Paint.NET is a case where the apprentice becomes the master. Making the jump from one to the other will take a little time, but you’ll save yourself a monthly subscription fee if you do. Overall, GIMP may feel like a free version of Photoshop, but it sports a unique look and experience. You can apply numerous filters, too, such as dropping a shadow, adding a neon effect, adding a glass tile, removing devilish red eyes, and so on. Icons in the toolbox represent specific tools, like Scale, Pencil, Paintbrush, Bucket Fill, Airbrush, Smudge, and more. When using a large display, or two monitors, you’ll have an expansive workspace to edit your images. You’ll also see two floating docks: One with the toolbox and another for managing layers, paths, brushes, and more. Once you launch the program, you’ll find a dedicated window that displays the image. It provides many professional-level editing and retouching tools - perfect for designers who can’t or won’t shell out hundreds of dollars for Adobe Photoshop. It’s available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Often heralded as the best free alternative to Photoshop, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open-source application that relies on a community of volunteer developers who maintain and improve the product. There are great choices for both conventional desktop software, mobile apps, and web-based solutions that don’t require installing software. And if our top pick isn’t for you, be sure to check out the other options on this list.
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It offers a huge workspace and a wide variety of professional editing tools. Our top pick is GIMP, an open-source photo editing software available for the big three operating systems.
If you’re willing to spend money on a photo editor, PhotoDirector 13 Ultra and PhotoDirector 365 are good value – especially as it’s almost always discounted from its full price. It can also work out cheaper if you’ll only need it for a year or less (there are options to pay monthly or annually, but the monthly price isn’t great value unless you need access for a few weeks only.) This includes a range of benefits over the non-subscription version including more cloud storage and extra tools. You can see all the new features here.įollowing Adobe, CyberLink now pushes you towards a monthly subscription to a version called PhotoDirector 365. There’s also support for layer masks, layer grouping and adjustment layers, non-destructive editing and content-aware clone and move tools.
There are plenty of easy-to-use retouching tools too, plus handy extras including content-aware object removal which lets you erase that unwanted wooden post or whatever else is ruining your otherwise perfect shot.
It offers AI-powered tools for replacing skies, and you can remove people from photos as well. PhotoDirector used to be an Adobe Lightroom clone, but these days it also has tools from Photoshop as well as ‘Guided Edit’ features from Elements. (But do see our Adobe Creative Cloud buying guide for all details on trials, prices, plans, student discounts and more.) And unlike others here, you can resize (or indeed crop) images to a specific pixel size, which makes it much more suited to power users that just don’t want to pay for Photoshop CC. That means you can erase unwanted people or other things from photos extremely easily.īetter still, a lot of the core tools are ‘smart’ which means, for example, that the crop tool will offer you a selection of crops based its analysis of your image. It’s available for both macOS and Windows.Īs well as all the photo editing options you’d expect, Elements provides some powerful tools including content-aware removing of objects. And, to be clear, you don’t subscribe to Elements: you buy it outright. Photoshop Elements is the more beginner-friendly version of full Photoshop, offering most of the same features for less than the price of a year’s subscription to Photoshop. As powerful as many of these free photo editors are, sometimes you just need something with a little more oomph.