European Design and Photo Editing Tools

It depends on what you open Photoshop for. For photographers, Capture One from Denmark is not merely an alternative but is widely considered better at RAW conversion and colour, and it sells a perpetual licence. For opening and editing PSD files occasionally, Photopea does it in a browser tab for free. For painting and illustration, Krita. For RAW workflow at no cost, darktable.

Yes, and this is the main reason people leave Adobe. Capture One and Linearity both sell perpetual licences. Krita, darktable and Penpot are free and open source. Photopea has a free ad-supported tier and a cheap paid one.

Photopea reads and writes PSD with unusually high fidelity, including layers, masks and smart objects. Capture One imports Adobe RAW catalogues. Penpot imports SVG and can round-trip with design-token workflows. Complex Photoshop files with heavy use of Adobe-specific effects will still lose some fidelity anywhere outside Adobe.

Affinity Photo was the obvious British answer to Photoshop until March 2024, when its maker Serif was acquired by Canva, an Australian company. It is still an excellent product, but it no longer belongs on a list of European alternatives. The same applies to Pixelmator, the Lithuanian editor Apple acquired later that year.