Photoshop alternatives have been making some headway lately:
First, the one everyone knows, GIMP. And yes, it’s a steep learning curve, and yes, it’s incredibly frustrating. But it’s feature rich and (last I checked) the most comparable to Photoshop in what it can do. If you’re patient and willing to learn it, it can become a permanent FOSS replacement for you. If you use Photoshop a lot, I’d say this is very much worth the effort.
There’s also PhotoGIMP which is an addon that revamps the GIMP interface to make it more user friendly for people that only know Photoshop. Think of it like a translator.
Other options are Photopea: browser based, but is useful for the basic stuff.
Darktable: don’t know much about it, seems like it might be more of a Lightroom alternative, but I’ve heard good things.
And there’s the rising star Krita: it was mostly for artists but they’re branching out into more photography-based features lately. It’s pretty robust.
There’s also Affinity Photo 2, which is a true Photoshop alternative in that it’s paid software, but it’s a one time payment for a permanent license, like Photoshop used to be.
Affinity just got bought by Canava. 1 time purchase license for now. But we will have to see !!!
Yeah, that purchase worries the hell outta me tbh.
Been using Affinity Designer and Photo for years, and happily paid for version 1 and the upgrade to version 2.
Now, I’m worried they’ll go for a new sub-based tier and limit features to the sub-version over the perpetual license, or hold features back for a version or two of the perpetual license version.
Or the amount of AI-related bullshit they’ll stuff the apps full of now, that will require a separate payment model for generation of images or fill-ins.
Eurgh.
I think GIMP is fantastic but when I bring it up I always get comments from people saying the UI “sucks”, “makes no sense”, is “backwards” etc. But they never say why. Is it the menu layout or something? I’m genuinely curious. I used Photoshop for many, many years before learning GIMP and I did find it confusing to begin with but it’s a different piece of software. I had to learn Photoshop when I started using that too.
You answered your own question. That learning curve, that confusion, you got over it because you’re likely more technically minded and appreciate that new software requires learning new skills. Other people find that more frustrating than you and cannot get over it. This is especially true for people that don’t use photo editing software all the time
And to be fair to them, GIMP deliberately tries to differentiate itself from Photoshop. It is not at all concerned with helping people make that transition. Some people will make it, some people won’t.
I hate Gimp with passion not only because it has a clunky interface that never got better, but because it’s unreliable with big files. I lost many hours of work when trying to do the incredibly complex act of choosing a different font, only to see it crash and burn and lose all the changes.
I really like photogimp.Although I have been using standard gimp for so long I get a little confused on the ui here and there (I’m terrible at remembering keyboard shortcuts.) The biggest upside to Photoshop is that the tools really are top of the line and work more efficiently than gimp’s tools.
