You need to crop one photo, shrink it, maybe knock out the background. Search around and everyone points you straight at Photoshop — and a monthly subscription you didn’t plan on. Here’s the short version: most of the time, you don’t need it. And the free side got a lot better lately.
How far does free actually get you?
A few years back, “the free editors never quite catch Photoshop” was just true. Not anymore. Two things changed.
First, GIMP reached 3.0 in March 2025 — its first big release since the 2.10 line, seven years in the making. Per the official release notes, you can now stack layer effects without wrecking the original, and it trades Photoshop (PSD) files back and forth more cleanly than it used to.
Second, Affinity went free at the end of October 2025. This had been the go-to “pay once, own it” rival to Photoshop — one of the few left. Serif rolled Photo, Designer, and Publisher into a single app and dropped the price to zero. You make a free Canva account, download it, and the core stuff opens up: RAW develop, layers, masks, retouching, compositing. The catch worth naming: the AI features — generative fill, one-click background removal, upscaling — sit behind Canva Pro, which is paid. So it’s less “completely free” and more “editing free, AI paid.”
Between those two, “free means toy” is an old line.
Which one, for what
You don’t need to install all of them. Pick by the situation you’re actually in.
Can’t install anything — locked-down work laptop, or you just can’t be bothered? Photopea. It opens in a browser tab, nothing to download. The layout looks enough like Photoshop that your muscle memory carries over, and it opens and saves PSD files. The free version parks ads down one side; they don’t block any editing. Five dollars a month makes them disappear.
Want the closest thing to Photoshop for nothing? That’s Affinity now, from the note above. For plain drawing and illustration, Krita has the better brush engine. On Windows, after something light and quick, Paint.NET opens fast and stays out of your way. On a Mac there’s Pixelmator Pro — a one-time $49.99 rather than free, and worth flagging that Apple bought the team in early 2025, so where it heads next is a bit of an open question. The rest fit in a table.
| Tool | Where | In a line |
|---|---|---|
| Affinity | Windows, Mac | Photoshop-grade, free since 2025 (AI is paid) |
| GIMP 3.0 | Windows, Mac, Linux | Open-source do-everything, offline |
| Photopea | Browser | Edit PSDs, nothing to install |
| Krita | Windows, Mac, Linux | Drawing and illustration |
| Paint.NET | Windows | Light, fast everyday edits |
| Pixelmator Pro | Mac | $49.99 once, not a subscription |
| Pixlr | Browser | Web + AI (free is capped) |
Pixlr leans hard on AI editing in the browser, but the free tier caps your daily saves and AI credits and exports at lower quality. Fine for a quick try; you hit the wall fast.
Where Photoshop still wins
Read this far and paid looks pointless. It isn’t. There’s a real case for it.
Price first, honestly. Photoshop isn’t something you buy and own anymore — you rent it. Going by Adobe’s own plans, the Photography plan that bundles Photoshop and Lightroom runs about $20 a month, and Photoshop on its own, billed month to month, costs more. The number isn’t the point. Stop paying and the program stops opening. Years of payments, and nothing stays yours.
What the money buys is real too. Lightroom rides along for RAW work, and generative fill — erase this, fill it back in so it looks natural — is built right into the app now. Handing files to a print shop in CMYK is still steadier in Photoshop. And the ecosystem is the big one: a tutorial for every problem you’ll ever hit, plugins you can bolt on, and everyone else handing you a PSD and expecting one back. If you edit for a living and swap files with a team all day, that ecosystem alone is why you pay.
Free vs paid, in one glance
| Thing | Free (GIMP, Affinity, Photopea…) | Paid (Photoshop) |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $0 (some AI is paid) | Subscription; stops when you do |
| Core editing | Layers, masks, RAW, retouch | All that, and deeper |
| Generative AI | Mostly behind a paywall | Built in, strong |
| Print / CMYK | Weaker | Steady |
| Tutorials / teamwork | Thinner | Industry standard |
So which should you use?
The line is clearer than you’d think. Images for a blog, social cards, tidying up a photo for a document, cutting out a background, changing size or format — free covers all of it with room to spare. If I had to name two, I’d open Photopea when I don’t want to install a thing, and Affinity when I want the full desktop app for nothing.
The other way round: if you send work to a printer often, retouch photos for money, or sit on a team that runs everything through Photoshop, paid is the answer. When you have to match what everyone else uses, following the standard is the cheaper move.
We never bought Photoshop
Running this blog, we’ve never paid for Photoshop. The cover image on each post isn’t a retouched photo — it’s a card with the title laid over it. We build the card in HTML, screenshot it, and generate a background when one’s needed. The editing that actually happens is cropping, resizing, and shrinking file size.
Even that came free. The thing we kept forgetting wasn’t editing skill — it was weight. We uploaded the cards as PNGs and the home page swelled to 2.8MB. Switching to WebP is what fixed it. If you’re wondering where the images themselves come from, we wrote that up separately in the piece on free image sites. Editing what you pull down, the free tools above were plenty.