Paintstar alternatives

Free 21 alternatives

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Paintstar is a versatile image editing program that lets you retouch, compose, capture, and manipulates images with intuitive tools. It supports layer, alpha, path, and the most common editing techniques. PaintStar has many of the tools and filters you would expect to find in commercial offerings and some interesting extras as well. The painting tools include pencil, paintbrush, eraser, filter brush, airbrush, color retouching, blur, sharpening, cloning, and smudge. Many customizable brushes, textures, gradients, and multiple methods of combining modes are also included.

A highlighting feature of this tool is the image morphing technique that you can use to create a sequence of intermediate frames that seamlessly transform one image to another and generate output in the form of gif animation. Transformation tools including scale, rotate, shear, flip, perspective, and wrap. Anti-aliasing is also supported to remove moiré patterns in the images. Additionally, the screen recording is also supported. All in all, PaintStar is a great tool for editing photos with its multi-purpose tools.

Ranked alternatives

1
Glimpse Image EditorFree
Glimpse Image Editor is an open-source photo editor that allows you to manipulate the image with its advanced tools. With its clean UI, the software feels professional and easy to use without any bloatware. It has a keyboard shortcut customization feature that helps you arrange the keyboard shortcuts if you are switching from another photo editor to Glimpse Image Editor. It comes bundled with some plugins, but you can also import additional plugins from the internet to improve stability and tweak performance.
This tool is an optional alternative to the GNU Image Manipulation Program with some upgraded options. It has every necessary option that you need for professional photo editing like exposure, curves tool, lasso tool, cut, text, pen tool, smudge, and paint, brush tool with varying opacity, thickness, and stroke. The tool can manipulate based on layers, just like Photoshop, with advanced options like masking, gradients, and every other tool needed for photo manipulation. All in all, Glimpse Image Editor is a great open-source photo editing tool that you can use as a Photoshop alternative.
Glimpse Image Editor alternatives
2
PhotoDemonFree
PhotoDemon is an open-source portable editor that provides a comprehensive set of tools to use for photo manipulation. The program is made for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10. The tool is designed to be lightweight yet packed with powerful features that you can carry around in USB and run on any system without any installation. A highlighting feature of PhotoDemon is the batch processing that works by recording all the editing options applied on one image and then apply those steps on multiple photos with one click. This saves your time applying the basic editing on the bulk pictures.
It includes pro-grade features like extensive RAW file format support, PSD file support, color-managed workflow, advanced multi-layer support for masking, and photo manipulation, editable text layers, non-destructive editing, digital paintbrushes, cloning, pattern brushes, gradient mapping, and much more. The adjustment tools include HDR, shadow and highlight adjustments, curves, levels, white balance, and color grading. You can also apply built-in filters and effects with features like perspective correction, edge detection for background blur, lens diffraction, vignetting, content-aware fill, noise reduction, and much more.
PhotoDemon alternatives
3
PhotoFlareFree
PhotoFlare is an open-source, lightweight, simple, and quick photo editor that lets you manipulate photos with its comprehensive set of tools. Some basic editing tools include paintbrushes color adjustment, image filters, cropping, flip, rotation, resize, tool palette. The application is aimed at those who value a more nimble workflow. Other advanced writing options include gradients, hue, saturation, adding or editing text, and batch processing.
A highlighting feature of this tool is batch processing that lets you record the editing steps on one image and apply those steps sequentially on multiple images. The tool palette includes a spray can paintbrush, clone stamp, blur tool, color picker, magic wand, line tool, paint bucket, eraser, and smudge tool. The adjustment tool has all the color grading tools like exposure adjustment, levels, curves, saturation that you can apply in the form of layers. All in all, PhotoFlare is a great editing tool that you can consider among its alternatives.
PhotoFlare alternatives
4
PixBuilderFreemium
PixBuilder is an image editing software that is designed for editing, processing, and retouching images with a comprehensive set of options. The tool can be used as professional editing software for photo manipulation. The interface is similar to the older version of Photoshop. The tool has every necessary tool ranging from simple features like color management, rotation, size changes to the most advanced options like layering, masking, overlapping, and other effects like clarity, blur, and noise reduction.
The color picker is also there to change the hue or saturation of selected colors. Other than that, the selection tool can be used to select the part of the image and edit only those parts. The image can be exported as JPG, PNG, PCX, ICO, BMP, TGA, or GIF. The program’s interface and keyboard shortcuts can also be customized to your liking. All in all, PixBuilder is a great tool that you can consider among other photo editing alternatives.
