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