What to use instead, free and lawful

The 5 free routes, side by side

Pick by the job rather than by the feature count. GIMP is the general purpose photo and composite editor, the closest in shape to Photoshop, and the one this archive covered when it ran a GIMP section. Krita is built for painting and illustration, so it is the right choice for anyone whose reason for wanting Photoshop is brushes rather than photographs. Photopea is the fastest way to open a layered PSD somebody sent you when you have nothing installed and no time. Paint.NET is the light one on Windows: layers and adjustments, no long learning curve. And the phone app is the odd one out, because it is not an alternative to Photoshop at all.

The free Photoshop that is actually Photoshop

The free Photoshop most people do not know about is Adobe's own. The Photoshop iPhone app launched in February 2025 and the base app costs nothing: it does selections, layers, masks and compositing, plus Tap Select for pulling a subject out of a scene and the Spot Healing Brush for removing a blemish or a stray object. An Android version followed later in 2025. Those are the operations that define the program rather than decorate it, so a person who needs to cut a subject out, put it on a new background and heal a mark can do the whole job at no cost, on hardware they already have. The full feature set does need a subscription, through an existing desktop plan or the Photoshop Mobile and Web plan at $7.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Photoshop on a phone goes through what that free tier can and cannot do in practice.

What a free download gets you from the vendor, on PC and on Mac

A free download from the vendor gets you a trial of the desktop program, on Windows and on macOS alike, from the company's own site and nowhere else. The trial is the full program for a limited period, it is the same installer the paying customers get, and it is the only desktop Photoshop download this site will point at. Corel runs the same arrangement for its program: PaintShop Pro 2023, version 25.0, published in December 2022, is sold from Corel's own site with a free trial attached.

Two practical notes for anyone weighing that up. A trial is a decision tool rather than a plan, so use it on the actual job you are stuck on rather than on tutorials, because the thing you want to know is whether the program solves your problem faster than GIMP does. And install a free program first, on the same day, because if the answer turns out to be no, the free program has already been learning your files while the clock ran.

Why no page here names a crack, a serial or a keygen

No page here names one, and the reason is practical before it is legal. An unauthorised installer is the single most reliable way to put malware on a machine that holds your photographs, your client work and your saved passwords, because it is a program you are asked to run with full permissions, from a source with no accountability, after you have been told to switch off the thing that would have warned you. That is the whole business model of the sites that rank for those words. This site also will not explain how to get past a trial, a licence check or an activation, on any product, in any version. What it will do is answer the question underneath, which is nearly always how to get the work done at no cost, and the 5 routes at the top of this page answer it completely.

The operations, done in a free program

The operations behave slightly differently outside Photoshop, and 4 of them account for most of what people arrive wanting:

• Removing a background. Build a selection, then convert it to a mask rather than deleting pixels, in whichever program you are in. Photoshop's desktop route is a single Remove Background in the Contextual Task Bar and Photoshop Elements has the same bar; the free programs make you steer the selection yourself, which is slower and, on hair, often more controllable. Removing a background in Photoshop is the full treatment.
• Brushes. Free brushes are free whatever you run, but the file formats differ: .ABR is a Photoshop format and support elsewhere is partial, while GIMP and Krita arrive with full brush libraries of their own for watercolor, hair, tree and calligraphy work. The brushes page covers installing a pack and judging one.
• Patterns. A .PAT is a Photoshop file too, and the underlying idea travels: a seamless tile is a tile, and any of these programs can fill with one. Architectural and background pattern packs are worth judging on tile size and licence text rather than on how many are in the zip.
• Matching a pasted subject to its new background. This is the operation behind the queries about harmonising a paste, and this site has not verified what any current automatic version of it does, so here is the manual method that works everywhere: clip a Curves adjustment to the pasted subject, pull its black point up to match the background's, sample a colour from the background and paint a low opacity layer on top in Soft Light, then add a contact shadow under the subject. The shadow matters more than the colour, and its absence is what makes a composite look pasted.

The 5 things to learn first, in any of them

The 5 things to learn first are identical in every program on this page, which is why switching costs less than people fear: layers, masks, selections, adjustment layers, and non destructive habits. Learn those, in that order, on whichever program you have installed today, and a tutorial written for a different one becomes readable rather than useless, because the menu names change while the operations do not. That is also the honest answer to the step by step and basics questions: no page is going to teach you the program, but 5 concepts make every page teachable.

Finally, the cost question has a shape worth naming. Paying is the shorter road when the work is billed, when you have to exchange layered files with people who use Photoshop, or when 1 automatic operation you use daily saves more time than the fee. Free is the right answer for everything else, and for anyone learning. If your interest is which programs the industry moved to for screen and interface design rather than for photographs, that is a different question with a different list: What designers use instead names the tools the work actually went to, and Photoshop, operation by operation lists the operations covered here one by one.

Where to go next

PHOTOSHOPPhotoshop, operation by operationPHOTOSHOPRemoving a background in PhotoshopHow to remove a background in PhotoshopPHOTOSHOPPhotoshop on a phoneWhat actually worksADOBE FIREWORKSWhat designers use instead: the image and interface tools that took the workWhat designers use instead of Fireworks