Image & Design Tools
Editors, vectors, stock photography, palettes, asset libraries, and every essential tool for composing, restoring, and formatting visual media.
Image & Design.
Editors, vectors, stock photography, palettes, asset libraries, and every essential tool for composing, restoring, and formatting visual media.
These are the heavy lifters for local desktop raster and raw editing. If you want full offline control over layering, masking, and high-resolution photo manipulation without paying a monthly subscription, these are the industry-standard FOSS alternatives.
GIMP
The premier open-source raster editor. Expandable via plugins like PhotoGIMP and Texture Synthesizer.
ImageMagick
Powerful command-line software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images in bulk.
For quick tweaks, Chromebook users, or working away from your main workstation, these browser-based editors pack surprisingly deep toolsets without requiring any installation or heavy system resources.
Photopea is practically indistinguishable from older versions of Photoshop. It natively opens PSD, Sketch, and XD files right in the browser, making it the fastest way to view and edit client files without installing Adobe CC.
Photopea
A complete, browser-based Photoshop alternative handling PSDs with full layer support.
Tools dedicated entirely to isolating subjects, clearing backgrounds, and removing unwanted objects. While online tools are convenient, running a local model like Rembg guarantees privacy for personal photos.
Many free online background removers (like remove.bg) heavily downscale your final image unless you pay. If you need full-resolution exports, use a self-hosted tool like Rembg or the open-source Segment Anything model.
Restore degraded images, clear up compression artifacts, or scale up low-res art using neural networks. Local tools like Upscayl run entirely on your GPU, meaning zero upload limits or subscription fees.
Waifu2x
The standard for upscaling anime-style art and illustrations using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.
A collection of specialized tools for adding retro textures, generating halftones, dithering, glitching, or turning standard photographs into heavily stylized graphic assets.
Software tailored specifically for illustration, sketching, and digital painting rather than photo manipulation. Krita and Inkscape lead the FOSS space for raster and vector illustration respectively.
While you can make pixel art in Photoshop or GIMP, dedicated sprite editors handle indexed color palettes, tiling, and frame-by-frame animation timelines much more intuitively.
UI/UX prototyping, layout engines, and collaborative whiteboards. This section also includes archives that preserve graphic design history, typography, and single-page web layouts for inspiration.
Quick generation tools for profile pictures, mockups, and vector (SVG) brand icons. Utilizing vectors ensures your logos remain perfectly crisp regardless of how large they are scaled.
High-resolution surface materials for 2D graphic design or 3D rendering. PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures include normal, roughness, and displacement maps alongside the base image.
Massive indexes containing thousands of mockups, vector illustrations, UI kits, and PSD templates. These are the aggregators to check before starting any layout from scratch.
Good typography defines a design. Always check the commercial license status before embedding a free font into a client project. When you know exactly what typeface you want, use the search syntax below to find the raw .ttf or .otf files.
1. Find the name of the exact typeface (e.g. Proxima Nova)
2. Run these exact search strings in Google:
proxima nova.ttf
site:vk.com proxima nova.ttf
site:github.com proxima nova.ttf
3. Alternatively, search directly inside GitHub:
extension:ttf extension:otf filename:proxima nova
Reverse image search engines and CLI downloaders. SauceNAO is highly specialized for anime and user-made art, whereas TinEye is better suited for real-world photography and tracking stock images.
"Royalty-Free" means you can use the image without paying per view, but there are often restrictions on resale or mass printing. "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero) means the image is in the public domain and can be used for absolutely anything without attribution.
The largest communities and tagging engines for user-generated art. "Boorus" rely heavily on user-curated tagging systems, making it incredibly easy to search for highly specific visual concepts.
Fast drop-points for sharing images. Note that while some hosts offer higher file limits, they may not allow "hotlinking" (embedding the image directly into forums or markdown documents) to save bandwidth. Catbox is a preferred choice for hotlinking.
Once configured, utilities like ShareX allow you to hit a single keybind to capture a specific window, annotate it, upload it to a host like Catbox, and instantly place the URL in your clipboard.
Mathematical color space visualizers and palette generators. Click any swatch on the live widget below to copy the hex code to your clipboard.
Tools to strip EXIF data, run OSINT forensics, or crunch massive image files into modern formats like WebP or AVIF for the web without losing visual fidelity.