I see no such thing on their website. Just $49.99. Has it expired?
Most people could probably make do with Photoshop Elements. That’s available a one payment and done product. Of course when a new version comes out you’ll have to shell out for it if you want the new features.
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Ah, at the very bottom of the page. In the US version, it’s about 30 PageDowns.
Thanks!
Sure, there’s tons, but it depends on what sort of graphic software you’re looking for.
Affinity Photo is a great Photoshop alternative; Affinity Designer does most of what Illustrator does. Both are buy-once-and-you-own-it programs.
ArtRage is focused on painting and sketching, not photo manipulation. I love it for natural paint effects.
I know a lot of artists who swear by Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio) and its brush flexibility.
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If you are PC based, I personally consider Coreldraw the best alternative.
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Completely agree about your criticism.
I have been an enthusiast Affinity user for about a year (I have been using for almost two years now).
At first, like many users coming from Adobe, I was just excited to see such a fresh approach. It seemed too good to be true, especially considered the price tag. I spent a lot of time and energy adjusting to Affinity, not only the different workflow but also its limits. I was almost going to forget all the shortcomings and being ready to just use Affinity Photo & Designer and abandon Adobe PS/AI (but not AE).
Then the worst happened: Affinity it’s been stable only at times, never consistent. On top of that, no matter what machine I tried (fastest Intel, Threadripper, Dual Xeon) it simply didn’t cut: my job relies on heavy editing, layers, masks, and so on. I can do all of that with no issues in PS, but Affinity clearly showed is not there. What’s worst, the forum didn’t help as the developers have their own agenda (which I understand) but requests like mine to improve the stability and the speed have received harsh comments from the users (and mostly ignored by the devs).
It’s been sad and disappointing. It is clear that their target is different. I’m glad it works for many new and experienced users but it is not for everyone. I had to move back to Adobe with the possibility to switch to Coreldraw for vector drawing, which so far it has just blow my mind.
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When I was mostly doing artwork for musicians, I had to keep a copy of CorelDraw handy, because it’s by far the most popular image software in Africa and India, apparently. All of the printers on those continents / subcontinents required Coreldraw files and it’s all the record labels used.
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For people who needs a RAW editor, Affinity Photo may not be the best alternative, as one of the main disadvantage is that it’s missing sidecar files.
You might want to take a look at Darktable, which I consider more user friendly than Rawtherapee (another great RAW editor). For Lightroom users Darktable could be confusing and difficult to grasp, it just needs a little time to get used to it. It comes with plenty of modules, extremely powerful and useful; also, one of the best demosaic algorithm, great grain simulation and denoise.
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Are sidecar files compatible across software packages yet? I know they should be in theory, but when I last did a test in 2015 nobody could successfully read and use a sidecar file not written by them.
You can get Photoshop for $20 / month. That’s cheap enough, especially when it’s something you use for work. It’s still the gold standard for a reason.
I hesitate to bring it up, as it’s not exactly a photo editor, but Autodesk Sketchbook is a nice draw/paint program, and it’s now free for personal use. I’ve only used the tablet version1, which is somewhat limited, but fun. Menus and functions are similar to Photoshop, so much so that my outdated knowledge had me up and running quickly with Sketchbook. (The last 'Shop I used was PS 7.0-- before CS1.) I haven’t downloaded the desktop program–yet– but it has many more brushes and features available. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
The other tablet alternative I use is Photo Editor, by dev.macgyver. It is incredibly powerful… with (IMHO) a very steep learning curve. Maybe I got too used to using PS… but I found PE’s functions less than intuitive. The only tutorials I could locate online were two full versions out of date, and if there’s a Help file, I couldn’t find it. But once you start figuring out menus and options, there are a ton of tools to use-- curves and levels, cloning and erasing, cropping, resizing, and plenty of effects, which can be applied to the entire image, a predefined shape, or via brush (like applying a mask.) Layers exist only in the Text/Image function, and I’m still figuring those out. The app’s best for still images, with little support for animated gifs (as far as I can tell.) PE is available free-with-ads, or you can buy an ad-free version.2
1 Unfortunately, my tablet is a Kindle Fire. Autodesk no longer supports Sketchbook for Kindle, and has in fact yanked it out of the Appstore. I’m aware there’s a hack to bring the Google Play Store and that version of Sketchbook to the Fire… but my Kindle is several years old and rather cranky, so I won’t be doing that any time soon.
2 Edited to add: at one point, there was a paid version for Photo Editor. I’m not seeing one in the Google Play Store now. But if I’m working offline, I don’t get ads. And when I’m online, I just see (and ignore) small banner ads, so it’s not too bad.
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Affinity is generally very good at anything that’s ultimately a print project - your raster art in Photo maintains its raster-ness (and some limited raster editing ability) in Designer.
The grids and guides in Affinity blow Adobe’s completely out of the water - it even has an isometric grid mode that cycles between XY, ZY, and XZ non-rectangular grids with a hotkey.
The undo stack is infinite, and saves and loads with your file.
Affinity has context-aware fill as a brush, and it’s loads better than Adobe’s.
The “personas” concept, which goes to the core of the workflow, is a super-smart and well-thought out way to make the UI sleek yet deep; although it requires a bit of a mental recalibration coming from an Adobe mindset.
There are a lot of things to like about Affinity.
There are also dumb missing features, like arrowheads on lines, and Illustrator’s “select similar,” which were complete dealbreakers for the workflow I was evaluating it for.
Whenever my Photoshop CS5 DVD becomes hopelessly outdated, though, I will gladly spring for Affinity for moonlighting use.
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Also, Inkscape for all your vector drawing needs. Critical.
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Interesting… the way I read the post, it sounded like a less full featured (and therefore faster) editor than GIMP. I think GIMP is fantastic, but if Affinity is at least on par, I’d support anything that reduces Adobe marketshare. I love FOSS, but sometimes you need another tool. I do have a friend who is looking at a low cost Photoshop alternative. She uses ArtRage for her on-computer drawing, but she needs a tool to make scans of hand-drawn stuff look right. GIMP can do it, but it might be worth investigating something more fully featured.
I’m going to put my vote in for Pixelmator and their newest, Pixelmator Pro. It does everything I want, but I am also fully invested in the Apple ecosystem so I cannot vouchsafe for the other OSes.
Disclaimer: I am in no way, shape or form associated with the company, I just really like the app.
Last time I tried GIMP, it was horribly unintuitive, everything spawned new windows out the wazoo, and it crashed left and right.
That was quite a while ago, so I’m certain it improved in the meantime, but even back then, many people were claiming it was a usable photoshop alternative.
It was during one of these “download GIMP instead of pirating PS” Internet campaigns, probably 2009 or 2010, so I did, and gave it about a week before uninstalling it.
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Krita is another open source option.
https://krita.org/en/
But GIMP has always met my needs - once I found out how to use shift-click with the pencil to draw a straight line or comma to trace out a selection. Krita sticks to a more expected interface.
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Oof, that’s good to know, as those are things I use daily. And I doubt Affinity has Illustrator’s batch-processing or variable-handling tools, which are essential to my work.
As @agies mentioned, Photoshop Elements might do the trick. AFAIK, it comes with an Organizer, which will handle most still and motion image file types. Not sure about IPTC tags, though.
