Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

September 01, 2024

Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

Transform your photos from ordinary to extraordinary—no subscriptions, trial periods, or premium versions involved.

BY Doug Aamoth

You don’t need to break the bank to elevate your images. These photo-fabulous free tools are truly free—no upsells to premium versions or limited-time trials.

They each offer a range of options to suit different skill levels and editing needs, helping you enhance your snaps without spending a dime.

Created with GIMP

GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a powerful, open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, GIMP offers a wide range of features including layers, filters, and a whole bunch of advanced-editing tools.

While it has a steeper learning curve than some apps, GIMP provides professional-grade editing capabilities at no cost. Put in some effort to master it, and it’ll pay off in spades.

Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

Snapseed

Google‘s Snapseed is a feature-rich yet easy to use mobile app available for both iOS and Android.

Along with basic editing features such as cropping, rotating, and brightness adjustments, the app also offers precision-editing tools right on your phone, including selective adjustments and healing, creative filters, and effects.

Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

Darktable

For photographers who shoot in raw format, Darktable is an excellent free alternative to Adobe Lightroom.

Created by photographers, this open-source software offers nondestructive editing, allowing you to make adjustments without altering the original file. It includes advanced features like color-grading and lens correction.

It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

DigiKam

Free, open-source digital photo management application DigiKam lets you import, organize, edit, and share digital photos and raw files from digital cameras.

Who needs Photoshop? These great image editors are truly free

It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and offers both basic and advanced image-editing tools, along with the ability to export photos to other editing programs.

It’s a powerful photo manager, offering face recognition and tagging, and photo-organization features such as the ability to create albums and collections complete with tags, labels, ratings, geo-location data, and more.

There’s support for a wide range of image formats, including raw files, and it uses a database to catalog and quickly access large collections of photos, making it great for photography enthusiasts and professionals who need a comprehensive tool to manage their digital-photo collections.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Doug Aamoth is a former writer and editor at TechCrunch and TIME Magazine, and has written for Fast Company, PCWorld, MONEY Magazine, and several other publications. With more than 20 years in consumer electronics, tech media, digital video, and software, his goal is to make technology approachable and useful for everyone, helping readers stay informed, productive, and secure in the digital age. 


Fast Company

(5)