Most designers on a tight budget can get an uncontrolled rapid heartbeat by considering what an investment in a Photoshop license will do to their economy. There are a wide range of very capable alternatives to Photoshop just waiting for you to discover. Whether you’re looking elsewhere because you can’t justify the hefty standalone price tag, or you want to support smaller development houses.
Question is of course which alternative to use and to help you out I have collected a set of Open Source Photoshop Alternatives you need to be aware of. While Photoshop alternatives may be usefil you have to accept that you will miss the many Photoshop web design tutorials, cool Photoshop effects, Photoshop text effects. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for recent updates.
You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well: Free Entertainment Plugins for WordPress, Awesome Bootstrap 3 WordPress Themes, Free Photo Gallery Widgets for WordPress and Free Customizable Themes for WordPress.
1. Photoshop Express Editor
Photoshop Express Editor has been built on the pattern of Photoshop itself but comes with a lot less capabilities and minus all the technicalities. It is good for the amateur photographers who don’t want to get indulged into the tricky tools of the Photoshop.

2. Pixlr Express
Pixlr Express is a fun and powerful photo editor that lets you quickly crop, rotate, and fine-tune any picture, all in a completely ad-free experience. Choose from over 2 million combinations of free effects, overlays, and borders to further personalize your image.

3. GIMP
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

4. Pixia
The original Japanese Edition of Pixia was created and developed by the author, Isao Maruoka, but has also been aggressively raised by its fans, which makes this software quite unique and different from other tools.

5. Paint.NET
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

6. Serif PhotoPlus X7
Create photos like a professional with the easy to use tools and features in PhotoPlus X7. Remove all imperfections in a flash, add stunning artistic effects, enjoy amazing color control, restore classic photos and much more.

7. Inkscape
Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

8. Pixlr Editor
This is a web-based photo editor with a layout that looks a bit like Photoshop CS. It has good an amazing interface and arsenal of features considering that it is a free web application e.g. layers, filters, magic wand, styling, texting, editing and a lot of effects.
