PHOTO EDITING

Photoshop alternatives are common, some are even free, but while many apps like to style themselves as competitors to Adobe’s behemoth, most fall down as they don’t have the kind of tools professionals look for.

If you’re not a professional, but an enthusiastic amateur, you’ll have a much better time deciding what to use. Photoshop is the bargain of the Creative Cloud suite: the Photographer’s Bundle offers raw processing and organization app Lightroom for $10 a month if you pay in advance, half the price of any other CC app. That may still be too much for some people, and others dislike the subscription model, so let’s look at some alternatives.

Corel’s PaintShop Pro ( www. paintshoppro.com), an old stalwart of the PC graphics scene, styles itself as the “affordable alternative” to Photoshop. You can buy it outright for $100. Its 2019 Ultimate version contains many of the same tools as Adobe’s app, and adds one-click fixes and instant effects. The Ultimate bundle includes

the AfterShot raw

image processor, plus Perfectly Clear for one-click enhancements, and a cut-down version of the natural medium art app Painter. Adobe’s own budget app,

Photoshop Elements ( www.adobe. com/products/elements-family.

html), offers all the tools most non-professionals need, and is available for $100, or $150 if you get the bundle with the Premiere Elements video-editing app.

Serif is all over this sector, and its Affinity Photo app ( http://

affinity.serif.com) is a more affordable Photoshop alternative, weighing in at $50 on the Microsoft Store. There’s also an iPad version that’s a pretty good port of the desktop app, along with a similar port of the Designer vector graphics app. They retail for $20 each, but you’ll need a recent iPad to be able to run them. Special mention has to go to

Photopea ( www.photopea.com), a student project that’s become a full-fledged image editor that runs in your browser. It’s nominally free, but a subscription model removes ads for $20 every three months.