So there is no real evidence for the old saying “Adobe software runs better on Mac.” Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator etc were not designed to perform better due to OS preference. Digital Typography was Born on the Mac. Used by design professionals worldwide, Adobe Illustrator CS6 software provides precision and power with sophisticated drawing tools, expressive natural brushes, a host of time-savers, and integration with Adobe CS Live online services. Adobe illustrator can be the best, not because is the best one, could be, but because is the most often used by people. Some times, to use the most used software can be better because you can find tutorials or videos where inprove your skills.

Let's face it: Nothing is going to completely replace Adobe's flagship Photoshop image-editing software if you need its whiz-bang, technological-marvel features. Things like content-aware fill, smart objects, and the new camera-shake correction are just not to be found in any other software. But if you just need basic, standard Photoshop features—adding text, glows, drop shadows, overlay layers, or sharpening-the actual application from Adobe is overkill. And the Adobe's recent jump to a cloud/subscription model with Adobe Photoshop CC has made many users hopping, frothing, foaming mad. Fear not: Photoshop isn't the only game in town.

Some of the lower-cost Photoshop alternatives come from Adobe itself: Serious Photographers can get most of the Photoshop features they need in the company's workflow application, Lightroom, which lists for $149. Photo enthusiasts and imaging hobbyist will get what they need from the even less-expensive Photoshop Elements, which actually simplifies creating a lot of the effects pros produce in Photoshop itself. It's available directly from Adobe for $99 standalone or $149 in a bundle with sister program Premiere Elements, an enthusiast-level video editor.

Even lower-cost Photoshop alternatives come from competitors. One of the longest-standing of these is Corel, with its similarly named Paintshop Pro ($59.99), which offers a surprising amount of Photoshop-like functionality. Another competitor is ACDSee, which offers three levels of imaging applications, the lightweight, starting with the basic ACDSee ($19.99) program, which offers brush-on edits, 20 effect filters, drawing tools, and noise reduction. At the midlevel is the $49 ACDSee Photo Editor, which gets closer to Photoshop, with object layers, tools like Red Eye and Smudge, Text, and batch editing. Along the lines of Lightroom is ACDSee Pro, which powerful app sells for a remarkable $39.99 (discounted from $99.99).

But if you really want to save money, there's a lot you can do for free, and even in some cases, in a web browser. The granddaddy of free but powerful image-editing software is 'the Gimp.' This extremely customizable and powerful open-source application is, however, very far from being a usability champ—expect a high learning curve. Even though it lives in your web browser, Autodesk's Pixlr Editor is an amazingly powerful web-based image editor that can even work with layers and sports toolbars and panels that will look familiar to any Photoshop user. A similar though less-polished offering is Paint.net, but deceptively, it's software you download rather than a web app.

So, as you can see, you may be able to do everything you thought you needed Photoshop for with something less expensive. Of course, there's nothing like the real thing. Read on to see if any of our suggested applications fit your needs. If not, getting Photoshop as a subscription may be gentler on your pocketbook, at $19.99 a month.

FEATURED IN THIS ROUNDUP

ACDSee
$19.99
ACDSee 14 offers fast, simple operation, nice photo organization tools, and all the standard photo-fixing basics: cropping, rotating, exposure, color correction, sharpening, red-eye reduction, and blemish removal. The app can also do several Photoshop-like tricks, including applying lots of artistic effects such as the popular lomo and Orton, as well as pencil drawing and painting effects. In all, the app offers 45 effects, but falls short of Adobe Photoshop Elements in really advanced stuff like content-aware filling and photo merging.Read the full review ››

Corel Paintshop Pro
$39.99 street
The latest version of this venerable imaging software adds some whiz-bang features like face tagging, mapping, and Instagram-like one-click photo effects. PaintShop may not be as polished and loaded with unique, mind-blowing imaging tools, but it's capable of everything a lot of users will ever need, and it's priced to sell.Read the full review ››

