My year-long Adobe photography subscription date was looming, and pricing increases have had me questioning whether there’s any value in resubscribing. But I’m also stuck with hundreds of PSD files that haven’t fared well in the past with free and open-source Adobe alternatives.

I recently had to print an old stitched photograph but only had access to the PSD file with adjustment and text layers. This file was a monster at almost 1GB, with five individual vertical photos combined to form a 12229 x 5052-pixel image.

I opened that copy in PhotoDemon, Krita, and GIMP on the same Windows PC to compare speed, memory usage, rendering, layers, and editability. All three alternatives managed to open the PSD file, but only one could actually produce a printable image.

PhotoDemon nearly matched Photoshop’s speed, then mangled the project

Its low memory use and speed were great, but most of my layers disappeared

PhotoDemon’s start was super encouraging. It opened the PSD file in only 16.4 seconds, which is comparable to Photoshop. It didn’t warn me about composition and adjustment layers, ask how to handle the text, or present conversion options. It simply loaded the file as though nothing had really happened.

Its resource usage was impressive. PhotoDemon occupied only 566 MB of RAM after the image opened, peaking at 1,628 MB during the opening process. For a portable editor that I extracted from a 22 MB download, it was a really efficient result.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good news stopped. When compared with the Photoshop output, the panorama’s finished color and tonal balance were all wrong, while most of the layer stack had completely disappeared. PhotoDemon had not only reproduced the image incorrectly, but also hadn’t preserved any of the working project behind it.

While PhotoDemon did attempt to import the adjustment layers, what it gave me was worse than just a flattened image. A flattened image would have sacrificed the ability to edit nondestructively, but I could still have resized, sharpened, and exported it for printing. Here, the pixels had reverted to the base layer, and all the components needed to correct the image were gone.

PhotoDemon was fast and incredibly efficient as a portable image editor, but those small victories solved the wrong problem. Fast access to a damaged project didn’t make it a viable Photoshop alternative.

OS

Windows

Developer

Tanner Helland

PhotoDemon is a free, portable, open-source photo editor for Microsoft Windows.

Krita saved my layers and text, but not the finished image

Its most impressive compatibility win could not fix the broken composite

Krita is more of a drawing and painting application than an image editor, and a real underrated one at that. I hoped that Krita’s native support for layers might have carried over to PSD files. When loading the file for the first time, Krita took 34 seconds to complete. More than twice Photoshop’s time. It also retained 2,722MB of RAM after loading and peaked at 4,446MB.

Unlike PhotoDemon, however, Krita did retain some useful project structure from all that extra processing. During import, Krita recognized the Photoshop text later and asked whether I wanted to preserve it as an editable layer. I selected yes, and it actually worked perfectly. The named layer groups, layer order, masks, and all the original structure also remained visible.

However, Photoshop’s adjustment layers were the major failure. Their names appeared in the Layers docker, but selecting them didn’t restore their original controls. I could rename them, but I couldn’t reopen curves, color, or tonal settings and continue from their saved values. Without those live adjustments, the rendered panorama no longer matched the finished Photoshop version.

To be fair, that outcome isn’t entirely Krita’s fault. Its own documentation clearly describes PSD as Photoshop’s internal working format, and actually recommends OpenRaster or TIFF for exchanging files. I attempted to save the PSD file as a TIFF and open it in Krita, but encountered the same failures, even after discarding the PSD data when prompted.

Krita preserved substantially more than PhotoDemon, but it provided no accurate merge reference showing how the damaged adjustments were supposed to look. I essentially had more pieces, but no reliable picture to work with.

OS

Windows, macOS, Linux

Developer

Krita Foundation

Krita is a free, open-source digital painting and illustration software designed for artists, illustrators, and concept designers. It offers a powerful brush engine, layer management, and animation tools, making it ideal for creating detailed artwork and storyboards.

GIMP gave me two imperfect halves of a usable project

Its layered import and merged preview finally provided a recovery path

GIMP landed between the other two in terms of speed, with an opening time for the layered PSD of 29.6 seconds. It immediately warned that some Photoshop layers were incompatible, then asked whether I wanted to keep or convert the embedded color gamut from sRGB to GIMP sRGB. Its memory usage settled at a reasonable 1,164MB, though its 5,206MB peak was the highest of all three editors.

Initially, the import looked like yet another failure. GIMP retained the complete layer stack, including the adjustment group, masks, and names, but Photoshop adjustment layers no longer worked. Consequently, the rendered panorama looked incorrect. GIMP also rasterized the text, giving Krita a clear advantage should I want to change the caption.

The breakthrough came from reopening the PSD and selecting the Photoshop merged image option. GIMP does knowingly provide this fallback for files whose Photoshop layers can’t be rendered correctly. This time, the panorama matched Photoshop. The adjustment layers were, of course, gone, but their visible effects had been baked into the merged composite stored inside the PSD file.

This solved my immediate problem. I couldn’t reopen the curves of color adjustments, but in this case I didn’t need to rebuild them before printing. The merged image retained the finished color, contrast, and overall appearance, so I could export a full-resolution print copy immediately. Neither Krita nor PhotoDemon produced an accurate final version.

GIMP still didn’t offer a fully compatible experience with PSD files. Its layered version didn’t offer any live adjustments, its correct version was flattened, and reconstructing every editable adjustment would take hours of work. That would unfortunately be unacceptable if I regularly exchanged PSDs with Photoshop users, leaving me trapped in Adobe’s ecosystem.

For the purposes of recovering an archived project, though, GIMP was the only editor that preserved the structure in one import and the printable result in another. I could, in theory, save any repaired project as GIMP’s XCF format, or TIFF when moving it elsewhere.

OS

Windows, macOS, Linux

Developer

Simon Budig

GIMP gives you many of the features Photoshop has but without the hefty pricetag, and GIMP is open source, so you can see every change and requirement needed.

I would switch to GIMP, then leave PSD behind

Winning this test did not make it a drop-in Photoshop replacement

If I’m honest, none of these editors gave me a reasonable replacement for Photoshop’s handling of a complex PSD file — and I completely expected as such. Simpler files can probably transfer cleanly, but live adjustment layers, masks, and Photoshop-specific compositing remain firmly locked behind an Adobe subscription and price hikes.

Krita was impressive for retaining much of its structure, while PhotoDemon was fast and efficient. GIMP was the only application that gave me both a complete layer stack and an accurate, print-ready merged image, though it could not provide them together.

So, where does that leave me with my looming Adobe subscription? Well, I’ve decided to officially move away from Adobe, but slowly, with GIMP being my new image editor of choice. I will use the merged import option for printing and rebuild unsupported adjustments in the layered version when I need to edit older projects.

For now, I’ll be paying for Adobe month-to-month. Because even canceling my Photography Plan is apparently a layer-by-layer process.