How to replace Adobe Photoshop: TOP 10 editors for phone and PC | Articles | Photo, video, optics

In light of recent polit­i­cal devel­op­ments, Adobe has announced a tem­po­rary exit from the Russ­ian mar­ket. Russ­ian users can no longer buy any of their devel­op­ments, includ­ing Pho­to­shop. In the arti­cle we will talk about alter­na­tives to the pop­u­lar graph­ics edi­tor.

What alternative do Russian developers offer?

The Russ­ian com­put­er soft­ware mar­ket is not as devel­oped as the for­eign one. How­ev­er, here you can still find wor­thy alter­na­tives to for­eign soft­ware.

One of them is the Pho­toMAS­TER pro­gram from the Russ­ian devel­op­er AMS Soft­ware. The pro­gram allows you to process pho­tos of any for­mat, includ­ing RAW. A dis­tinc­tive fea­ture is a set of AI-func­tions, thanks to which you can pro­fes­sion­al­ly process pho­tos in a few clicks.

The main advan­tages of the pro­gram:

• retouch­ing using ready-made pre­sets or man­u­al set­tings;
• semi-auto­mat­ic face and fig­ure plas­tic surgery;
• effects library for styling and quick qual­i­ty improve­ment;
• col­or cor­rec­tion: curves, RGB and LAB chan­nels, LUT fil­ters;
• sim­ple removal of unnec­es­sary objects;
• spot cor­rec­tion of indi­vid­ual areas;
• quick back­ground change;
• over­lay pho­tos on top of each oth­er, add stick­ers and frames.

The pho­to edi­tor does not require a pow­er­ful com­put­er to work; you can install it on a PC with any ver­sion of Win­dows. The dis­ad­van­tages include only a short demo peri­od. How­ev­er, unlike Pho­to­shop, you do not need to con­stant­ly renew your sub­scrip­tion to use the pro­gram: a license is pur­chased only once. The cost starts from 690 rubles.

Analogues of Adobe Photoshop: paid and free software

Let’s con­tin­ue to con­sid­er analogs of Pho­to­shop for the com­put­er. The list of pro­grams below includes soft­ware that works equal­ly well on both pow­er­ful PCs and weak ones. We tried to choose pro­grams that have tools sim­i­lar to Pho­to­shop.

1.PaintShop

PaintShop is a good alter­na­tive to Pho­to­shop: there is work with lay­ers, mask­ing of any objects, draw­ing dig­i­tal paint­ings from scratch, advanced pho­to edit­ing, pro­fes­sion­al col­or cor­rec­tion.

The edi­tor pro­vides fil­ters for pro­cess­ing dif­fer­ent types of shoot­ing, for exam­ple, for pho­tos under water or from the air. If you want to bring a pic­ture to life, you can cre­ate an ani­ma­tion.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the soft­ware has the same dis­ad­van­tages as Pho­to­shop: it puts a heavy load on the sys­tem and has a rather com­pli­cat­ed inter­face. The pur­chase is a one-time, but all sub­se­quent updates must be paid sep­a­rate­ly.

2. GIMP

If you want to get the func­tion­al­i­ty of Pho­to­shop for free, GIMP will come to the res­cue. Almost all of his tools are here (with the excep­tion of ani­ma­tion cre­ation).

Work with RAW, draw pic­tures, per­form pho­to manip­u­la­tions, work with curves and col­or pro­fes­sion­al­ly, cre­ate an unlim­it­ed num­ber of lay­ers, adjust trans­paren­cy and blend­ing — all this and much more is avail­able.

The appli­ca­tion has a lot of tech­ni­cal nuances, so advanced edit­ing skills are required. But it is cross-plat­form and works sta­bly on weak PCs.

3. Home Pho­to Stu­dio

Home Pho­to Stu­dio is anoth­er com­plete­ly Russ­ian-lan­guage soft­ware. Prac­ti­cal­ly does not load the com­put­er and impos­es min­i­mum sys­tem require­ments.

