Adobe Photoshop is the holy grail for all budding digital graphic designers and image manipulators. At Softonic, we get lots of people trying to find out how to download Photoshop for free or even looking for free alternatives to Photoshop. The good news is that there are a lot of great alternatives out there and there is even better news from Google.
Say goodbye to Photoshop: Meet the 5 best online photo editing alternative
Read nowGoogle Chrome Labs has just launched a brand-new browser-based image optimization tool that is completely free to use
Squoosh, as the new piece of software is called, is designed to help users convert and optimize images for use across a variety of digital platforms. It runs entirely within your web browser, using the many capabilities that modern browsers now have built-in. Once it has been loaded into the browser, Squoosh doesn’t need access to the internet, meaning the image optimization and manipulation can take place offline.
Surprisingly, although Google obviously recommends using Squoosh on Google Chrome, it will work with all modern browsers on both desktop and mobile.
Squoosh isn’t a direct competitor to Photoshop, but it does offer enough options to fulfill the needs of many amateur designers who need a simple tool to help them play around with their images. Squoosh can resize pictures and photos, manipulate the color palette, and even offers options like image dithering, and smoothing and sampling. There will be different editing capabilities available depending on the selected output format of which Squoosh offers quite a lot of options. As well as common file formats like JPG and PNG there are also options like OptiPNG, MozJPG, and WebP.
With Squoosh being a browser-based image editor tasked with getting images ready for the web, compression is a big part of its skillset. Previews of changes are readily available and there is even a slider for seeing the changes in real time as you pull it across the image. Users will even be able to see what the file size of the new image will be once all of the changes made will have been implemented.
If you think you might like to give Squoosh a try, all you have to do is head over to squoosh.app. Once the page has loaded, you’ll be able to edit your images even if you lose your connection to the internet. If you think you might need something a bit more powerful than Squoosh, or if you know what your specific image editing needs are, you might want to check out our guide to all best Photoshop alternatives below.
Say goodbye to Photoshop: Meet the 5 best online photo editing alternative
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