Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Source: http://lifehacker.com/five-best-photoshop-alternatives-1483312519

Adobe Photoshop is the market leader when it comes to photo retouching, image editing, or even creating new images from scratch. However, for most people's uses, it may just be too many features to wade through, too much money to spend, or too complicated to use. Thankfully, there are plenty of powerful alternatives that also have tons of features. Here's a look at five of the best.

Earlier this week we asked you which Photoshop alternatives you thought were the best, or which ones you preferred when you needed to do image editing or photo editing. You responded with a ton of great suggestions, but here are your top five, in no particular order.

GIMP (Win/OS X/Linux)

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP, is well known and well loved for more than a few reasons. It's incredibly powerful, packing as many features as Photoshop itself, the fact that it's cross platform and supports Windows, OS X, and Linux machines with ease (and with feature parity across all devices), and of course, because it's completely free. It has a completely modular and customizable interface, so you can keep your most oft-used tools front and center. It also features image correction utilities that make photo manipulation and retouching easy.

Those of you who nominated GIMP praised it for coming in at the low low price of $0, but many of you also reported issues with its interface and usability. It's true, the interface certainly leaves more than a few things to be desired, and it can be difficult to get used to if you're more accustomed to other image editing tools. Some people love it, some people hate it, but everyone acknowledges that it's difficult to find a comparable feature-packed utility for free.

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Pixelmator (OS X)

Pixelmator is a richly featured image editor for OS X. It'll set you back $30, but it often appears in bundles and app packs along with other useful utilities, so it can be had at a bargain. Pixelmator is remarkably powerful; packing a flexible, customizable interface that's designed for OS X, multiple layer styles and filtering/editing tools, and an adaptive engine that switches to the right tools or features when you need them. It's packed with photo and image editing and retouching features, so if you're looking to clean up photos before posting them to the internet, or getting them printed and framed, this app comes at a fraction of Photoshop's price and offers a ton of useful features.

There's a reason that we said that Pixelmator is a seriously good replacement for Photoshop, and while some people will always have a use case that requires Photoshop specifically, (eg, you need non-destructive editing, channel support, or adjustment layers) for the rest of us, Pixelmator is worth a look. Those of you who nominated it praised its RAW file support, and its depth of features, not to mention its price tag. Of course, it's Mac only, so those folks doing image editing on Windows or Linux machines don't have it as an option.

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Paint.NET (Windows)

Paint.NET is one of our favorite image editing tools. Part of it is because the app is feature packed, offering layer editing, a customizable interface with plenty of room to work but also plenty of tools at your disposal, unlimited undo, tons of effects and filters, and a community of passionate users. Part of it is because Paint.NET is completely free, and for the vast majority of people looking to touch up a photo before they post it to the web, resize or crop an image, or do basic image editing, it's more than enough, and it's completely free. It doesn't have the same features as more advanced tools like Photoshop or even GIMP, but not every Photoshop alternative needs to have the same breadth of features—just the ones that matter.

Those of you who nominated Paint.NET noted this explcitly. Advanced users may run up against its limitations after a while, but advanced users probably already know the tools that have the features they need. The rest of us though, who just need to open a tool to do some basic work here and there and want a fast, flexible, and free utility to do it, Paint.NET Is the way to go.

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows/OS X)

Adobe Lightroom stands out from a number of the alternatives here partially because it's designed specifically for photographers, and has the broad variety of tools and features they need to get their photos edited, retouched, updated, and corrected before they're printed, framed, posted online, or even professionally judged. Color correct your images, remove objects or people, straighten images, and more. Lightroom is part of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, so you have the option of buying access to it alone, or making it part of a larger subscription to Adobe's other utilities as well. The full version is $149, but it's frequently available with discounts.

We were initially surprised that another Adobe product, much less Lightroom, got the nominations for the top five. However, it makes sense if you're a photographer looking for a great image editing tool that's not quite Photoshop, and it looks like a number of you are doing just that—editing photos specifically, not just images, and not necessarily creating images from scratch.

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Pixlr Editor (Web)

Pixlr Editor is actually part of a suite of Pixlr apps, including the previously mentioned mobile appPixelr Express, and photo filter and tweaking app, Pixlr-O-Matic. Pixlr Editor on the other hand is a richly featured webapp that offers a healthy dose of features for editing photos and images. It packs adjustments, layers, filters and effects, basic features like rotation, resizing, cropping and editing, area selection, and so on. It's not as feature-packed or as streamlined as a lot of other tools, but the fact that it's free and runs in your browser alone makes it worth your attention, and your use if you're away from a computer with a tool you already know installed.

Those of you who nominated Pixlr highlighted that fact as well; it does just about everything the average user needs, and while professionals will likely find it lacking, amateurs and everyday users have a lot to like here. Plus, the fact that it's a webapp means it runs in any browser, on any OS, with the same features. Sign up for an account and you can save images for future work.

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There you have it, your top five. Now it's time to put them to an all-out vote.

Not much in the way of honorable mentions this week, with the exception possibly of Google Picasa, which some of you noted you use to touch up your images, do some light image editing before sharing them or posting them to the web, and also to organize and manage your photo library. Similarly, we should give a nod to SumoPaint, another free, cross-platform tool that's web-based and offers a ton of useful tools and features.

Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

Photos by Robert Freiberger and Blake Patterson.