1. Gimp
2. Free Photoshop Equivalent For Mac
3. Free Photoshop Program For Mac
4. Free Photoshop Type Program For Windows 7
5. Free Photoshop Type Software For Mac

Photoshop—Yes, the Photoshop ($10 a Month on Windows and Mac) Okay, I tricked you a little bit. Yes, I’m putting Photoshop itself on this list, and here’s why: its current pricing scheme is, depending on your situation, cheaper than it used to be.

Best Video Software for the Mac How To Run MacOS High Sierra or Another OS on Your Mac Best Graphic Design Software the Mac Stay Safe with Best Free. Photoshop is a must-have program. Type: Software The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP as it’s more commonly known, is open-source software you can download right to your computer. Not only is GIMP a Photoshop alternative that’s free to download, install, and use, you’ll also get all GIMP upgrades at no charge!

How We Found the Best Photo Editing Software Programs

5 programs tested

The Best Photo Editing Software Programs

To find the best photo editing software, we pitted the best programs tech-giant Adobe has to offer (Photoshop, Lightroom, and Photo Elements) against three highly commended competitors to find out which one was user-friendly enough for beginners and powerful enough for professionals.

The 3 Best Photo Editing Software Programs

• Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan -

  Most Powerful

• Serif Affinity Photo -

  Easiest to Dive In

• Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 -

  Best for One-Click Editing

Why we chose it

Access to Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC

The Adobe Photography Plan combines two Adobe applications — Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC — into one bundle. Lightroom CC is Adobe’s dedicated photography software. If you’re working with large quantities of photos, you’ll want to take advantage of Lightroom’s organizational system: With it, you can rank photos out of five stars, tag photos, and edit information to keep track of where you took a photo. Subscribing to Lightroom CC (either on its own or as part of the Photography Plan) also gives iPhone and iPad users access to a mobile version of the software.

Photoshop CC, meanwhile, won’t do much to help you stay organized — but it has more advanced tools than Lightroom, like layers, masks, and customizable toolbars.

Customizable image editing tools

Photoshop has over sixty basic tools and customizations to choose from, in addition to its more advanced color, lighting, filter, and 3D tools (among others). These basic tools themselves are customizable, so you can do more than just correct red eyes; you can also specify how large, dark, or light you want pupils to appear. More advanced tools — everything from saturation and contrast to lens correction, liquefy, and RAW photo processing — are similarly customizable. Actions are also processed rapidly, allowing you to quickly assess whether your experiments are working.

Easy to learn

Despite the number of tools (and how easy it is to fall into the rabbit warren of adjustments and filters), we found Adobe surprisingly easy to use. You should expect a learning curve, since Photoshop is intended to be an extremely hands-on program, but Adobe supports you at every step. It has an abundance of online resources — a hidden benefit to choosing a company that’s been in the field for decades — and Photoshop CC particularly impressed us with its tutorials and guidance, helping us learn both terminology (what exactly the clone tool does) and technique (how to create and add to masks).

Hovering over the individual tools in Photoshop's left-hand bar pops up five-second gifs that demonstrate each tool — though you can easily change your settings and remove this feature once you get the hang of things.

Points to consider

Subscription service

Our only complaint about Adobe’s Photography Plan is that it’s a subscription service; you’ll sign up for a year-long contract and pay fees monthly rather than making a one-time purchase. While this subscription is significantly cheaper than the one-time purchase model that Photoshop used to follow (complete with a painful $1,500 price tag), if you cancel your subscription, you’ll lose access to all of the programs and tools, as well as any photos that remain in Adobe’s proprietary format. Make sure you’ve completely exported your library if you decide to cancel your contract.

Why we chose it

Easy to use

We were primarily drawn to Serif Affinity Photo because of how easy it was to use. Its customizable control panel initially appears overwhelming, with 22 adjustments options immediately available on your right-hand dashboard. However, each one is neatly packaged so that no matter what you want to do, you can quickly find and open the relevant folder.

Helpful presets

We also appreciated how Serif provides a number of immediate preset options on all of its effects. You can also manually adjust each effect for more control, but the presets offer a nice introduction for beginners.

