What's your favorite FOSS tools for image editing?

I use Krita every time i need to edit something. It’s more than good enough for me

Lots of great suggestions here already

I haven't seen mobile editing mentioned yet:

• ImageToolbox for a very good Android image editing tool

• Fossify Gallery for some quick editing tools built into the gallery

• While not directly for editing, Tidy on android allows for AI search locally

• Termux for any CLI edits (imagemagick, etc.)

I often use imagemagick (cli) for cropping, rotating, resizing, etc.

I heard about Graphite the other day. It’s nowhere near finished, but very promising. Hopefully, it becomes the FOSS of Photopea. https://editor.graphite.rs/

Krita, I use it for everything, I hate gimp, it feels so bad

You can install and run Stable Diffusion locally (Pinokio is a versatile installer that can run SD and many other open-source AI tools as well). With SD you can build your own upscalers that are better than Upscayl, and do things like background removal too (in addition to prompt-based generation and such).

I have used darktable, but doesn't seem to fill your need as it is more a lightroom replacement than Photoshop https://www.darktable.org/

Pinta.

It's like a Linux version of Paint.net

GIMP for most general stuff, Krita for painting and 2D animation, Aseprite for pixel everything.

GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Upscayl, ImageMagick, Background remover AI

GIMP and Inkscape. I use GIMP for all kind of image editing off course, and use Inkscape to create logos and icons. Both great tools. I wish GIMP had a few basic shape tools too and non destructive editing. Soon we get non destructive editing in early future, but basic shape tools will be added in a later future.

I have Krita installed too, but for general purpose editing and want to replace GIMP with it. Because Krita adresses some issues I have with GIMP, but it does not feel good in editing to me. Maybe I'm just not used to it, even after years of trying over and over again. It has extensive vector layers and non destructive editing, great, but the font tool sucks.

I also have Upscayl installed since a while, to play around with upscaling images. First it was nice, but over time I'm no longer happy with it. Especially with higher end resolutions, the image contain unnatural and wrong parts that stand out.

For background removal I use GIMP. Its a manual step with the integrated background removal tool, but you have to mask areas as foreground and background. If the image is not low quality and the boundaries are not too fuzzy, then it works well "sometimes". But I assume you ask for a more easy to use and more automated tool, preferably an AI tool right? I have such a tool bookmarked, its a browser online tool, but never used it so far: Background remover AI

As other tools, I use commandline converter and editor ImageMagick! Its nice to be able to script simple stuff and bulk edit them (20 thousand and more in a few minutes), such as crops from screenshots. Or at work I could create simple text based images out of a text file (it was for my shop back then... long time ago :-( ).

Darktable for raw image processing

I paid 700 for Adobe Photoshop each month, and pay extra 10 each time to unlock when I open the program.

A very useful tip for technical images (i.e., lab report/research): export whatever graph you created as .svg, and do some prettifying touches in InkScape. It is faaaar easier than doing it in code.

Also, always export the .svg, even if you're not gonna use it. You never know when you want to do a very small correction, and it will save you quite some time.

I used to use GIMP, but Krita has gotten advanced enough to where it can replace it for most things (at least that I would use it for).

I've been meaning to get into some image generation type things too. The best self hosted tool I know of is InvokeAI. I'm sure there could be a whole other post (or other community) about image generation tools.

With ChaiNNer you can remove background, upscale (local), it's a lot more flexible and compatible with models than Upscayl, also a little bit more complex (node based, not as complex as comfyUI). You can upscale an image with a face model and use other model for everything else in the same image.

I use Gthumb for simple edits (croping, resizing, rotating...).

dd if=/dev/zero of=image.png bs=1k count=1024 conv=notrunc

GIMP, but mostly because I'm already used to it. I keep meaning to give Krita a go, but just haven't had the time and energy to figure out how to do all the things I already know how to do with GIMP using it.

My daughter and my sister 🤣🤣. I have 0 art in my body, so they do all that for me. I could say I have a great AI driven FOSS process in place, lol.

Image removal and AI tools have an overlap, for sure. RemBG is pretty effective, which runs in many of the environments with Stable Diffusion. Bria is a recent improved model for RemBG, which I've had some good success with. It's not perfect, but it cuts out a lot of the work.

Image is a broad word. I would say in order of usage per year it would be Darktable, Inkscape, Hugin, GIMP, Krita… but these obviously serve different purposes.

I use kolourpaint to make memes

I'm not an artist, I just need the occasional hack job or screenshot annotation.

I loved the simple programs (this love stems from all the way back to MacPaint v1.0) and MS Paint has largely been ok for me apart from its lack of png support and only 90° rotations.

On Linux, Pinta has been fantastic but these last few years it got increasingly more crashy, to the point where it will now consistently crash within 10 seconds or two clicks, regardless of Linux distro / laptop/pc / version of Pinta. (insert "whyyyyy" meme here)

I've tried Krita, but it's simply too much. Don't even want to try installing Gimp. I am sad.

remove backgrounds? i think you could find a krita plugin for it, or just use an online website / huggingface space.

GIMP is alright. Mostly I stick to it because Krita's dependency on QT means it looks and works differently from everything else in my GNOME environment.