Image Editing & Raster Art

Photoshop is the standard, and for professional retouching it still is. What has changed is that the alternatives are good enough that paying for it should be a decision rather than a reflex.

The open-source answer to Photoshop is GIMP for editing and Krita for painting — Krita in particular is a serious tool for concept art and illustration, not a compromise. Photopea runs in a browser, opens PSD, XD, Sketch and Figma files, and is the quickest way to open a layered file on a machine with nothing installed. Affinity is free and covers raster, vector and layout together. Pixelmator Pro is a one-off purchase for Mac.

Photography is its own branch. Lightroom and Capture One handle raw processing and cataloguing at the professional end, with Capture One the stronger of the two for tethered studio work. Darktable and RawTherapee do the same job free and open source, Darktable being the closer match to Lightroom’s non-destructive workflow.

The AI end — Firefly, Midjourney — generates rather than edits, which is a different job and usually a different licensing question. Squoosh is the small one worth bookmarking: browser-based compression with a live side-by-side quality check.

Prices are checked by hand and the drawbacks are written out.