GIMP
Free
The name of this longstanding open source image editing project is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Though you can use it for free to your heart's content, the project actually does accept contributions through Bitcoin and Flattr. A lot of GIMP's capabilities are courtesy of plugins, such as its support for raw camera files and custom brushes. You get the expected layers, gradients, paths, text, curves, and levels tools. And if you're running Linux or it's your most powerful image-editing option.Read the full review ››

Paint.net
Free
Paint.net is pretty bare bones, but at least it's free, and it does give you a lot of Photoshoppy tools. It features an easy-to-use interface and an array of effects. But there's no built-in sharing tools (like every other photo editor on the planet now has), no photo-organizing tools and no Mac version.Read the full review ››

Photoshop Elements
$99.99 list
Coming from the same source as Photoshop itself, you know Elements will offer some state-of-the-art imaging software technology, and it does. Not only that, it makes a lot of effects that would take painstaking effort in Photoshop simpler, with its Guided Edits. Two other modes, Quick and Expert do as their names suggest: the first offering very basic, simple fixes and adjustments, and the latter coming closer to Photoshop itself.Read the full review ››

Pixlr
Not Rated
Free
Load the web page at http://pixlr.com and you may be amazed that you're not looking at Photoshop: You see the same toolbar running down the left, with crop, lasso, marquee, wand (alas, no 'magic'), pencil, brush, eraser, bucket, gradient, clone stamp, smudge, and lots more. You even get tooltips telling you what the tools are when you hover the cursor over them. On the right, you'll see panels for layers, history, and a navigator. The app—I mean site—offers adjustments for levels and curves, and many many effects, including water swirl, kaleidoscope, night vision, selective blurs, and mimicking HDR.

Serif PhotoPlus
$89.99
With 64-bit image processing engine, Smart Selection and Edge Refinement tools, noise reduction, and a tilt-shift effect, Serif PhotoPlus is no slouch. It's just not as slick or intuitive as the competition, with no face recognition and no adjustment brushes. For your rather steep $89.99, you do however get non-destructive cropping, raw camera file support, and tools for adjusting adjust white balance and exposure, reduce noise, crop. You can even use masks to apply adjustments to specific areas of the image.Read the full review ››

Every graphic and web designers will use Photoshop during their work time. Designers can’t complete their work without using Adobe Photoshop. Graphic designers mostly depend on Adobe Photoshop and Web Designers use it for designing layouts, icons, and simple backgrounds. Since Photoshop is a paid tool and not everyone can afford it, we have prepared a lot of best Adobe Photoshop alternatives for both professionals and casual designers.

Professional image editing can be done with Photoshop and the same features are also available in other tools and they are known best as Photoshop alternatives. There are many sites like Fiverr, Upwork to find clients and sell your designs. But learning Adobe Photoshop is nota and you can not learn it overnight. It takes several months to understand all Photoshop features.

The beginners who feel it hard to learn Photoshop will surely look for some free alternative to Photoshop to get started. I must say, there is no perfect alternative which can completely replace Adobe Photoshop. However, there are few good paid and free Photoshop alternatives you should try if you are not a Photoshop-friendly user.

Why you need an alternative for Photoshop?

9 out of 10 designers choose Adobe Photoshop and they will never think about any Photoshop alternative. But few people prefer free Photoshop alternatives and here are the reasons:

• Photoshop is a premium tool and beginners can not afford it.
• It is a RAM hungry tool and can lead to more disk and CPU usage.
• Takes more time to render high-resolution images on low-end computers.
• Photoshop perform very slow if your computer is outdated. You may need to update your computer to the best configuration or buy a new computer using our desktop buying guide for smooth performance.

If you still think you can’t have your hands on Photoshop, you can try these alternatives to Photoshop which have similar features of Photoshop.

List of Best Photoshop Alternatives

After searching and trying plenty of offline and online tools, we shortlisted 9 alternatives for Photoshop. So here is our list of best online and offline alternatives for Adobe Photoshop:

Page Contents

1. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

It is yet another product from Adobe and no doubt it is the best Photoshop Alternatives for photographers. This tool is very useful for editing photographs before sharing or printing them. Photoshop Lightroom is specially designed for Photographers to adjust colors, remove people from the pictures, adjusting color levels, adding frames and much more. However, this tool is not completely free and you need to buy an individual license for the full version. Lightroom can be better defined as a lite version of Photoshop and one of the best paid Photoshop alternative.

