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/
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?
>I know a good few photographers who have switched, and for my photography I find it is an actively better tool
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.
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)
Graphic and print designer do digital painting, collages, retouching, adding special effects to images (say fake halftone), fake natural media, and tons of other things with Photoshop. Illustrator is for vector graphics, which they also use, but it's a different thing. And InDesign is for DTP, not for graphics work (illustration, graphic design, retouching, image manipulation, etc) for web or print.
And both print and graphic designers use vector art pretty extensively. Large amounts of print/printed work is done with scalable designs for really obvious reasons.
Photoshop is not generally the final tool for a print designer; it is likely not often the final tool for a graphic designer. Things have moved on a lot.
I didn't refer to that kind of print design - the design of the layout and such, since it's irrelevant to Photoshop vs Affinity Photo comparison.
I refer to design for print. Graphical elements, manipulated images, etc meant to go to books, magazines, posters, and so on.
>Large amounts of print/printed work is done with scalable designs for really obvious reasons.
That's a different comparison, Illustrator vs Affinity Designer. And large amounts of print/printed work are done with Photoshop still: basically anything that's not vector. They're just done in high enough resolution to be able to be printed at all their target dpis.
But stipulating this definition, and getting back to my original point, I don’t believe there are really significant things that would limit those users in Affinity Photo either, particularly when combined with the tools from Designer and Publisher which you can switch to seamlessly. I have worked alongside designers for thirty years and understand some of what they do; I do not see Affinity lacking in fundamentals or clever features.
Aside, again, from needing to add in an asset management app.
Which would be easily affordable given how comically affordable the entire suite is. But I hope Affinity fix this next.
Annoyingly there is nothing that gets close to Lightroom at the moment :(
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.
Figma now requires to pay for the Dev mode, but that's ok.
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.
This is an online only tool. They will do the same thing photoshop did soon enough.
There are also non-Adobe pipeline utilities for pretty much every process, but they're not usually taught in schools. However, if your role is to interact with people who only rely on modern Adobe, you more or less have to, as well. There's a certain pride people have in owning their tools and not being dictated to by software, so I'm generally happy to accommodate anyone who I find personally resonant.
1: https://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/
2: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/davinciresolve/...
Natron (https://natrongithub.github.io/) and Blender (https://www.blender.org/)