This makes me wonder. Who is actually using Photoshop today and why?
In the past, these were graphics designers and photographers. The latter already migrated to Lightroom, Capture One etc. Designers have so many tools to choose from, why would they use Photoshop? I understand for long-time users it's just inertia, but new users are spoiled for choice.
I work in the manga/webtoon localization industry, and all files received from the original publishers that aren't TIFF are INDD or PSD. There is no choice but to use photoshop and indesign. Recently, I had to cough up money for the pricey indesign server in order to be able to ingest the .indd files en masse. There's no other choice. At first I thought I could do it with a mix of humans converting to .idml (the xml zip slightly less proprietary format) and my own python!... but you still need indesign for that first part, and after weeks of python, I gave up trying to parse that nasty mess that is idml. Now I run an ugly indesign js script that also talks to photoshop via bridge to create workabke files. It's disgusting and I pay the adobe tax, but it works. P.S. protip: never export images from indesign using any other option besides PDF, Indesign's built in image renders are awful for manga. Tune all the pdf settings so there is no quality loss, then "print" the pdf to image using ghostscript
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/
One-off purchase price, like Adobe apps used to be, and a very reasonable price at that.
Photoshop has unrivalled features - not just photo editing, but also digital painting, animation and even limited video editing. At one time, Adobe even added 3D features to Photoshop (which they later removed). Photoshop also supports a massive market of third-party add-ons like plugins, brushes, scripts, effects, LUTs etc.
In a different comment, I mentioned that no other software can rival Photoshop in learning resources. So yes, Photoshop is a monster in features, bloat, in clunky UI - and still dominant in design and photography fields.
Games studios, VFX studios, and other companies doing that kind of artwork are going to be licensing Adobe products for decades to come.
Modern Photoshop feels extremely bloated. Slow to start, slow to paste images, cumbersome in other aspects. Since I'm using it much less frequently than I used to, I'm considering switching to an open source equivalent -- like I did with my 3D needs: I already switched from 3DS Max to Blender.
There’s no real standard alternative for advanced retouching afaik.
Aftereffects and I design are also the industry standard in their areas.