Pros & Cons
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- Free
- Clean, clear interface
- Lots of layer blending modes and filters
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- Opening and browsing raw images is slow
- No noise or chromatic aberration corrections
- Limited text options
- No soft proofing
Photo Variants Specs
| Layer Editing |
Photo Variants differs from most photo editing software in one big way: It’s free (with the option to donate to its developers). The app provides basic image corrections, along with graphics and fonts, raw camera file support, retouching tools, and some workflow capabilities. That said, some actions take a while to perform, and you don't get the AI features, chromatic aberration corrections, or noise reduction tools of competitors. In its current state, Photo Variants falls short as a true replacement for Photoshop, our Editors’ Choice winner for professional image editing.
Pricing: Is It Really Free?
Photo Variants is completely free, though if you like it, you should consider donating to its developers. To do so, click the Donate option in the app's Help menu.
It's not the only free photo software, however. Photopea, for instance, is an impressive, web-based Photoshop alternative. You can optionally pay Photopea $5 per month for some extra AI features and online storage for your photos. GIMP is another free Photoshop substitute but its user experience is complex. Paint.net is also free; even though it sounds like a web app, you can install it on your desktop.
When it comes to paid photo software, Adobe charges a minimum of $263.88 per year for Photoshop. However, it does offer a less expensive option: Adobe Photoshop Elements costs $99.99 for a three-year license. Other lower-cost options include CyberLink PhotoDirector, which goes for $99.99 (for a permanent license) or $64.99 per year (for a subscription that adds a lot of AI tools and stock content). Affinity Photo is a direct Photoshop competitor that costs just $69.99 for a permanent license, but it lacks the AI features and sophistication of Adobe's software.
Opening Files: A Good Concept, But Mixed Execution
To install the program, you need a PC with any version of Windows from 7 to 11. The developer doesn’t specify any further system requirements. I installed it on a Windows 11 PC with a Core i7 CPU and a Surface Laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. No macOS version or mobile apps are available.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)When you start work in the program, Photo Variants has you choose a folder (either from your local PC or a camera card) to examine and shows a grid of thumbnails of all the images in it instead of opening a single file from a standard file picker. Each thumbnail has a checkbox in the upper-right corner that lets you “mark” it. You can also mark a photo using a button at the top of the window. Here, it's also possible to mark all images, pan and zoom them, and rotate them. You can’t select a group of images by ticking one box and then holding Shift down while clicking another further down; annoyingly, you have to click each separately.
Adobe Lightroom, by contrast, forces you to import images before you can do anything with them. When I work with that app, I usually cull images in File Explorer and import only the good ones into Lightroom. Other programs, such as DxO PhotoLab and Skylum Luminar Neo, let you simply open photos from the file system rather than requiring an import. Of course, Lightroom has the advantage of organizing your entire photo collection using albums and searchable metadata.
I ran into a performance problem with Photo Variants’ image-opening process when I tried working with a large set of raw camera files (the file format I recommend for serious photography). After I scrolled down in the thumbnail panel, it took a while before the next group showed up. Scrolling down in the thumbnail list would even cause the window to lag for a few seconds. I don’t encounter as much slowdown when I do the same thing in the Windows File Explorer. And Photo Variants sometimes even stopped responding during this process. If you’re just opening a single image or dragging one onto the Photo Variants window, you won’t run into this problem; starting work on photos that way was snappy.
When you open raw camera files, you next see a window with raw conversion settings, including a choice of conversion engines (Windows or LibRaw). Among the other options are brightness, color space, and gamma. This is a far cry from the wealth of options you get with Lightroom and Photoshop, which offer camera profile corrections, denoising, and even local adjustment edits and selections at this point in the process.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)With Photo Variants, you need to go through this Import window separately for every image. With Lightroom, you import everything in one step (though it can take a while). Photoshop also requires you to separately open each raw file, though it shows a filmstrip along the bottom with the files you either selected in a file picker or dragged from File Explorer.
Interface: Pretty Standard, With a Few Twists
Photo Variants’ interface resembles that of Photoshop, except it’s less busy and puts its tools across the top rather than to the left of the main panel. In Photo Variants, the left panel shows object positioning options and a running history of your actions—handy for getting back to a previous edit point, which you do simply by clicking on the action name in the list.
Like Photoshop, Photo Variants has tabs above the viewer for multiple open images. One unusual aspect is that it doesn't provide a settings or preferences menu. Therefore, you’re stuck with the program’s default appearance. Panel sizes are fixed, and you can’t collapse them.
Let’s return to the name Photo Variants for a moment. Next to the Layers panel on the right is a small, easy-to-miss tab called Variants.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)This lets you duplicate the current edit as a copy or create a new variant using a preset or multiple presets. If you select multiple presets, you get a new variant for each. When it comes time to export, you can choose to output all or just some of these variants. In the screenshot above, you can see seven variants in the right-side panel. One problem with creating variants this way is that you don’t get a side-by-side, before-and-after comparison, the very thing that the program stresses when you apply effects one at a time.
