With digital photography largely taking over traditional film photography’s place, it has become more and more important to have an image editing software. The king of kings is, of course, Photoshop, but with a price tag of $699 for the full version, many started to wonder if there aren’t free options around that could do the same things Photoshop does.

What program you need depends largely on what you will use it for. Today, we’ll be looking at a couple of alternatives to Photoshop, and the best part is, they are all free.

GIMP

GIMP is, without a doubt a very capable image editing software with many of the same features as Photoshop. And if you require a program that allows you to create several layers, manipulate individual parts of the picture, create filters and tools and work with a variety of formats, including most Photoshop native formats, such as PSD; then GIMP is the right program for you.

PhotoScape

PhotoScape is built to be user-friendly, with an intuitive choice of projects to select from, which vary from image editing and GIF creation to a wizard to combine pictures together or take screenshots. It does not have as many features as Photoshop does, but can do, with a single click or two, many of the same things it would take a Photoshop user several clicks to do.