Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.
I'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop.
Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.
Photoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.
After ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.
Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.
There's a community of folks maintaining some WINE tweaks to make it work! Thankfully, it's mostly just config options so nothing additional to install/run beyond WINE. I tend to use the V2 suite and on a mac, but I've got Affinity V3 installed on my ubuntu dev machine and had no issues with it when I've needed it.
I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..
I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.
Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.
I'm not saying they didn't have a good or bad reason to do what they do, what I'm saying is this is akin to paying someone to paint the walls and suddenly you find out they're reconfiguring your smartphone. A tad too intrusive for my taste is what I say.
World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
I share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.
I think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :)
GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.
> World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative.
Wow, that's a wild statement. I think you might be right. Though GIMP was responsible for GTK, which is now a critical part of most linux systems. I wonder where we'd be if not for GTK? Qt everywhere maybe?
There's good reason why people are annoyed with GIMP/GIMP developers.
For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.
Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.
GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.
Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.
Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.
Hi! I dug through issue report archives to try and learn more about Fade. From what I understand (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/3558#note_7...), it seems like it was reimplemented as "Blending Modes" directly in the filters themselves.
If you're willing to test, is that comment correct - do the blending modes for filters work for you like Fade use to? If not, I'd be interested in learning more about what is lacking in the current version. Thanks!
For what it's worth, there's been a lot of turnover in developers in the last 20 years. I've read some comments on older issue reports, and it made me understand why people think GIMP developers are abrasive (even though that hasn't been my experience with the current developers)
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)
GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs
Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
This software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2
V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
BMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve
I've been happy with Photomator (now owned by Apple).
It's Apple-only, with versions for iOS/iPadOS and Mac. It integrates seamlessly with the Apple photo library.
It's only "gotcha" (which I don't find to be a problem) is it leverages Apple processing where possible (ie the Apple RAW engine). That doesn't bother me, but if you're a pro-level photog and need some special sauce for your RAW workflow, it might not work.
> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).
There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.
The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.
A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
It was all of the Adobe app's caches that kill me. I kept a copy of DiskInventoryX around for a long time for the specific purpose of showing how large those folders could get.
> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Yeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.
Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.
The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that).
Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.
Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.
The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.
I suspect large companies vs. small companies is another big part of the problem. What I mean is that in small companies, there's usually only one or two layers between the owner(s) and the lowest-level employees. Which means that usually, everyone making management decisions is well aware of the needs of the company and where the company's profits actually come from. It's (usually!) only in large companies with half-a-dozen (or more) layers between the CEO and the workers that you can end up with the kind of empire-building, turf-guarding management that turns a company sclerotic, and makes decisions like selling off / discontinuing a service that was a key part of what their clients needed.
I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.
I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).
What a dreadful memory to resurface. I had the exact same errors when I tried running the Creative Cloud uninstaller program, so I hunted through all of my /library and ~/library subfolders for anything containing "adobe", "photoshop", "creative cloud", or "CC". I'm very confident that I didn't delete anything unrelated to Adobe, and I'm equally unconfident that I deleted every single file related to Adobe.
I have a cure-all for difficult-to-cancel services ... cancel the credit card. I have done it before, and I will do it again if need be. And, I absolutely refuse to give any, ANY company my debit card number or bank account number. I want to be in charge of when my money leaves, and to whom it goes.
98 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] thread[1] https://www.photopea.com/
That said, Affinity is quite fair fast even on huge files. You can bring over like 80% of your Photoshop muscle memory.
Honorable mentions depending on your needs: Figma, Penpot, Krita
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
"Everything is working" was meant to imply my legacy flow as well as the new flow haven't broken at all.
I'm sure that in a year or so Canva will move to a subscription model. Then we'll see.
How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?
Shame it's only Mac/Windows compatible. I'd kill for a Linux build.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux
Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well
I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..
I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.
Not true since requires you to sign in with Canva account.
This has indeed things like "!!1! MALWARE !!!!" written all over it.
How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
Wow, that's a wild statement. I think you might be right. Though GIMP was responsible for GTK, which is now a critical part of most linux systems. I wonder where we'd be if not for GTK? Qt everywhere maybe?
As someone who picked the KDE side decades ago, I have to say that would be for the best.
For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.
Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.
GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.
Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.
Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.
If you're willing to test, is that comment correct - do the blending modes for filters work for you like Fade use to? If not, I'd be interested in learning more about what is lacking in the current version. Thanks!
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)
Not that you should have to do that, I'm just letting you know that you can so they don't get a fee from you.
Does anyone happen to know if there is a similarly good alternative to Lightroom?
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2 V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
Never change, FOSS UIs
It's Apple-only, with versions for iOS/iPadOS and Mac. It integrates seamlessly with the Apple photo library.
It's only "gotcha" (which I don't find to be a problem) is it leverages Apple processing where possible (ie the Apple RAW engine). That doesn't bother me, but if you're a pro-level photog and need some special sauce for your RAW workflow, it might not work.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
Holy moly.
The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
[0] https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ [1] https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.
The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
Krita could refocus into a more general photo editing software, but I think they want to focus into being the best painting software instead
Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.
Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.
The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
Well, be careful what you wish for Adobe!
Now everyone just says an image is AI, and something being Photoshopped is a distant memory.
RIP Photoshopped Images.
I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).