful plugins and tutorials shared by Paint.NET users.
3. Seashore
Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format. However, Seashore only aims for basic image editing purposes, and never meant to replace professionals image editing tools.
4. Artweaver
Artweaver is a simple graphic tool that offers all artistic effects which you need for your work. It has all the necessary features of a image editing tool, supports various common file formats and languages. I had covered Artweaver before in the portable apps article.
5. PhotoPlus SE
PhotoPlus is an award winning digital photo editing software. PhotoPlus itself is not free, but you can download PhotoPlus SE, which is a freeware. With PhotoPlus SE, you can perform features such as warps and transformations, filters, adjustments and perfectly optimized images.
6. Photoscape
Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos. Some of the key features are batch editor, animated gif, splitter, color picker and raw converter. Besides using it as image editing tool, Photoscape can be used as a powerful image viewer too.
7. Inkscape
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X. Is uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It had been covered in the portable apps article too.
8. Krita
Krita is open source bitmap editing and drawing application for KOffice. It includes a lot of filters for either serious use or just to play around with.
9. Pixen
Pixen is an innovative graphics editor for Apple Mac. It is a simple yet powerful application and comes with tons of features. Some of the examples are layers, able to create animations, powerful palette, beautiful interface, support different file types and so on.
10. PhotoFiltre
PhotoFiltre is relatively small compare to other image editing application like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. However, it manage to launch faster and has all the basic features of an image editing application. It can also be used to as an image viewer and batch image converter.
11. PaintStar
PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing application which suitable for tasks such as etouching of photographs, composing and authoring images and image morphing. Some of the tools included in this application are transformation tools, gradient fill tools and selection tool.
12. Pixia
Pixia was originally designed for anime/manga community but has also been used in other branches of art. It is available in various languages. There are a lot of English tutorials available for you to get start with it.
13. Active Pixels
This photo editor resembles Photoshop in many aspects, from the way menus and windows are laid out on its interface to the keyboard shortcuts used for many actions. Active Pixels also includes some extra embedded apps, such as a red-eye fixer, a picture browser and a screen capture tool.
14. ChocoFlop
ChoceFlop is an image editing application designed exclusively for Apple Mac users. It only weight a few megabytes and launches in 2 seconds on a cheap Mac.
15. Photo Pos Lite
Photo Pos Lite is a free lite version of the award-wining photo editor Photo Pos Pro. With Photo Pos Lite, you can edit, enhance and manipulate your pictures easily.