One-time purchase

One of the keenest edges Serif Affinity has over Adobe’s Photography plan is that it’s a one-time purchase of $50, rather than a $10 or $20 monthly subscription. This means that, depending on your cloud storage needs (in turn based on how many photos you have and their editing needs), Serif Affinity becomes the more affordable plan after five months, possibly as early as three months.

Points to consider

No organizational tools

However, Serif Affinity’s budget plan comes with one significant drawback: It doesn’t offer any organizational tools. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of photos that you need to organize, or would like to sort by place, date, or personalized keyword, you’ll want to consider Adobe’s Photography Plan or take a look at Photoshop Elements 2018.

Why we chose it

One-click editing

If you’re just trying to create, say, annual holiday cards, and the idea of learning new photo editing terms, tools, tricks, and techniques feels daunting, Adobe Photoshop Elements transforms the process into a few simple clicks — with a couple of sliders you can adjust if you’re feeling adventurous. That’s it. Photoshop Elements 2018 gives you high-quality photographs without a technical learning curve, so long as you stay within its predetermined adjustments.

Settings for different skill levels

Gimp

We love that Photoshop Elements offers three tiers of photo editing: Quick, Guided, and Expert. Quick is simply that — with a few auto-adjustments, possibly a camera filter or picture frame, you can take your photograph from raw image to printer-ready. Guided gives you almost 50 options, where it will walk you through step-by-step the process of adjusting brightness, straightening or resizing a photo, or adding filters. Finally, the Expert mode lays out all of the program’s tools with minimal instruction.

Points to consider

Light on advanced editing tools

Even though the Expert mode of Photoshop Elements is more advanced than either the Quick or Guided modes, it doesn’t compete with our top picks. In addition to its clunky ‘90s-era design, it lacks all of the tools found in Photoshop CC or Serif Affinity Photo. That said, it could be a good introduction when you feel like trying out some additional techniques outside of the guided programs.

How to Find the Right Photo Editing Software for You

Decide what tools you need

Different types of image editing require different tools. No matter what you’ll be doing, you’ll want to know which ones you need for your most common projects — these functions might not be immediately necessary, but they’ll let you tackle tasks a little more complex than wiping away corgi footprints.

• Layers let you combine separate images or edit specific areas of a photograph. These are helpful if you’re trying to remove a photo-bomber from your wedding ceremony on the beach or swapping out the snowy background of your cute dog photo to send him floating through space instead.
• Applying a mask layer is another technique to isolate areas of a photo for specific editing. If you’d like to make changes to the background of your photograph without affecting the subject, or if you’d like to create a cut-out of a tiny dog from one photograph to layer him into a desert landscape in another, you’ll probably use a mask.
• Finally, preset filters let you adjust your photos with a single click. These could either take the form of a typical Instagram filter (you click “Black and White” or “Landscape” and it automatically alters your photo) or auto-adjustments on a tool-by-tool case.

Knowing what types of editing you’ll be using the software for will help you narrow down which tools are essential and which are just nice to have.

Test drive several options

All of our top picks offer a free trial, and we recommend taking full advantage of them. You probably know what you’re going to be using the software for, and now’s a good time to see how each of them perform on the type of image editing you need. Pay attention to the number of tools and effects provided, how easy they are to use, and the organization features of each program.

Determine how much you’re willing to spend

Prices for photo editing software vary a lot, and depending on what you’ll be using it for, you may not need to pay a premium. The most powerful tool on the market, Adobe’s Photography Plan, runs on a subscription model for $10 per month. If you don’t need all of that technical prowess, Serif Affinity will meet all your image editing needs for a one-time purchase of $50. There are even a number of free photo editing software options available if you don’t want to make any investment.

Photo Editing Software FAQ

In most situations, you should edit your photos in the raw camera format as opposed to a standard format like JPEG. The raw files will contain a lot more information about the picture, so you can be more precise in your editing. Once you’re ready to show it to the world, you can then convert it to a shareable format like JPEG or PNG.

