10 Inexpensive and Free Photoshop Alternatives For macOS

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at ten Photoshop alternatives for Mac. 

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So a lot of people ask me about Photoshop alternatives. Maybe they just want a good photo editing app or maybe they've worked with Photoshop in the past and have an old copy that doesn't work on macOS Catalina or newer since those old versions of Photoshop are 32 bit. To get the current version of Photoshop, which still remains the king of all photo editors, you need a monthly subscription to Adobe. That's no problem if you're a pro. But if not you may not want to pay that much. Some people even have old Photoshop PSD documents that they want to be able to open in the future. But they don't want to have to pay a monthly subscription fee just in case they need to open these files. 

You don't need Photoshop to open PSD documents. That format can be opened with a variety of different software with different results. Some of these options I'm going to show you are already things you have on your Mac. Others you need to install. Some are free and some cost a little bit. But all of them cost much less than actually getting full Photoshop.

So as an example here I've created a Photoshop file that has a nice background image and the MacMost logo over it. Now you can see here in Photoshop I've got these layers. I even have an effect applied to the MacMost logo and a filter applied to the background. Without the filter you can see how much brighter the background is. Without the effect there's no little drop shadow behind the logo.

Here's that file saved to my desktop. It's a PSD document. Now the first option just involves viewing the file. A lot of times people get a PSD document and they want to just to be able to see the image in it. You don't need any special software to do that. macOS can do that by itself. If I select the file and just hit the spacebar for Quicklook it will show me the file. So I can actually see any PSD images like this. You can also do that in the Preview are in the Finder. So for instance here I have a Finder window open to the desktop. There's that same PSD document. If I turn on the Preview you can see the image right there.

The next alternative is something you already have on your Mac as well. That's simply to use Preview. So if you have nothing else installed on your Mac and you double click on a PSD it should open up Preview as the default app. I'm going to Control click on it and choose Open With and then select Preview. This will open up a PSD just fine. But you won't have the layers. You'll just be able to see the image. However, with Preview you can also Export. So I can export this and I can save it out in a variety of different formats including JPEG, PNG, and even PDF. 

If you're not interested in the layers and you just want to convert a PSD document to something else you can easily do it here. Of course in Preview you can also work with it. You can adjust the size. You can apply some filters to it like color. You can turn on Markup Tools and do a variety of things. Even with Markup Tools click on the selection tool here. Select an area and you can Copy and Paste a section of it. So there's a lot you can do with just Preview.

Now in a lot of cases if you have an old PSD document or somebody has given you one and it has layers in it, you want to get access to those layers. So for doing that you're going to have to install a third party app. Now two apps that I talk about all the time are Acorn and Pixelmator Pro. Both of these will open PSD documents and give you the layers. 

So let's first open this up with Acorn. You can get Acorn in the App Store. So here I have it open in Acorn. You can see I can view the image fine. Of course I can work with it in Acorn. In addition you could see I've got the layers there. So there's the layer for the logo. There's the layer for the background. What I don't have are the filters. So in this case it does give me a layer for this brightness layer adjustment. But it doesn't do anything. It's not there. The MacMost logo is missing that shadow layer. But now that I have these in Acorn I can, of course, reapply them. If the idea is to go back to an old document and just get something off of a layer you can do it with Acorn.

Now you can also use Pixelmator Pro for this. So I can go to Pixelmator Pro and now you can see here I've got those layers just like with Acorn but I don't have anything there for the brightness and contrast layer. At least it didn't come out right. I kind of get the feeling that both Acorn and Pixelmator Pro are trying with some of these layers. So maybe some will work. Just not this particular one. So I can go and, of course, just like with Acorn I can apply my own shadow and everything to it from with inside Pixelmator. With both Acorn and Pixelmator Pro I can export in a variety of formats as well. So these are both decent options. Not perfect but pretty good. Both are in the Mac App Store and both are available for much less than what an Adobe subscription would cost you over the long run.

So another option you can get in the Mac App Store is Affinity Photo. If I open it up with that I actually get the layers and the effects. So I can see here if I click on this layer it has that shadow effect that I applied and also there's the brightness applied to the background layer. Affinity actually has two different apps. So Affinity Photo is in the App Store. Also, Affinity Designer. So you might want to look at Affinity Designer if your Photoshop documents are more of the design nature with all sorts of different graphics and illustrations in them rather than ones that are made mostly from photos.

Now there's a variety of other software you can get in the Mac App Store that will open up Photoshop documents as well. So one is called Aurora HDR. Another is Fotor Photo Editor. Another is Luminar. So you've got plenty of different options. I actually have a page at MacMost.com with a list of all of these with links to the Mac App Store. I'll put a link to that page in the description for this video.

Another option is to get Photoshop but not regular Photoshop but Photoshop Elements. Over the years Adobe has come out with a series of apps called Photoshop Elements which instead of being a subscription are actually just a one time purchase. Now there's not as many features in Photoshop Elements as there are in Photoshop. But you can still use these to open up PSD documents and get the layers. So here we're going to open up our document using Photoshop Elements. We can see here we have the layers and the layers indeed do have the effects and the filters in place. So at least for what I use it works just as well in Photoshop Elements as it does in full Photoshop.

Now one last alternative. This is really powerful and it's free. It's to use GIMP. You've probably heard of GIMP before. It has been around forever. It's basically an open source free image editing app that tries to be as much like Photoshop as possible. You can go to gimp.org to download it. Now let's open this up in GIMP here and see what we get. So you can see here it does indeed open it up. I do have the layers but it looks like I've lost the filters and effects. But GIMP is still a decent free option.

Everything I've showed you, of course, is running on macOS Catalina. It's all 64 bit apps. There are probably other solutions as well. So it really depends on what you want. Of course if you just want an app to handle your photos, make adjustments, and things like that you can use the Photos app on your Mac. You don't need to use an image editing app at all.