In addi­tion to the basic options (crop­ping / bright­ness and con­trast / work­ing with col­or / fil­ters and effects, etc.), we can note:

• point cor­rec­tion and col­or­ing;
• appli­ca­tion and cre­ation of your own “scripts” (record­ing a sequence of actions in a script);
• cre­ation of post­cards, cal­en­dars, pho­to­books;
• auto­mat­ic qual­i­ty improve­ment.

The pro­gram has many use­ful fea­tures. This is both a plus and a minus at the same time, because it can be dif­fi­cult to find the right tool right away.

4.Paint.NET

If you’ve used Pho­to­shop for the basics — crop­ping, col­or grad­ing, gen­er­al enhance­ment — you don’t need a pro­fes­sion­al alter­na­tive. The free Paint.NET allows you to do all these things, as well as make sim­ple pho­to mon­tages and cre­ate dig­i­tal art.

The soft­ware allows you to work with each lay­er sep­a­rate­ly, adjust trans­paren­cy and blend­ing. You can open mul­ti­ple snap­shots and work with them in dif­fer­ent tabs. And most impor­tant­ly, Paint.NET is easy to learn and does not load the sys­tem at all.

5. Pix­el E

If you’re look­ing for a brows­er-based option, Pixlr E’s online edi­tor is a great option. Regard­ing the pro­cess­ing of raster images, the online edi­tor is almost the same as Pho­to­shop, the only thing miss­ing is work­ing with vec­tor and ani­ma­tion.

Oth­er­wise, you can car­ry out the same oper­a­tions: apply masks to text and pho­tos, cre­ate dig­i­tal art, pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als and posts for social net­works, adjust col­ors, etc. The inter­face is almost iden­ti­cal to Pho­to­shop, so it won’t be dif­fi­cult to mas­ter it.

Alternatives to Photoshop on mobile

Since mobile appli­ca­tions from Adobe are also tem­porar­i­ly dis­abled for our coun­try, we have select­ed replace­ments that work on Android and iOS.

1. Snapseed

iOS | Android

Com­plete­ly free, Snapseed allows you to cre­ate pho­to col­lages, quick­ly enhance your image with a fil­ter, fix col­ors and light­ing, work with HDR, and even cre­ate a dou­ble expo­sure. Dis­tor­tion of per­spec­tive and point change of areas is allowed. The dis­ad­van­tages include not very intu­itive work with lay­ers.

2. Pics Art

iOS | Android

The hall­mark of Pic­sArt are “remix­es” — user-cre­at­ed pre­sets that you can apply to your pho­tos. Among the man­u­al func­tions are retouch­ing, stick­ers, effects, plas­tic, curves, pho­tomon­tage, masks, draw­ing func­tions. The free ver­sion dis­ables back­ground removal and some fil­ters.

3. Tool Wiz Pho­tos

iOS | Android

Tool­Wiz does not require pay­ment and comes with a set of almost pro­fes­sion­al tools. Per­spec­tive, lay­ers, object removal, lens cor­rec­tion, retouch­ing, fil­ters are just a few of its options. Par­tic­u­lar atten­tion should be paid to art func­tions — there are options for draw­ing man­u­al­ly or trans­form­ing pic­tures using art fil­ters.

4 Polarr

iOS | Android

Polarr is suit­able for those who need advanced pro­cess­ing. The appli­ca­tion allows you to work with areas, change per­spec­tive, apply tex­tures, edit col­ors and light­ing, retouch por­traits, over­lay pic­tures on top of each oth­er. A slight neg­a­tive is the lack of fil­ters, but you can use cus­tom pre­sets from the inter­nal com­mu­ni­ty.

Finally

As you can see, even despite the depar­ture of Adobe Pho­to­shop from Rus­sia, it is quite pos­si­ble to find alter­na­tives with sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ty. At the same time, some of them are supe­ri­or to the pop­u­lar graph­ics edi­tor in terms of price and sys­tem require­ments, and are almost as good in terms of capa­bil­i­ties.