GIMP (Windows, Mac, Linux / FREE) GIMP is probably one of the more well-known Photoshop alternatives built specifically for Microsoft’s Windows platform. The versatile graphics manipulation package is freely distributed and comes with a fairly decent set of features for image manipulation considering it’s offered free-of-charge. There are plenty of Photoshop alternatives for Mac that you can download or use in-browser to create just the right images and graphics for your projects. And some of them are completely free! None of these are necessarily one-size-fits-all solutions.

Photoshop is the big daddy of image creation and editing, but it isn’t cheap: even the relatively wallet-friendly is US$99.99/£86.56/AU$145.19, while a student subscription to is US$9.99/£9.98/AU$14.29 a month. The excellent Photoshop alternative is a bit cheaper at US$49.99/£48.99/AU$79.99, but what if your budget doesn’t even stretch to that and the filters built into the Photos just don’t cut it? The good news is that it’s possible to get very powerful image apps for free. The bad news?

There isn’t much really. You’re not going to get a direct analog of everything you'd find in Photoshop, but you might be surprised by how powerful the best free alternatives are.

Inevitably some apps will have issues – for example one of our picks, a web-based editor, doesn’t work properly in Safari; others can be a little difficult to learn – but the benefits massively outweigh any downside. The closest thing to Photoshop you'll find – and it's completely free As we say in, gives you most of the features of Adobe Photoshop completely free. It’s probably overkill for basic photo editing but if you like to create or edit complex images, work with a lot of unusual file formats or automate as much as possible it’s a very solid app indeed.

It’s cross platform too, so you can use it on any Windows or Linux machines as well as on your Mac. That’s handy if you need to collaborate with others. The interface isn’t the prettiest, and the app takes a little time to learn – and the help guide leaves something to be desired – but it’s very powerful and well worth the effort. It enables you to work across multiple layers, includes a good selection of brushes, filters and image enhancement tools and supports a lot of plugins too. It’s also extremely customizable, so you can arrange everything just-so to suit your own way of working. If you've used GIMP In the past but thought it was too difficult or crashy, it’s worth taking another look. It’s become a much better program in recent years: the interface has been tidied up a bit, it runs much better and it’s considerably more stable.