Summary

• Save money by using open-source alternatives to Photoshop like GIMP.
• GIMP offers advanced features like layer masks and painting tools.
• Open-source tools like Darktable and Krita provide excellent photo editing and painting capabilities.

Photoshop is one of the most popular creative tools for graphic designers, digital artists, and many photo editors and retouchers. Once locked into a Photoshop subscription, you may end up spending thousand of dollars on Photoshop, even if you rarely need to use it. That’s why it’s better to use an open-source alternative, especially if one leans more toward your purposes than another, such as Darktable if you primarily use it for photo editing.

5 Paint.Net

Windows-only image editing

Originally created as an alternative to Microsoft Paint — one of many graphic designers’ first tools in digital design and illustration — Paint.Net has since been developed into a simple photo and image editing tool. While it’s free for users, it’s only available for Windows systems. Unlike many open-source tools, you can purchase Paint.Net from the Windows store as a way to donate to the cause.

Within Paint.Net, you’ll find basic tools for editing in layers, curves, and levels for image manipulation. There are limited tools and filters, but you can download plugin extensions for free to enhance the tools available in Paint.Net. It offers unlimited history for returning to previous versions of your files.

There are many forums full of Paint.Net users sharing tutorials and tips or tricks to help improve your Paint.Net workflow. The program is designed to be easy and fast to learn. It uses an intuitive tab-based interface.

4 Inkscape

Vector design tools

Photoshop is a raster-focused tool with abilities to draw and edit vectors, which makes Inkscape a viable Photoshop alternative. Inkscape is an open-source vector tool.

You might not have typically used Photoshop as a vector creation tool, but sometimes it’s required to create vectors within Photoshop — using Inkscape gives you better vector results due to its many great features. You can import raster files to Inkscape and especially benefit from the tracing tool to trace from bitmap to vector.

3 Darktable

Open-source photo development

Darktable is cited as one of the best open-source photo development tools, especially for RAW format editing. While it is more photo-focused than Photoshop itself, it provides features similar to those you’d expect from Adobe software.

In Darktable, you’ll have more sharpening options than Photoshop offers and more color editing tools. These, alone, allow you to transform your photos more than if using Photoshop for editing. You can directly edit RAW format photos using Darktable — if you want to edit RAW in Photoshop, you must do so via Lightroom or the Camera Raw plugin.

2 Krita

Krita is a powerful open-source tool

Krita is one of the better Photoshop alternatives available. It features a powerful brush engine that allows you to create imaginative digital paintings and image manipulations, like in Photoshop. You can also benefit from the Krita AI Diffusion plugin to add AI generation features to your Krita workspace — this puts Krita even closer to Photoshop with its Firefly generative AI features.

Like Photoshop, Krita can also be accessed from tabletsfor digital illustration on-the-go, although the user experience is better from a computer. You can use a digital display like the XP Pento get the benefits of tablet drawing and the desktop version of Krita all in one experience.

Krita is best used for digital illustration and painting, and it offers tools similar to those found in Photoshop. With brush stabilizers, you can ensure smooth lines in your digital art. The wraparound feature allows you to create seamless patterns for various uses easily, and like in Photoshop; you can benefit from a simple 2D animation timeline for animating GIFs.

1 GIMP

The best open-source Photoshop alternative

GIMP — GNU image manipulation program — is one of the most well-known and best-developed Photoshop alternatives in the open-source world. GIMP is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and has such a large community that it’s easy to find tutorials or help for using the program.

GIMP is compatible with most popular file formats, including Photoshop’s PSD file. GIMP 3.0 was released at the end of 2024, with layer blending enhancements and plug-in improvements. There’s a Darktable integration, so you can open your RAW files in GIMP for further edits than what’s offered directly in Darktable — this provides similar results to the crossover between Lightroom and Photoshopin the Adobe suite.

Although open-source, GIMP provides many professional and advanced features, such as layer masks, filters, painting tools, and photo enhancement and retouching tools. Photographers and graphic designers alike will find a whole host of tools to utilize to their advantage in GIMP, keeping them away from needing to pay for Photoshop.

Open-source tools keep your creative options open

Photoshop is one of the most famed creative software tools. It’s expensive, adds bloatware to your system, and its continuous updates require retraining yourself on the software often. Using any open-source alternatives to Photoshop will save you money, secure your privacy, and let you join a generous community of developers and creators who want to share the good of open-source developed tools. Photoshop is a tool that most people use at some point, but its open-source options bring good results, especially GIMP or Krita.