Free Alternatives to Photoshop That Are Actually Worth Installing

Most articles on this subject are a list of names with the drawbacks quietly left out, which is how people lose an afternoon installing something that was never going to do the one thing they needed. So here is the short version first: if you just need to edit an image today, open Photopea. It runs in a browser tab, it opens PSD files, and the interface is close enough to Photoshop that you already know where things are.

Everything below is about which tool to commit to, which is a different question.

Photopea — the one to open right now

Photopea is a full raster editor that runs in a browser tab. It reads and writes PSD files with layers intact, along with XCF, Sketch and AI files, and its layout is a deliberate copy of Photoshop's — same panel positions, same tool shortcuts, same layer styles. If you have used Photoshop at all, you can work in it immediately with no learning curve whatsoever.

It supports layer masks, adjustment layers, smart objects, blend modes and pen paths. For the overwhelming majority of what people actually open Photoshop to do — crop something, remove a background, fix levels, edit a file a designer sent you — it is genuinely sufficient.

Where it falls short: it is funded by ads in a side panel, which are unobtrusive but present. Because everything runs in a browser tab, very large files (think 8000 px multi-layer compositions) will make it sluggish and can crash the tab. There are no third-party plugins. And while your files are processed locally rather than uploaded, you are still depending on a website continuing to exist — not a great foundation for a professional workflow.

GIMP — the serious free replacement

GIMP has been in development since 1996 and is the most capable free image editor you can install. Layers, masks, channels, curves, a full selection toolkit, batch processing through a scripting engine, and a plugin ecosystem going back decades. GIMP 3.0, released in 2025, brought a substantial modernisation — better colour management, non-destructive editing on several operations, and a considerably less alien interface than the version most people remember bouncing off.

It is free in every sense: open source, no account, no telemetry, no possibility of the licence changing under you.

Where it falls short: the workflow is its own, not Photoshop's. Menus are organised differently, tool names differ, and muscle memory works against you constantly for the first week. Text handling is noticeably clunkier. CMYK support for print work is limited and awkward compared to Photoshop's. And while 3.0 improved things, non-destructive editing is still not as pervasive as it is in Adobe's tools.

The honest summary: GIMP rewards commitment and punishes dabbling. If you are willing to spend a few hours learning it deliberately, it will do almost everything you need indefinitely. If you want to open it once and get something done in ten minutes, you will be frustrated — use Photopea for that.

Krita — if you are drawing rather than editing

Krita is built for artists making images rather than editors fixing them, and within that scope it is not merely a free alternative — it is a first-choice tool that many professionals prefer outright. The brush engine is outstanding, with genuinely sophisticated pressure dynamics, brush stabilisers for clean linework, and a wrap-around mode for seamless textures. It has proper animation support for frame-by-frame work.

Where it falls short: it is not a photo editor. Retouching tools are basic, there is no equivalent to content-aware fill, and the RAW handling is rudimentary. Using Krita to fix a photograph is possible and unpleasant. Use it for what it is for.

Darktable and RawTherapee — for photographs specifically

This is the point most "Photoshop alternatives" lists miss entirely. If you are editing photographs from a camera, the tool you actually want to replace is Lightroom, not Photoshop — and the free answer is Darktable or RawTherapee.

Both are non-destructive RAW processors: your original file is never modified, edits are stored as a list of operations, and you can revisit any decision at any time. Both handle exposure, white balance, lens correction, noise reduction and tone curves at a quality level comparable to Adobe's. Darktable adds library management for organising a large photo collection.

Where they fall short: neither is a layer-based compositor. You cannot combine two images, paint on a mask freehand, or do detailed retouching in any comfortable way. The intended workflow is Darktable for developing the RAW, then GIMP or Photopea for pixel-level work — which is exactly how Lightroom and Photoshop are meant to be used together.

Between the two: Darktable has the better interface and library features; RawTherapee has slightly stronger demosaicing detail. Either is fine. Both have steep learning curves, because RAW processing is inherently a technical activity.

Affinity Photo — the closest match, now free

Affinity Photo is a professional-grade editor that was for years the leading paid alternative to Photoshop, sold as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. After Canva acquired its developer, the Affinity applications were made free to use in late 2025.

It is the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement: non-destructive adjustment layers, proper CMYK and colour management for print, excellent RAW development built in, 32-bit HDR support, and genuinely fast performance on large documents. It also opens PSD files well.

Where it falls short: it now requires an account, and some features are tied to a Canva subscription. More to the point, "free" here is a company's current commercial decision rather than an open-source licence — it can be revised, and anyone who built a workflow on the previous one-time-purchase model has already watched the terms change once. Check what the current terms actually are before you commit a business to it.

What none of these replace

Being straightforward about the gap: Adobe's recent generative features — Generative Fill, Generative Expand and the rest — have no free equivalent of comparable quality integrated into an editor. Free AI image tools exist, but using one means leaving your editor, uploading your image to someone's server, and bringing the result back. If generative fill is central to how you work, none of this list replaces it.

The other genuine gap is the ecosystem: Photoshop's plugin market, the tutorials indexed for every conceivable problem, and the fact that a studio job will assume you know Photoshop specifically. That last one is a career consideration rather than a software one, but it is real.