One of Photo Variants’ interface conventions is unique among photo apps, but it makes sense given the product name. When you click on a tool like Contrast/Brightness, HSL, or Replace Color, a new window shows before and after views of the image. I like this behavior because it lets me see what the edited image will look like in a large view. Here’s how it looks with the Auto-Enhance tool:
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(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)That tool offers five Methods, or categories of effects. These include (in order of appearance): General, Tone Mapping, Stretch Colors, Enhance Contrast, and White Balance. You can set parameters for each with sliders for Slope, Range, and Quality. When I hit OK from this window, I encountered an excessive wait time. This is just another example of the program needing some performance improvements.
Double-clicking a slider doesn’t reset it as it does in Adobe programs, which can be helpful. Another quirk is that, unlike in most Photoshop-like programs, holding down the Shift key doesn’t switch you to the hand tool for easily moving your canvas around.
Photo Corrections: A Decent Selection, But Some No-Shows
Photo Variants offers several color and light adjustments: Black Range, Contrast/Brightness, Curves, Equalization, Gamma, HSL, White Range, and a few others. But a couple that I use all the time—highlights and shadows—are absent. I do like the Equalization tool, however, which is basically an adjustable histogram. This lets you easily correct overly bright or dark parts of an image.
The app doesn't provide automatic camera- or lens-based corrections like you get in CyberLink PhotoDirector, DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom, and Photoshop. So, forget about reducing chromatic aberration or image noise.
Selection and Adjustments: Relatively Simple
Don’t let Photo Variants’ single selection tool (a box) on the toolbar deceive you. When you click that, you get a decent set of options, including Detect Object and Magic Wand. The former requires you to first select an area with one of the tools, such as the rectangle. Don’t get too excited, though. It identified and selected my photo’s subject, but did far from a perfect job. Fortunately, you can add to the selection with the other tools. You can hit the delete key to remove selected areas or hit Crop to Selection, as I did in the example below.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)The application includes Heal and Retouch tools. The former works well, zapping blemishes with a click. But Retouch had more of a blurring effect. The Clone tool worked as expected, letting me click on a source area and brush it elsewhere in the image. Other apps, such as Photoshop, Skylum Luminar, and even Microsoft Photos, go beyond that with AI-based generative erase tools.
Filters and Plug-Ins: Plenty Available
Photo Variants comes with over 100 effects, object-adding, and frame filters. You can choose from categories such as Colorization, Distortion, Texture, and Frame from the Filters menu. (Note that the Colorization filter won’t colorize an old black-and-white photo but just applies color effects and tints.) Third-party filters from Photoshop plug-ins (in 8BF format) also work.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)Among the specific filter choices are Black and White (two versions), Film Grain, Holiday, Old Paper, Sunny, and Winter. The list order of these filters isn’t clear if you choose All, and you get just a text-based list. Most competitors show thumbnails that illustrate these effects. I appreciate that you can adjust the intensity of most effects, however.
Layers: Basic Options
Layers are a keystone of Photoshop-like editing apps, letting you stack images and effects on top of one another. As with most of Photo Variants' tools, its layer editing features are sufficient for most people but not replete with options. It doesn’t provide layer groups and gives you just one type of layer to add from the buttons at the bottom of the Layers panel—neither adjustment nor effect layers are available. The Layers top menu does let you create mask layers, however. Photo Variants lacks Photoshop’s Artboards, which are important if you deal with more than one image size on a single canvas.
I wasn’t able to unlock the Background layer in testing, even though, like in Photoshop, there’s a lock icon. In Adobe’s program, you simply click on the lock icon to unlock it. On the plus side, you actually have more blending mode choices than in Photoshop—over 40 in all. Photoshop more than makes up for those with its Advanced Blending panel, however.
Design Tools: Enough for Some Projects
Photo Variants includes Arrow, Line, Path, Shape, and Text vector objects as well as four brush types (in order): Solid, Gradient, Spray, and Textured. The Textured type is the most interesting, as it offers a few dozen 3D and blended color brush options. That said, you don’t get anywhere near the brush adjustability and selection as in Photoshop or CorelDraw.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)Text Tools: Just Adequate
The software has a good selection of fonts and a choice of Formatted and Headline. The former lets you set alignment line spacing and change settings for individual characters, while the latter keeps formatting the same for the whole text entry. You can use borders (aka strokes) and gradients in the text, but there are no drop shadow, glow, leading, tracking, or glyph options like in Photoshop.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)Export and File Support: Nothing Too Advanced
As mentioned, you can export all saved variants of a phone at once, which worked surprisingly quickly for me. The program also has batch conversion capabilities that let you convert not only among dozens of file formats, but also apply effects, resize, and rotate. Among the output choices are GIF, PDF, PNG, SVG, and WebP—a generous selection.
(Credit: Photo Variants/PCMag)That’s all fine, but professionals will need Photoshop’s color management, color separation, and proofing features, as well as its more extensive layout and soft proofing options. And some consumer-oriented photo programs have options for optimizing exports for popular social media sites, which Photo Variants lacks. Again, if your output needs are simple, Photo Variants might be all you need.
Final Thoughts
Photo Variants
Photo Variants is a free, well-designed Photoshop replacement with a few unique tricks, but its slow performance and limited features hinder the experience.