PixBuilder alternatives
5
showFotoFree
showFoto is a quick and easy-to-use image editor that has a powerful set of tools to edit and retouch your photo. You can use this tool as a photo viewer as well as an editor to improve them the way you like. It can easily import thousands of images at a time with Raw and JPEG support. The editor has a comprehensive set of tools like filters, captions, Color editing tools, image enhancement, image transformation tools, adding decorative elements, special effects, and much more.
The standard photo editing sections include exposure, white balance, levels, colors, sharpening, blurring, noise reduction, and digital asset management tab that make the workflow easier with arranged tools. A notable feature of showFoto is the batch processing tool that applies the effects and tool sequentially to the multiple selected photos in one operation. All in all, showFoto is a great photo editing tool that you can use being a beginner as well as for professional work.
showFoto alternatives
6
FotografixFree
Fotografix is a standalone photo editing tool that helps you in photo retouching, image adjustments, and editing with its basic set of tools. The tool is lightweight and doesn’t require any heavy hardware resources to operate as the size is only in a few MBs. Besides basic painting tools, it also includes the layering feature, which makes photo editing way easier by making no destructive editing and adjustment layers.
Additionally, batch processing can record your editing steps and apply them to multiple photos with one click. Fotografix can open Photoshop’s PSD project file and is compatible with all the layers in the file. All in all, Fotografix is a great tool that you can use for stepping into the world of editing.
Fotografix alternatives
7
PhotolineFree
Photoline is a versatile photo editing software that you can use to manipulate images, retouch them, enhance, and even make graphics from scratch. It offers a set of creative tools, including Lab color space or CMYK tab for color grading, color management with ICC profiles, 16 and 32-bit color depth pr channel. The tool also has layers feature that you can use to easily apply various effects with the flexibility of non-destructive layering. Additionally, the recording action feature copies your editing steps and batch process multiple photos by applying all those steps in one click.
The tool is made for Windows as well as macOS with the new Apple processor M1 support. Additionally, you can also edit PDF files and make graphics in them. Some other notable features are making a slideshow, print multipage documents, flyers, labels, multithreading support for multi-core processors, and USB stick support. Lossless image processing is made possible by adding functions to an image without changing the original data. Other useful tools include distortion correction, noise reduction, temperature, chromatic aberrations, red-eye removal, scaling, and rotation of the image.
Photoline alternatives
8
PhotoFlowFree
PhotoFlow is an image editing, manipulation, and retouching software that provides you a set of comprehensive tools for a professional workflow. It features non-destructive photo editing based on the layering technique. This allows for real-time image preview before rendering the final image. Additionally, you can remove any effect applied by deleting the layer rather than undoing all the effects. It supports 8-bit, 16, 32, and 64-bit floating-point precision.
A highlighting feature is the layer masks that let you edit a part of the image or play with layers for photo manipulation. Other basic editing tools include blurring, noise reduction, cropping, sharpening, scaling, exposure, contrast, saturation, levels, curves, color space conversion, text, pen, and brush tools. PhotoFlow tool is made to work seamlessly with RAW photos that allow for more precise editing and pull more information from shadows and highlights. All in all, PhotoFlow is a useful tool that can take you from a beginner to a pro editor.
PhotoFlow alternatives
9
PhoXoFree
PhoXo is one of the fastest and lightweight desktop photo editors that occupies only 5MB of your storage. It is easy to use, fast, and tiny that you can consider as a mini Photoshop. Besides being a small software, it still supports layer editing with non-destructive layering and an undo functionality of up to 50 steps. With its batch processing feature, you can record your editing steps and apply them to multiple photos with one click. Other useful features include selection tools like a marquee tool, lasso, magic wand, crop, measuring scale, painting, navigation, retouching, shadow text, gradient color, and ripple text.
You can also add clip art, frames, patterns, shapes, and textures to the picture. It has more than 50 effects, including oil painting, mosaic, pencil sketch, soft edge, splash, and emboss. Photo enhancement tool includes red-eye removal, sepia, and glow tool to help in retouching, correcting, or improving the digital photo. All in all, PhoXo is a great tool that you can consider among its alternatives.
PhoXo alternatives
10
FilmulatorFree
Filmulator is an open-source raw photo editing program that has a library management feature for focusing on ease of use, simplicity and streamlined workflow. The tool supports every manufacturer’s RAW photo and tries to simulate the look of a film as if exposed to the same light as the camera sensor. This technique allows for darker shadows, bright highlights, and in short, a less dynamic range photo.
The overall tonal contrast makes it more film-like rather than a digital photo. Other operations it does during this process are enhancing the bright region saturation, brighten the skin tones, and retain the brightness in the sky or sunset. All in all, Filmulator is a simple-to-use raw editor that manipulates your photo to give a look at old film cameras.
