Are There Any Good Low Cost Alternative Photo Shop Type Programs?

GIMP is arguably the best free/open source alternative.

Affinity Photo is a pretty good image editor ($49). It has a fairly similar tool set to Photoshop and can read PSD files.

Procreate is a great painting app for the iPad. For a one time purchase of $10 in the app store it's quite a bargain.

 

It's really going to depend on what you mean by "other things" as to what you need from said alternative.

Is it just straight photo manipulation? If so, then Gimp is the first one that does come to my mind for that type of functionality (although I have never been a fan of it, mainly the UI), more likely then not, you'll need to know python to really script some really good functionality. There is a fork of Gimp called Glimpse (where do they come up with some of these names?) that is supposed to take it into a different direction. It's a fork of Gimp 2.10, so it is the most recent version of Gimp.

Now, if you need more painterly functionality alternative, I would suggest Krita. It has some PSD functionality, and ABR functionality as well (all of my abr files imported correctly I should say). Some people call it a Ps alternative, but I consider it more of a Corel Painter alternative. It does have HDR editing as well. In fact, it has some functions that Ps only now just got or fixin to get in the latest release.

I have no experience with Affinity products, but I've heard some really good things about them, so that is another alternative.

 

go one ebay and buy photoshop express on DVD or CD. there are tons for sale. I got adobe illus and photoshop on there cheap. I just dont register them with adobe, dont see the point of that anyway

 

Inpixio PS is just 99.9$.

 

Affinity Photo

 

If you were to get CS6, you would have to register with Adobe. Having an Adobe ID is apart of the activation process, unless go hacking around the software to bypass that. Which if getting from ebay, probably not something that one would be against doing. Before then, the only other couple of reasons to register was at point they offered a free gift to help entice setting up an account, but then in order to get Adobe support (not talking about the forum support) had to have a user registered to that serial number. At least in my experience.

Depending on the OPs needs, Photoshop Essentials may actually do the trick for them. Now, options are in a slightly different area, sometimes not easily discoverable, so there is a slightly different workflow, but there is going to be that no matter what software that they get and depending on what they get, it could be a significantly different workflow.

Only downside is that since they don't want to get Inpixio, probably not wanting to get Ps Essentials (at least not new, I have my own concerns with getting from ebay, but to each their own).

 

Look at Paint Shop Pro. I've used it for many years.

 

https://www.photopea.com/ Depending what you're doing photo pea is great. It's...pretty similiar to Photoshop. And one of the only free programs that can open and edit Photoshop files. I've used it in a pinch on my laptop. It's an online editor... So obviously it's not perfect, and not for large 2-3 GB files. But if you're just doing simple editing it's not bad.

 

https://www.xara.com/us/photo-graphic-designer/

 

If you already use/have used photoshop for a decent amount of time... No.
If you're new to it, you won't know what you're missing and will probably be ok with GIMP or something.

 

As it really shouldn't be.

However, as far as filters and such, this is where knowing python scripting can really close the gap OR have access to scripts written by others that automate these things or have filters for effects that are lacking. Don't have to know python, but that does leave you at the mercy of others freely giving access to scripts that they have written.

This is where the power of GIMP can come in (that and there is a way to have the UI mimic Ps as well, the UI is something that I don't really like about GIMP) to play is being able to script or take other's scripts. But scripts really do come into play in making that software robust. Now, if you are going to use the software as is, yea it's going to seem really, really clunky.

The nice thing is that languages like Python and JS do seem to be more accessible then other languages.

 

Hi. I`m new to the Forum so here it goes.. I`ve been using PS for decades and stopped using it actively about 2 years ago. I found an excellent open source software : Krita https://www.google.com/search?q=kri.....69i57j0l5.2222j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I still -have- to use PS at Work but I find it clumsy and prefer to use Krita for my personal work.