2. Fotophire

Fotophire is an amazing tool from Wondershare which has plenty of basic features to edit the images for a professional look. With Fotophire you can easily edit photos, cut photos, erase unwanted objects from images, maximize the images without losing quality, remove background from images and more. The best feature in this tool is Fotophire Focus, which can make the blurry images into clear and crisp photos by adjusting the focus, brightness, and other elements. This is an offline Photoshop alternative available for both Window and Mac operating systems.

3. Gimp

Gimp is a cross-platform compatible software available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is one of the best free Photoshop alternatives available today in the market. It had a huge community to get immediate help and a lot of free Photoshop tutorials are available on the official website

4. Inkscape

Inkscape is best for vector editing which works the same as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw. It is an open-source tool and a Photoshop alternative for MAC, Windows, and Linux. You can register an account at Inkscape to upload your editing’s in their community to inspire people with your designs.

5. PhotoScape

PhotoScape is a Photoshop alternative with just basic and essential features. It suits well for beginners and casual users to edit images for profile pictures. With PhotScape you can adjust colors, brightness, apply background de-focus and more. Apart from editing, you can compress images and create good-looking collages. It is very basic and lightweight Photoshop alternative which works smoothly even on old low-end machines.

6. Pixlr

There are many apps from Pilxr for image editing. They have mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Windows. Recently they developed an online tool with features similar to Adobe Photoshop. It runs smoothly on all popular web browsers in the market. It is a free online photoshop alternative which looks the same as Photoshop with a lot of options like Layers, Adjustments, filters, color picker, gradients, etc. The best thing about Pixlr is, it is an online tool and no downloads and installs are required to use the tool.

7. Canva

Canva is the best online Photoshop alternative that features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface together with a huge library of pre-designed design templates and illustrations. It makes our life simple to create designs without compromising on quality.

Canva is useful for creating Social media graphics, Infographics, Business cards, Marketing materials, Posters, Restaurant menus, etc. In a span of just over 2 years since its inception, Canva has already managed to increase its user base to approximately 6.6 million with over 48 million designs created. Canva mobile app is also available for both Android and iOS devices.

8. Stencil

Stencil and Canva are friendly competitors with similar features and options. It providers Firefox, Safari, and Chrome browser extensions to open and edit any image you see on the internet. It is second best online Photoshop alternatives with over 1.5 million royalty-free stock images, 100K quotes collection, 600+ premade templates, 2000+ Google fonts and lot’s more. It’s drag and drop interface like Canva makes it user-friendly for novice users.

9. Fotor

Best Computer For Adobe Illustrator

Fotor is yet another online alternative for Photoshop which is also similar to Canva and Stencil. The online drag and drop interface of Fotor can help you in designing stunning collages and social media promotional banners. Apart from them, the image editing tool of Fotor is useful for portrait retouching, sharpening images, adding various image effects and hundreds of fonts and stickers will surely change the entire look and feel on your photos.

Fotor also comes with an Ad-free Pro version which allows saving your works on Cloud and instantly share them on your social media accounts. If you are a student, you will get flat 20% discount on Student Discount with the purchase of Fotor Pro. If you are a mobile person, Android and iOS apps for Fotor are available in Play Store and App Store respectively.

Choosing the best Photoshop alternatives

Hope these best Photoshop alternatives make your works easier and quicker. It is better to emphasis Adobe Photoshop is still the best among all above-mentioned tools. We suggest developing a habit of practicing Photoshop instead of trying a free Photoshop Alternatives. You will always need a professional photo editing software for deep photo retouching and digital designing. If you want to try Photoshop before choosing its alternative, then here are the different official ways to download the trial version of Photoshop legally.

Adobe Illustrator Mac Trial

To summarize, Photographers should try the Adobe Lightroom. If you do most of your work on mobile devices, then Canva is the best option for you. For those who don’t like installing software’s on the PC, Stencil and Pixlr suits you the best. Let us know if you still know any other good Photoshop alternatives in the comments section below.