I used to use Paint Shop Pro many years ago, as Microsoft Paint was sadly lacking in features, such as layers and history but as time went on the program got more complex and so I found Paint.NET, which is free but has a distinct disadvantage, it only works on Windows. I recently discovered Pinta, which works on Mac as well as Linux as well as Windows.
What is Pinta?
Pinta is a free and open source painting program that was first developed 15 years ago as a clone of Paint.NET in GTK# so that it is multi-platform.
There are versions in Flatpak and Snap for Linux, along with MacOS and Windows as well as FreeBSD.
You get drawing tools, adjustments and effects as well as multilingual language support. Advanced features include full history for undo, layer support and choice of how you want the workplace to look.
You can also find a user guide on their website.
OpenRaster
Adobe PhotoShop PSD format used to be widely used to share layers until Adobe decided in 2006 to add restrictions to the format specification so that non-Adobe developers were excluded from seeing the specification.
As a result the Open Raster format was created in 2006 to address this issue so Pinta is one of the programs that supportes the .ora file format to interchange layers between programs.
Open Raster files are zip files that contain a collection of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for the layers and png files for raster files as well as svg files for vector files.
Need Photoshop?
If you need something like Photoshop, then check out photopea which is a web based Photoshop clone.
