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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

At this point, if you are in the graphic design area, Adobe basically own you. There is really nothing that will substitute for Photoshop without a massive drop in productivity.

GIMP is better that it was, but not yet good enough to replace Photoshop in the same way that Blender replaces Maya etc; perhaps this will drive support for GIMP to get better, but I'm not optimistic.

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Affinity make a pretty decent clone of the main Adobe apps.

Although they just got bought by Canva so may be at the shark-jumping point.

They just shipped an update with support for variable fonts. So, I guess, it's still much alive.

Every time someone brings up alternatives, I always recommend Krita.

User friendly, cross platform, OSS. Far better than Gimp, especially in the UI side.

If krita work for you, that's great.

However, Photoshop do lots more than painting and photo editing. If you use the vector, content filling or plug-in features on Photoshop, krita won't help you.

Krita has vector support too. In fact you can mix and match vector and raster layers.

It also has plugins that do content filling like this (and they do it offline): https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

But nothing is going to be a 100% replacement, I'm merely offering alternatives.

As I said before, my GF works in design and she's been using Affinity and Cavalry for a while. She seems happy about it.

Honestly a lot of creatives have managed to move away from Adobe. It's why they tried to buy Figma. And they'll try to buy probably every other alternative they can if it keeps you in their system.

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