You can download and install Photoshop on up to two computers, regardless of the operating system. However, you’ll only be able to use one Photoshop on one computer at a time.

Photoshop CC is the more powerful editing tool — you’ll need to manipulate multiple layers here — while Lightroom CC offers sorting and organizing features into its slightly more basic editing capabilities. Both programs offer preset filters as well, so you can adjust your photos to a preset perfection with only a few clicks. Adobe’s Photography plan includes both programs.

The Best Photo Editing Software Programs: Summed Up

Free Photoshop Equivalent For Mac

Our Other Software Reviews

Over the years, we’ve put just about every type of software imaginable through the ringer to find the best of the best. Check out some of our favorite reviews below:

You might also like

Free Photoshop Program For Mac

Adobe Photoshop is the professional image editor. It’s name is now a verb for image editing (which is something that Adobe absolutely hates). Photoshop though, isn’t the only editor in town. Over the last few years, new image editing apps have come along that are almost as good as Photoshop, for a fraction of the price. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Free Photoshop Type Program For Windows 7

GIMP (Free on Windows, Mac, Linux)

RELATED:The Downsides of Open Source Software

I’ll be honest up front: I’m not personally a fan of GIMP. I think it’s a god-awful piece of software that embodies everything that can be bad about open source projects. Teaching myself how to use it was a huge hassle, and there are a lot of things in GIMP that are more convoluted than they should be.

But there’s no doubt it’s a powerful program, and it’s 100% free.

In fact, it’s so powerful, that there’s not a lot you can do in Photoshop that you can’t also do in GIMP. You just have to do those things in a less intuitive, roundabout way. If price is your only consideration (or you’re running Linux), check out GIMP. But if you want your life to be easy, try one of the paid (but relatively inexpensive) alternatives below.

Affinity Photo ($50 on Windows and Mac)

Free Photoshop Type Software For Mac

Affinity Photo is one of the first apps to even make me consider switching from Photoshop. It’s available on Windows and macOS for only $49.99.

Affinity Photo is a great alternative to Photoshop, and like with GIMP, it can do almost anything Photoshop can. The only thing you really miss out on is Adobe’s ecosystem, and a bit of Photoshop’s extra polish and more advanced features.

For everyday users and amateur photographers, it does pretty much everything you need. $49.99 may seem steep for some, but compared to Photoshop, it’s a steal, and a big step up from GIMP.

Pixelmator ($30 on Mac)

Pixelmator is a Mac only image editor. It’s not as fully featured as Photoshop, but it can still do a lot. At $29.99, it’s the cheapest great app you can get.

Like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator is a worthy Photoshop alternative that’s a massive step up from GIMP. The biggest problem is that the workflow can be very unintuitive, especially if you’re coming from Photoshop, or Photoshop-like apps. There is a learning curve if you want to switch.

What sets Pixelmator apart from Affinity Photo is that you can do a lot more design and vector work. Affinity Photo can replace Photoshop for photographers, but Pixelmator can do it for everyone.

Photoshop—Yes, the Photoshop ($10 a Month on Windows and Mac)

Okay, I tricked you a little bit. Yes, I’m putting Photoshop itself on this list, and here’s why: its current pricing scheme is, depending on your situation, cheaper than it used to be. So if you haven’t looked into Photoshop for a few years because of it’s $700 price tag, I recommend looking again.

Instead of having to remortgage your house, you can now pay $9.99 a month to sign up for the Adobe Creative Cloud Photographers plan. Your ten dollars per month gets you Photoshop, Lightroom, the Photoshop and Lightroom mobile apps, a hosted website, a subscription to the portfolio site Behance and a few other small features.

As good as the other apps on this list are, they still aren’t Photoshop. And at ten bucks a month, it’s still not cheap, but arguably less expensive than paying $700 up front—especially if you used to pay $700 each time a new version came out. Plus, Lightroom is a good program for photographers, so if that’s something you would have also bought, you’re getting an even better deal.

There have never been more great, non-Photoshop image editors available. Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are fantastic and GIMP…well, GIMP works when you need it to. Even still, with Photoshop’s current subscription pricing, it might be the best for you.

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