Filmulator alternatives
11
Project DogWaffleFree
Project DogWaffle is a raster graphics editor that comes with animation capabilities. The program is made for Windows. The program features include a frame-based animation tool, realistic paint effects similar to Corel Painter, standard paint tools like bitmap paint programs, and an alpha channel for transparency effects. The program also supports multithreading with a multi-core processor. Some highlighting features include real-time effects that update as you fine-tune them in full screen, a particle painting tool that paints things like plants and leaves, and animation tools to produce typical particle system effects.
The animation tools include a timeline for putting on filters, a key framer to move images around, an exposure sheet, the ability to paint with animated brushes, pulldowns, and retiming, a batch processor, and motion graphic templates. Another notable feature is the Motion Prediction module that detects the motion in the video and creates slow motion by adding frames so that the video doesn’t look choppy. All in all, Project DogWaffle is a great tool that you can use for multi-purpose editing.
Project DogWaffle alternatives
12
PictBearFree
PictBear is a multi-function editing tool that provides easy to use interface with efficient editing tools. It has a layering feature that lets you overlap images to combine photos and change colors. A wide range of expressions is possible by changing the combination method of layer effects. You can easily compose the layers by drawing a picture or arranging and overlaying photos. Additionally, it allows for a wider range of expressions by adding brushes to the brush palette. With this intuitive editing tool, you can easily organize the tools for ease of use by switching the display of the tool icons and changing the order.
Filters make it easy to add a variety of effects to your image. In addition, by combining this filter, full-scale processing and editing become possible. Tab switching display of multiple documents is possible. You can work smoothly even when editing multiple images in parallel. PictBear allows you to zoom in and out very smoothly; especially when enlarging, the grid is automatically displayed, which is very useful when drawing pixel art or illustrations. It supports image formats including pbx, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tiff, j2k, tga, wmf, psd, jsf, pcx, and ras. All in all, PictBear is a great tool for beginners as well as for professional artists.
PictBear alternatives
13
DarkrFreemium
Darkr is an app that allows you to teach photography with its composition techniques and lets you virtually recreate the process of developing photos from the film. It has a darkroom that lets you pick the strip that has the best theme and contrast. Just like a real darkroom, you can make parts of the image brighter and darker by blocking or adding light to the image. The app then takes you to a photo editor that lets you crop, dodge, rotate, blur, burn, and tone the image.
A highlighting feature of this app is the layer editing that you can use to add as many effects as you want. Each effect will be treated as a layer that can be edited, deleted, and treated separately. The app has some built-in camera modes, including one that mimics a large-format camera that only produces results in black and white. You can change the shutter speed, ISO range, Focus, apply a tilt-shift lens, and shoot everything in manual settings as the traditional film camera.
Darkr alternatives
14
PhotoModularFXFree
PhotoModularFX is a photo editor that you can use to create customized picture effects with its parallel processing flow. The program works on trees and nodes that are connected with each other, just like layers. It has a wide variety of modules that you can add to the processing string. The modules are basic and advanced effects like Blur, Dithering, Border, HDR, Invert, K-mean, or Paint that you can easily customize. Moreover, you can select one of the available templates or create your own processing string.
You can preview the Picture, in the main window, at any time, by simply sliding the cursor to the upper left corner. You can blur edges, adjust colors and highlight contours in order to obtain stylized images. A highlighting feature of PhotoModularFX is that it writes the editing steps and effect parameters applied in the photo along with the image. This means you can reuse the editing workflow on other pictures whenever you want.
PhotoModularFX alternatives
15
WidsMob RetoucherFree
WidsMob Retoucher is a creative photo editing tool that can fix flaws in your photos with its retouching tools. It has an advanced photo beautifier algorithm that beautifies portraits with ease. You can remove selfie imperfections like minimizing the freckles, whitening the teeth, and skin smoothening. The de-noise tool helps to remove the noise occurred by either low light, high ISO, or fast shutter speed. By using custom information from each image, it can easily improve image detail hidden in noise and handle parameters like shadow tone, demanding, or color casts.
WidsMob Retoucher applies saturation, contrast, and the grain of analog films to give your photo a unique feel. With various color renditions and film grain, you can mix up and make a splendid photo. The film pack provides dozens of revolutionary camera profiles with stunning film effects included. Whether you need to convert photos to different styles of black and white files or apply the classic film analog effects, WidsMob Retoucher is a perfect tool for this. Moreover, the program also provides lots of other parameters, which lets you adjust saturation, contrast, brightness, temperature, and tint according to your requirements.
