but seriously, look up photopea
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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The great free software that works on windows and I have personally tried (some are only free for personal use, but others are completely free):
Have not tried
Canva is absolute raging hot garbage that I wouldn't touch with a 100 meter pole if I didn't need to. Is their Affinity any better?
So, I bought Affinity before it was sold to Canva and I haven't upgraded it. I have used the Canva free version on someone else's system. As of late last year, it's fantastic. It's the 3 programs in one, photoshop, illustrator and publisher. There is a little bit of learning curve, but some things are better than photoshop, but of course there are a few things worse. They're probably going to enhitify it, but that might take a couple of years. It's a great free version for now.
btw blender also has 2d animation, a video editor, compositing suite and physics sim
If some adobe chump can't figure out how to install and use this program, then that's on them. Completely unhinged meme.
Some of those are free as in beer, but not free as in freedom. Relevant distinction to keep in mind.
True, but Blender is free as in awesome, free and freedom. They're making movies with it.
Also, DaVinci is old school in that the free version is pretty good for beginners. I bought the lifetime version for a one time fee. For now, it's better than premiere pro.
I've tried it. It's an extremely powerful alternative to Lightroom. It was my tool of choice for the last year or more. But it really is the epitome of what people complain about with open source. It feels like a bunch of features just thrown at a wall with no regard for UX. Even its own loyal users will tell you how ridiculous it can be that there are multiple seemingly redundant ways to do the same thing.
And it provides very little guidance on how or why to use the different options.
Ironically, that post is from a thread about...
I've just recently started trying this out. It's far too early to give any real conclusions yet. I think I like its basic editing feel a lot more than Darktable, but it's still far too early for me to say. I haven't even finished going through the first project I decided to edit with it.
And to be honest, part of the reason I'm looking at these at all isn't even about open source. It's that I have become dissatisfied with Lightroom. Specifically, with its file management aspects. If I could just have Lightroom 🏴☠️ with file management that didn't feel like a pain in the arse every time I touch it, I'd be happy.
I'm mostly very happy with the latest version of it. It seems to have a really great UX now. It finally feels like an adequate replacement to Photoshop in many ways, which it certainly did not prior to the recent-ish major redesign.
Except that it is insanely resource-intensive. For some reason a fairly simple project consisting of nine 25-ish MB jpegs and basic layer masks ended up for me as 1.5 GB compressed, and I think it may have been 5.7 GB uncompressed, based on what its UI was telling me. This made it painfully slow, in addition to the ridiculous amount of disk space it took up.
And it still unnecessarily fails to have sensible defaults, as I experienced in this thread, though thankfully the wonderfully friendly @oeuf@slrpnk.net was able explain how to fix its broken settings.
Take a look at Rawtherapee - I found it much easier to get into than Darktable. It doesn't really do management of a library of images but you can use Digikam or Shotwell for that and set Rawtherapee as the external RAW editor. If you want to quickly evaluate and rate image files nothing beats Geeqie though in my experience.
Re GIMP: On large files I've noticed significant improvements to performance by setting the image encoding to 32bit linear floating point. Gimp uses this behind the scenes for processing anyway, so it doesn't have to do any extra conversion while you're editing. Just be aware that you'll want to be using a linear icc profile too or your images will be dark, and make sure to convert it appropriately before exporting. If you're using the built-in sRGB profile GIMP should take care of everything for you though.
Also check in your preferences that you are allowing GIMP enough access to your CPU and memory.
GIMP's defaults are really good imo, but if you deviate from them in one area you need to know how to set the others in accordance with it to get images looking like you expect. It can be complicated to fully understand it all, but if you experiment with 1) the encoding settings 2) your image's icc profile and 3) the display profile you should be able to settle on a workflow that works for you. It's all configurable, you just need to find the right combo 👍
Also bear in mind that the file sizes you see reported in GIMP are their size in RAM, as opposed to their size when exported to disk and include all the extra non-destructive stuff GIMP is using while working on your project. Saved XCF projects will be large for this reason too, but when you export as an image file like .tif or .jpg the file size on disk will be as expected. Personally, I like seeing my RAM getting properly utilised as it's much faster than my disk..
If you don’t care about the Lightroom replacement being open source you could check out the Davinci Resolve beta that was released recently. They added a photo mode with library management. It’s relatively barebones but it might be enough for you.
I would certainly prefer open source, but yeah, closed source is not a dealbreaker.
I've actually been using DaVinci Resolve an an NLE for a while now. A bunch of things about it frustrate me, but I think having experienced FCPX I'm never going to not be frustrated by any other NLE. But as far as track-based NLEs go, I've definitely really enjoyed Resolve.
I had no idea it had a photo mode. I'm definitely...sceptical of a photo mode in a video editor. But I'm also very intrigued! Will definitely give it a look at some point.