The best free photo editor offers all the power of professional software without on-going subscriptions or hidden charges.

Our team of creatives have gone hands-on with the best photo editors and the best graphic design software - and these are the ones we recommend if you're looking for plenty of artistic tools without any of the cost.

Gimp is the best free photo editor - and has been for a long time. Loved by the community, this open-source tool is incredibly powerful, letting you manipulate images and creative seriously imaginative designs.

We put the top free photo editors to the test, exploring all the creative tools, assets, and comparing the overall design workflows to find the right software on PC, Mac, and Linux.

Best free photo editor overall

GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free photo editor around. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day.

We found this photo editing toolkit to be breathtaking. It features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.

GIMP is an open-source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further. Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the official glossary. If that's not enough, you can even install Photoshop plugins.

Read our full GIMP review

Best free photo editor for beginners

If you've got a lot of photos that you need to edit in a hurry, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer could be the best free photo editor for you. Its interface is clean and uncluttered, and utterly devoid of ads (although you'll need to submit an email address before you can start using it).

Importing pictures is a breeze, and once they've been added to the pool, you can select several at once to rotate or mirror, saving you valuable time. You can also choose individual photos to enhance with the software's one-click optimization tool. In our tests, this worked particularly well on landscapes but wasn't always great for other subjects.

If you want to make manual color and exposure corrections, there are half a dozen sliders to let you do exactly that. It's a shame you can't also apply the same color changes to a whole set of pictures at once, but this is otherwise a brilliant free photo editor for making quick corrections.

Read our full Ashampoo Photo Optimizer review

Best free photo editor online

Canva is one of the best free photo editors online, ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you.

Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but we think that the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB of free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8,000 templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.

You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here. But there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more.

The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs. And it's so, so easy to use, too.

Read our full Canva review

Best free photo editor for retouching

Fotor offers free photo editing software for beginners, ideal for giving your pictures a boost quickly. If there's a specific area of retouching you need to do with the clone brush or healing tool for example, you're out of luck. However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters really shine.

There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant color tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools.

Fotor's standout function, in our humble opinion, is its batch processing tool, which is the one feature that's sorely lacking in many of the best free photo editors. Feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand.

Read our full Fotor review

Best free photo editor for experienced creators

Photo Pos Pro isn't as well-known as Paint.net and GIMP, but we found it to be one of the best free photo editors for those needing advanced image-enhancing tools.

This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours.

The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually. You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing.

It's a shame that the free version of Photo Pos Pro only allows you to export at a maximum of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels. If you're preparing images to share online this might not be a problem, but it limits the software's usefulness if you want to print your work.

Read our full Photo Pos Pro review

Best free photo editor for basics

More is not, believe it or not, always better. Paint.NET's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy-to-operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of tools like GIMP.

Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve.

We found Paint.NET to be fully featured, even though it's in simplicity where it finds core strength. Its interface might remind you of its namesake, but over the years, they’ve added advanced editing tools like layers, an undo history, a ton of filters, myriad community-created plugins, and a brilliant 3D rotate/zoom function that's handy for recomposing images.

Read our full Paint.NET review

Best free photo editor for RAW files

PhotoScape might look rather simple - but a glance at the menu of this top free photo editor reveals a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper.

The meat, of course, is in the photo editing here. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.

We'd definitely point this toward the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap.

Read our full Photoscape review

Best free photo editor for performance

The online Pixlr X is slick and well-designed, with an interface that's reminiscent of Photoshop Express, and a choice of dark or light color schemes.

With Pixlr X, you can make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and frames, and combine multiple images.

There's also support for layers, an advanced feature that you won't find in many free online photo editors, as well as an array of tools for painting and drawing. We'd call this a great choice, whether you want a quick way to fine-tune your photos or have some advanced tasks to tackle.

Read our full Pixlr X review

Best free photo editor for business

As its name suggests, Adobe Express Editor is a trimmed-down, browser-based image editor that streamlines workflows by making photo editing and design as easy as possible. It's also available on mobile devices, letting you work whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.

In our own tests, we found it to be well-designed and packed with customizable tools. It's incredibly easy to use, and if you or your business is already part of the Adobe ecosystem, the tool will fit right into your workflow.

As you'd expect from Adobe, this is one of the best free photo editors online. And although it doesn’t boast quite as many tools as some of its rivals, everything that’s there is polished to perfection. Adobe Express is a pleasure to use. Its only drawbacks are the limits on uploaded file size and types, and the lack of support for layers.

Read our full Adobe Express review

Best free photo editor: Frequently asked questions

How to choose the best free photo editor for you

When you're choosing which free photo editor is best, the first thing to consider is your level of confidence and experience. If you simply want to make a few adjustments (removing blemishes and improving colors, for example) then a simple online tool might be perfect, doing the job well without overwhelming you with options.

If, on the other hand, you're interested in more advanced editing then you'll want to focus on desktop software that offers tools such as layers and masks, giving you full control over the process.

Desktop software is also a good choice if you have several photos to edit, and some free photo editors can even edit photos in batches, which can save you an enormous amount of time.

It's also worth considering what you'll be using the exported photos for. Online photo editors can often only export images in JPG format, and only at relatively low resolutions. That might be fine for images you want to display online (and many such photo editors include tools for sending images directly to Facebook or Twitter). However, if you want to print your work then you'll be better off with a tool like GIMP or Paint.NET that will let you export in just about any format, in high resolutions.

How we test the best free photo editors

The best free photo editors are not always stripped down - many deliver the same robust tools and features found in their paid-for counterparts. We don't take our tests of free photo editing software lightly.

Instead, we make sure to dive as deep as we could possibly get, starting with the interface. Free photo editors are better suited for beginners, casual users, and budding photo editors, which means that they should have a user interface that's approachable and use to navigate. We make sure to note if a particular photo editor's interface and user experience are more complicated or have a steep learning curve.

We then test out their basic, advanced and pro-level (if on hand) tools, seeing how they compare to other free photo editors as well as some of the top paid-for counterparts. After all, photo editing software is nothing without its tools.