Might be a little overkill for what you're after, but GIMP has always been excellent for me!
GIMP does just about everything you could ever need except basic shapes.
And color management. Useless for photo editing, stuck with 8-bit sRGB.
Just cannot get on with it. Have tried a few times over the years.
As someone who uses it somewhat regularly... It's terrible. Apparently the next update is supposed to fix some of the UX issues people have had for years. But they said that last time as well.
I just use Krita now for most stuff. The only thing GIMP does better (or did, I haven't checked recently) is textboxes. Adding text to images on Krita was a nightmare a few years ago, but maybe they've fixed it.
I've used GIMP casually for a while for my image editing and manipulation needs. I keep hearing people say the UX is terrible over the years, but this is not something I personally experienced. I've always genuinely wondered, what aspects of the UX make it so terrible?
I honestly love GIMP's UX. It's why I've been using it for years. I've had Photoshop installed at the same time and I just never use it. GIMP is sleeker, slimmer, and a lot cleaner and easier to use.
The GUI's stayed more or less the same the whole time I've been using it and it's got plenty of capabilities to do everything I need. I'd be disappointed if they changed it in any significant way.
The UX is abysmal to the point of being user-hostile, the name of the software is an abelist slur, and also has sexual connotations (the founders are aware of both issues with the name, with the latter being the intention behind the name, and explicitly no intentions of addressing the former). There's just nothing positive about it whatsoever.
Truly a relic of the 90s
Just fork it and make a better UX then (and give it a better name than the current one).
somebody forked gimp a few years ago but I don't think they had the steam to keep up
Because forking a huge software project is a massive undertaking
they should rename it GINP (GINP Is Named Properly). Then we don't have to go to war renaming GTK
If you're interested, there's a patch for it that makes it look and behave more like Photoshop.
Had the same situation.
At some point I just got used to enough of it that it's quite functional.
I wish I could change some of the defaults, but for editing it fulfills most of my needs.
Seconding this.
Krita's made so much progress over the years. One of the best FOSS image tools. It might be intended for painting and artists, but it's just as good at regular image editing.
That's essentially the opposite path Photoshop took and that's considered good for both. Anyway can attest, krita works great for everything I've every used Photoshop for.
Not open source though.
And it's a web app which is fairly annoying. Otherwise it's pretty good.
I found pinta useful. It was once forked from paint.net when it was still open source. easy to use
Not much for image tweaking, but maybe xournalppfor the rest?
Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw do all that, but they're not bitmap editors.
I mostly use GIMP.
I am also enthusiast about the https://graphite.rs/ project which is working in browser (love it or hate it for that).
Krita is amazing for drawing but may be intimidating.
I like MyPaint that I use as a whiteboard. It is easy to use and convenient
You might look at Digikam. It is both a photo manager but has some editing functions. Not sure what they are.
The other one people talk about is Krita. I have not used that one. I would use GIMP myself but I hear you. Kind of understood the interface but now it has changed again so I struggle.
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.