Open-source Adobe Photoshop alternatives

Graphite is a free and open-source 2D content creation application, described as a procedural toolbox. It started life as a vector editor and is growing into a general graphics tool that handles both vector and raster work, with a nondestructive workflow in which layer-based compositing meets node-based generative design. It is currently in alpha.

The editor's tools are friendly wrappers around a node graph at its core, and the project says its architecture resembles a game engine more than a typical creative application. Further capabilities on the roadmap include VFX compositing, desktop publishing, digital painting, motion graphics and photo editing. Topics tag it as a graphics editor, SVG editor and procedural drawing tool, and it is written in Rust.

Graphite is Apache-2.0 licensed and community driven. Its website offers a newsletter, and volunteers and donors support the work. Because it is alpha software, features and file formats may change, which makes it more of an interesting project to follow and try than a drop-in replacement for mature design suites today.

Krita is a free and open-source cross-platform application for creating digital art from scratch. It is a digital painting program meant for artists who want to produce professional work from start to finish, and it is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters, and the digital VFX industry.

It is built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. The GitHub repository is only a mirror, since the real code lives on KDE's invent.kde.org. The project offers a user manual at docs.krita.org, API documentation, a bug tracker, a community forum at krita-artists.org and an IRC channel where most developers can be found. Nightly builds for both unstable and stable branches are available from KDE's CI server.

Krita is written in C++ and licensed under GPL-3.0. The README includes a repository status table with feature and string freeze information for the current branch, and developer builds for Linux with debug symbols can be fetched from the CI system.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a free and open-source image editor developed within the GNOME project. This GitHub repository is a read-only mirror of the official source hosted on GNOME's GitLab, where development, releases and issue tracking take place.

GIMP is widely known as a general-purpose raster graphics editor used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, and it can be extended with plug-ins and scripts. The input available for this entry was limited to the project metadata, which shows the code is written in C and released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. For downloads and documentation, use the official project resources rather than this mirror.

Ikuaitu, also published as vue-fabric-editor, is an open-source image and design editor that runs in the browser. It is built on fabric.js and Vue and focuses on a lightweight drag-and-drop workflow for posters and graphics instead of acting as a full online Photoshop replacement. The code is released under the MIT license and the documentation is mainly in Chinese.

The editor imports JSON and PSD files and exports PNG, SVG, and JSON. Its tools include layers, grouping, gradients, stroke and shadow settings, undo and redo, guides and rulers, alignment of multiple elements, arrows, lines, a drawing brush, polygons, QR codes and barcodes, image replacement, cropping, filters, and watermarks. Fonts, materials, and templates can be customized.

A plugin architecture allows extra features, context menus, and keyboard shortcuts to be added, and the interface supports internationalization. The project also lists commercial editions and a product-customization designer. It is aimed at developers who want to embed a design editor in their own product and at teams building template-based graphics tools.