From the beginning, many people are asking me what is the best alternatives to photoshop. The truth is, I have no definite answer. And it will depend on what is your project requirements.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite and tell you what to get. Because at the end of the day, you’re still the one who’s going to pay for it and use the said software.

Many graphic artists that are heavy in drawing or painting, need less expensive applications. But for most graphic designers, you need flexible software like Photoshop.

And some professional photographers settled with On1 Photo RAW.

Choosing the best alternatives to Photoshop is the way to go if you’re not ready for Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions.

At the end of this post, I hope that I can help you with your problem by choosing what is the best aside from Photoshop.

Procreate

The multi-award-winning artistic framework gives you the power wherever you are to create beautiful drawings, inspiring paintings, and breathtaking illustrations. In Procreate, your studio is the world.

The Best Alternatives To Photoshop for Artist-Procreate

Rebelle

Rebelle is a revolutionary paint app that allows you to create realistic aquarelle, acrylic, wet, and dry media artwork with real-world color mixing, wet diffusion, and drying.

Artist Peter Blaškovič created the unique aqua-color simulation as one of his experimental drawing projects. The original dream was to create a paint scheme with the most natural resources for painting.

Rebelle is built for conventional painters and CG artists who want to develop and extend their creative skills using the new ground-breaking visual painting techniques.

Rebelle
  • Windows 7, 8 and 10; OS X 10.11 or better
  • Website

ArtRage

Realistic painting tools textures and color blending. ArtRage is a digital artist’s studio with an array of familiar tools that look and work like real things. It’s a canvas for thick, expressive oils and delicate watercolor, a sketchpad with a complete group of pencils, and a sheet of paper with a collection of wax pencils all in one. ArtRage is the perfect creative tool for everyone.

The 13 Best Alternatives to Photoshop for Artist 1
  • OS X 10.8 or newer; Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10
  • Website

Affinity Photo

If you could create your own photo editing software, it could work such as this. Be it quick corrections, delicate retouching, or immersing yourself in a huge selection of layers of complex artwork, Affinity Photo has you covered.

Affinity Photo has become the world’s first choice for photography and creative professionals who love its speed, power, and precision. Born to work hand-in-hand with the latest powerful computer technology, this is the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows, and iOS.

Affinity Photo - The Best Alternatives to Photoshop for Artist

Photopea

Photopea is a free online image editor that works without plugins. It can read and save PSD files. Open and edit PSD, XCF, Sketch (Photoshop, Gimp, and Sketch), or any other image files. Inspect PSD and Sketch files. Convert Sketch to PSD.

Photopea

Sketch

Create, prototype, collaborate and turn your ideas into incredible digital design products.

Build the best work with essential tools to speed up the process and game-changing functionality that will drive your projects to the next stage.

Cloud makes it easy to bring the collaborators you need into the design process whether you’re a freelancer or a full-fledged team.

Sketch - This is one of the best alternatives to Photoshop.

GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU / Linux, OS X, Windows, and other operating systems. It’s free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. Thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins, you can further improve your productivity with GIMP.

GIMP is one of the most popular best alternatives to Photoshop.

Gimp

Pixelmator Pro

Professional image editing tools that can be used by anyone.

Pixelmator Pro is an image editor designed to make the most powerful professional image editing tools accessible to all. And with a wide range of tools for editing and retouching photos, creating graphic designs, painting, drawing vector graphics, and adding stunning effects, this is the only image editor you need.

Pixelmator Pro

Pixlr

Achieve next-level, intuitive photo editing with AI-powered tools for fast yet professional editing. Designed to be quick, you can now edit photos smarter and faster for Free-with Pixlr. There is no steep learning curve, no design achievement required.

Say goodbye to dull, repetitive editing tasks with AI design tools. One click is all you need to delete backgrounds perfectly from your pictures, cut out every strand of hair, and more!

Simpler moves, equally stunning. Only turn on and off, or drag the sliders from left to right to edit your images. With Pixlr, creating special visual photo effects becomes so much simpler.

The Best Alternatives to Photoshop for Artist

Corel PHOTO-PAINT

Create and enhance any type of image with advanced photo editing features in Corel PHOTO-PAINT ® 2019. Designed to complement CorelDRAW, this photo editing program offers advanced editing tools and support for PSD files, plus robust RAW image support for over 300 camera forms.

Whether you are a first-time user or an accomplished artist, PHOTO-PAINT is easy to learn photo editing software thanks to in-product learning, content, plug-ins, and more.

Corel Photo Paint

Paint.net

Paint.net is one of the oldest and best alternatives to Photoshop. It’s an image and photo editing app for Windows PCs. It features an intuitive and creative layer-supported user interface, limitless undo, special effects, and a wide range of useful and powerful tools. An active and rising online community is offering friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

It started to develop as an undergraduate college senior design project led by Microsoft and is now being managed and developed by Rick Brewster. Originally designed as a free replacement for Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has developed into a powerful but simple image and photo editor.

Paint.net

SumoPaint

Sumopaint was launched in 2008 and now has over 30 million unique users worldwide. It received 5-star ratings from About.com and MacWorld and was listed on Google’s Edu platform as the Chrome Books featured program. The next edition of Q1/2018 will be released to support mobile devices and multi-users.

SumoPaint - The Best Alternatives to Photoshop for Artist

Acorn

Use non-destructive curves, layers, and filters. Metal 2 GPU capacity. Add layer masks and selections to touch up your pictures or render something entirely new. Delete backgrounds, merge images, perform color correction, resize, rotate, crop, and more.

Acorn is the powerful best alternatives to Photoshop and has everything you need in an image editor.

Acorn