These are all valid alternatives with real world use, but none of them are Photoshop, and that's kinda the problem we face.
Krita - https://krita.org/en/
Photopea - https://www.photopea.com/
GIMP - https://www.gimp.org/
Inkscape- https://inkscape.org/
Affinity Photo - https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
Paint.Net - https://www.getpaint.net/
If you have a Mac, Pixelmator Pro is a great alternative as well.
https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/
+1 for pixelmator
Annoyingly there is nothing that gets close to Lightroom at the moment :(
Capture One.
Yeah after posting that I'm actually downloading the trial now :)
Have you tried Photomator from the Pixelmator folks?
Until recently it couldn't really compete for what people use Lightroom for aside from editing (because it didn't have photo management). They've added it since a few months now in version 3.x.
Capture One is head and shoulders above Lightroom.
But then so is its price, and it's a subscription model or a perpetual-and-no-updates model, which is an uncomfortable choice.
I like DxO PhotoLab a lot -- it's my preferred tool because I find its raw conversions to be much more useful if you're trying to work with cameras of multiple ages and manufacturers -- but it lacks some of the library management that a lot of people like or need (stock shooters, journalists).
Library management is not really an issue for me, and PhotoLab works well. Plus the simulations in FilmPack are, IMO, the best in the business for stills.
Darktable is decent (in my experience).
https://www.darktable.org/
ACDSee
Everyone always forgets about Acorn. :(
https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
I’ve used Affinity Photo for nine years now, and my feeling is that the ways it is not like Photoshop likely would barely impact most Photoshop users.
Some of the ways it is not like Photoshop are evidence of it being better-designed. I know a good few photographers who have switched, and for my photography I find it is an actively better tool. Cross-model colour curves, layer blending curves, and live filters are all useful, and the implementation of the built-in frequency separation tool is such that it’s possible to tailor it very subtly to the image so it can be used without the downsides of the Photoshop-type approach.
Affinity Photo’s biggest problem remains the lack of a Bridge/Lightroom tool. Hopefully with Canva’s money this either gets resolved or they have the clout to get app developers like DxO, Capture One and Photo Mechanic to add closer round-trip integration with Affinity products.
Affinity Designer really is a 100% credible alternative to Illustrator. Affinity Publisher is super and highly capable. So the Bridge alternative issue is a limiting factor for these too.
Most professionals or most users who use Photoshop to crop and retouch some scratch in a photo?
Ah, photographers. Not the real heavy users of Photoshop though, despite the name of the product - it's graphic and print designers who need the fancy stuff. For most photography needs Capture One and others will also do.
Graphic and print designers do not just use Photoshop; it’s not the right tool for that job. The bulk of that work happens outside Photoshop in Illustrator or InDesign.
Affinity has matching applications (minus Lightroom and Bridge as I said).
It also handles vectors and text just fine in Photo and has integration functionality to edit between Designer (their Illustrator alternative) and Photo, and even more impressive integration once Publisher is added to the mix. But I've used Photo on its own for tasks like banner ads, header images, and a couple of full-colour flyers (it's not my main area of expertise so I generally do not)
Take a look at an Affinity video demonstrating Publisher (their InDesign competitor). Once you combine the three apps it is surprisingly powerful and a pretty credible alternative to InDesign.
Given that you can buy the entire suite outright for desktop and iPad for the price of about four months of full Creative Cloud, I think it’s at least worth considering, though the asset management side is still obviously lacking somewhat as I said.
ETA: photographer workflows can be considerably more complex than your characterisation! I have a darkroom-soft-focus simulation in live filters in one of my projects, cross-model curves (Lab curves on an RGB image without switching modes) in several, a black and white negative processing stack, HALD CLUT inference macros, and I know people doing colour neg corrections entirely in Affinity Photo (which is a task people often delegate to something like Silverfast)
My GF is a Designer/UX and she's been using Affinity tools and Cavalry (for animating stuff) and she's happy so far.
Figma now requires to pay for the Dev mode, but that's ok.
I thought Adobe acquired Figma.
The deal fell through: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24005996/adobe-figma-acq...
What’re the best alternatives to premiere and after effects?
Davinci Resolve - https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Also:
Natron (https://natrongithub.github.io/) and Blender (https://www.blender.org/)
Does anyone have a reasonably feature complete alternative for Audition? I tried several paid and free ones, none seem to make it easy to work with multitrack audio in a non-destructive fashion.
If it's for podcast editing, which is what I used Audition for in my old job, then I've seen people use GarageBand[1] or DaVinci Fairlight[2].
1: https://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/
2: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/davinciresolve/...
It's for making game sounds. Fairlight looks like it could work though, thanks!
For non professional use, photopea is seriously great too. Literally just a website you open that imitates the older Photoshop UI (pre-creative cloud)
Unfortunately Photopea can't have floating point precision since it is dependent on browser support.
Technically speaking, it still could. It'd just have to implement it itself via strings. But yeah, it probably doesn't do that (I can't speak about the implementation, I'm entirely uninvolved).
Though I've never actually encountered any errors because of that as my usecases are always pretty basic. Things like magic select, transparency, layers etc all work good enough that I haven't used anything besides this since I found out it ... sometime between 2015 and 2019.
Adobe is much more than just Photoshop. That is the problem. Especially, if a bought into the whole movie pipeline with Premier, After Effects, and more.
InDesign is also an anchor product. Affinity Publisher is actually great and catching up on some of the niche tools InDesign offers, but I think it remains true that you can’t really flip some designers until you sell them on a new book/magazine/PDF layout tool.
And alternatives for Substance Painter and Designer: InstaMaterial (free for under 100k revenue) - https://instamaterial.com/
Upvote for Inkscape! I’ve been using it professionally for many years now. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you master it, it’s very powerful software, and even script-able.
I’ve switched to Pixelmator Pro (Mac only) as a Photoshop replacement, Capture One for photo processing and Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator as of a couple of years ago. I already used Final Cut Pro for video before I switched the others.
Will the world really stop turning if we can't use Photoshop™ for a year?
https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone
https://www.rawtherapee.com/
https://www.darktable.org/
https://www.pinta-project.com/
Krita has gotten really great over the years, and it started out pretty good to begin with
This is an online only tool. They will do the same thing photoshop did soon enough.
On Mac, Pixelmator Pro is the best - in my opinion.
*Inkscape not Inkspace