The long-standing free answer to Photoshop, and capable of most of what people actually use Photoshop for: retouching, compositing, masks, layers, colour work and batch processing. For anyone editing images occasionally rather than professionally, paying a monthly fee for Adobe when this exists is hard to justify, and it runs on hardware that Creative Cloud would struggle on.
It is not a drop-in replacement. The interface follows its own logic rather than Adobe's, so existing Photoshop muscle memory works against you for the first week, and it trails on the newest generative editing features. Designers working to client deadlines in an Adobe workflow will keep Adobe. Everyone else should try this before signing up for anything.
