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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Photographers: is Adobe Photoshop still the king of photo editing?

I strongly dislike Adobe’s “subscription only” business model, but it seems the market is telling them that subscriptions are a-OK: Adobe’s profits are very steady and are up 70+% in five years. [https://valustox.com/ADBE]

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I'm not a photographer, but pretty much everyone I know who does anything with photos or image manipulation is using Photoshop. I'm the only person I know who uses a Photoshop alternative in any capacity (pixelmator)

The Affinity suite of products is pretty popular, at least what I've seen from non-professional use. Not sure what their professional use numbers look like, but for at least Photoshop/Illustrator/Publisher they seem like a real competitor.

Depends on what kind of editing is needed. Most professional photographers I encounter use Lightroom, but they don't do any heavy editing like cutting out/in actual objects, but just modify color curves and whatnot.

Besides, Photoshop really isn't a competitor in any way to Figma, they have two very different use cases. Closest competitor would be Adobe Illustrator.

I feel like there are actually more great options out there today than back in the pre-subscription days of Adobe. It all depends on what parts of Photoshop you're actually using, but between Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Capture One and many others, there's a good chance that you can find something for your needs.

I like Capture One as an alternative to lightroom for a fujifilm camera, it has great integrations with the camera’s film styles feature. It doesn’t offer the more powerful image manipulation features of photoshop though. It can be one-time purchased for the yearly release or subscribed for continual updates

For photo editing, PixelMator Pro and Affinity Photo are great.

I'll check these out. Both have one-time payments through the App Store, which is about 1000x better than an opaque, eternal, very expensive subscription with Adobe.

I'm a very non-serious amateur; all I do is edit the light curves in my photos or do some light cropping. The built-in editor in Apple Finder is amazing for that!

I think the latest version of Affinity is not available through the AppStore though.

https://affinity.serif.com/

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