Typically when I’m working with photos, I’m doing graphic design type work. I’ve been using GIMP for this. GIMP is meant for raster graphics editing.
You could also use Inkscape for vector graphics, or Krita for more digital painting type work. But I know all these tools are very powerful and overlap on some use cases.
Do you use any AI-type tools? I use a image upscaler called Upscayl. It works really well and works entirely locally.
Do you know of any tools that can remove backgrounds? This would help with help with the type of graphic design I do.
What other tools do you like to use as it pertains to images?
I often use imagemagick (cli) for cropping, rotating, resizing, etc.
For painting from the command line, I use sed to replace data at given offsets
sed -i '1s|^.\{10\}.\{5\}|\0*****|' image.jpg
It requires decoding the jpeg in my head to get the said offsets, but the pragmatism is unbeatable.