WidsMob Retoucher alternatives
16
VCW VicMan’s Photo EditorFree
VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor is an all-in-one photo editor that provides a versatile tool for all your editing needs. The program offers an intuitive interface, easy-to-learn operation, easy customization, and a high productivity workflow experience. It comes with a wide range of essential features for both beginners and professional designers. With this tool, you can polish your digital photos, draw artwork naturally and fluently and produce wonderful visuals for the web. The tool supports more than 30 image formats, more than 100 filters, and effects, and photoshop compatible filters.
The interface features include previewing the images as you edit them, editing and preview images at any scale, previewing thumbnails or full-sized images before you open them, and switching between files easily with toolbar buttons. Some useful tools are pencil, paintbrush, and eraser, type, shape, size, and transparency, eyedropper, color selection, lasso tool, shape tool, text tool, anti-aliasing, gradient, fisheye, denoise, crop, and resize. Other than that, you can adjust brightness, saturation, and contrast quickly and easily.
VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor alternatives
17
Fix PictureFree
Fix a Picture is an online tool for resizing the image and converting it to other formats without losing quality. The maximum image size that you can upload is 3MB. After uploading the image, you can choose the output quality and image format, including tiff, jpg, png, pdf, bmp, gif, and webp. Other than that, it gives you the option to choose the custom resolutions in a number of pixels and percentage factors.
Other options are rotation, flip, automatic levels, automatic contrast, greyscale, sharpen, and sepia effect. Additionally, it supports almost all raw image file formats. All in all, Fix Picture is a quick online image conversion and editing tool that you can use anywhere without the need for an editor on your computer.
Fix Picture alternatives
18
Photo ToolboxPaid
Photo Toolbox is a photo editing software with intuitive tools to make your photos enhance from every aspect. It has multiple color adjustment tools, sharpening, and blur tools, blemish, spots, and red-eye tools, a selection tool for partial editing, and brushes for retouching. The color adjustment tools help enhance photo color and lighting, adjust image levels, adjust color curves, saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, brightness, and white balance. A notable feature of this tool is the sharpening tool that increases the overall clarity of the photo without increasing the noise or artifacts level.
You can use a clone stamp to duplicate objects or remove scratches, stains, and any unwanted distractions. Blemish remover tools allow you to remove the imperfections in the faces with just one click. Another intuitive tool is the effect brush that you can use to add multiple effects on pictures just by painting. This allows you to give a special effect to the image more easily.
Photo Toolbox alternatives
19
PhotopainterFree
Photopainter is an editing tool that lets you retouch your pictures, create artworks, and fine-tune the art pictures with its digital painting tools. A highlighting feature of this program is the layers editing that allows you to have greater flexibility over editing with each independent layer that has every single editing step which you can easily change. With the Alpha image file read feature, you can save your picture in PNG, TGA, and TIFF, with the alpha channel. This technique is beneficial to exchange layers with other professional image editing software such as Photoshop.
Some painting tools include pencil, Magic Wand, paintbrush, Chinese brush, and many other. With its improved lasso tool, you can precisely select the object for more complex image processing. Additionally, Photopainter works very well with pressure-sensitive WINTAB compliant tablets. All in all, Photopainter is a simple editing tool that you can use even on lower-end computers.
Photopainter alternatives
20
Home Photo StudioFreemium
Home Photo Studio is a lightweight yet powerful photo editing software that lets you creatively retouch, enhance, and manipulate photos. The tool is made for beginners with a detailed set of instructions for every tool but can also be used by photo enthusiasts. There are all essential tools for fine-tuning levels, color balance, curves, contrast, saturation, and more. Low-quality shots can be improved with its AI enhancer that upscales and sharpens the Picture. You can enhance colors, retouch photos, fix blurred images, remove red eyes with one click.
It has more than one hundred creative filters and special effects to manipulate your image. Some top effects include nature, illumination, optical, plastic effects, geometric, and much more. Another notable feature is the 3D composition which applies some special effects to turn your photo into art. The tool supports more than 20 input and output image formats. All in all, Home Photo Studio is a great tool for quickly editing your photos.
Home Photo Studio alternatives
21
ClipDropFreemium
ClipDrop is a 3D photography app that provides one of the fastest ways to extract anything lying around you and save it for later use. The way it works is by pointing the camera towards the object that you want a picture of, and it will automatically extract the selected object and erase other things giving you a product picture with transparent or white background. You can use that product pictures from your presentation, eCommerce website, website product image, or social post.
It uses state-of-the-art vision AI to provide the best analysis & cut-out technology, no matter what you’re capturing. One of the biggest advantages of this tool is that it eliminates the need for having a dedicated photo studio or a lightbox work product photography. The transparent background allows you to replace it with any picture like a gradient or solid wall. All in all, ClipDrop is a great tool that you can use to quickly have a product photo without any professional editing.
ClipDrop alternatives