Our first alternative comes from Adobe itself, Adobe Photoshop Elements. This one-time-purchase app includes a good many Photoshop features, such as filters, image adjustments, layers, auto subject select, blemish and object removal, sky replacement, and text overlays. It’s decidedly targeted at consumer enthusiasts rather than professional image editors. It features many Guided Edits that take users through the steps of embellishing or correcting photos, but it lacks Photoshop’s most advanced tools, such as Neural Filters and cloud-based collaboration. By itself, Photoshop Elements costs $99.99, but you can bundle it with Adobe’s consumer video software, Premiere Elements, for $149.99.

Capture One Pro is usually thought of as a Lightroom competitor, and it excels at rendering raw camera files with excellent detail and colors. But the program also includes plenty of features found in Photoshop, in particular, its layer and mask tools. You also get curves and deep color-editing tools, but no text or drawing tools, aside from watermarking and markup to point things out to collaborators. Capture One is not especially cheap at $299 for the one-time-payment option (at the time of writing) or as a subscription for $179 per year or a whopping $24 per month, making the monthly price higher than Photoshop’s.

Corel’s PaintShop Pro is probably the best-known, longest-running, full-on competitor to Adobe Photoshop. It’s less expensive than Photoshop and does all the major things you can do in Photoshop and even supports the market leader’s PSD file format. You can work with raw camera files, vector graphics, and layers, just like in Photoshop. Not only that, it supports plug-ins and drawing directly on windows tablet screens. It even boasts AI tools like AI Upsampling, AI Artifact Removal, AI Denoise, AI Style Transfer, and AI Background Replacement. Apple fans need not apply, however, as PaintShop Pro is strictly Windows-only.

CyberLink PhotoDirector supplies the functions of both Lightroom and Photoshop with both workflow and pixel-level editing tools. So you can do not only your Lightroom-style importing, raw conversion, tagging, and camera profile corrections, but also your Photoshop-like layers, filters, masks, text overlays, and retouching. It, too, offers AI-powered tools, including object removal, denoise, image enlarger, and deblur. You can either buy the software in a one-time purchase or subscribe (at a much lower cost than Photoshop) to get an ever-updated flow of new effects, templates, and stock imagery.

Like Photoshop, Skylum Luminar Neo lets you use layers, raw camera files, and loads of filters. As its name suggests it excels at fixing skies, but it also has a few unique tools up its sleeves, like AI Relight to change lighting based on depth, and its one-press powerline removal tool. Let’s not forget AI masking, object erasing, and powerful portrait retouching tools. You won’t get Lightroom’s workflow and organization features, but remember, we’re replacing Photoshop here, not Lightroom. That said, unlike Photoshop and PaintShop Pro, Luminar is only about photo editing and enhancing: You don’t get drawing and text overlay features. If you want its special tools but still want to stick with the Adobe software, you can use Luminar as a plug-in in Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.

ACDSee has been in the digital imaging game for nearly as long as Adobe. The ACDSee Photo Studio Professional software package is wide ranging in its capabilities, which include both photo workflow organization and detailed image correction, editing, and enhancement. You get Photoshop-style layer editing, curves, and gradients, along with Lightroom-style importing, raw file conversion, and even face recognition. Remove or blur the background with its AI features, add text or drawings, or apply dozens of striking effects. The program even offers online storage for syncing your photos to the cloud.

ON1 Photo RAW is another all-in-one photo app that includes organizing features found in Lightroom and image-manipulation tools found in Photoshop. It even has an AI masking selection, text overlays, a healing brush, a clone stamp, and layers. Like Lightroom, ON1 Photo Raw lets you work in nondestructive mode, in which the original image isn’t altered and the edits are stored separately. As the name suggests, working with raw camera files is the program’s bread and butter, and you can keep your collection organized with keyword tags, albums, and geotags, and it will even sync photos to cloud storage. It’s a huge toolset, but as with all the other alternatives, you still miss out on Photoshop’s state-of-the-art capabilities and slickest of interfaces.

GIMP is free and open software that has enthusiastic fans and a large toolbox of image editing features. It’s typically seen as the best free alternative to Photoshop. Just don’t expect a modern, pleasing, intuitive interface, fast performance, or the latest AI tools. Many features require you to install plug-ins manually, even for common things like opening raw camera files. But if you’re willing to put in the work, you get a program that can accomplish all of Photoshop’s major functions for free, as long as you’re willing to live without its state-of-the-art editing, collaboration, and learning tools.