Adobe raises price of Photoshop 50%

Zack Maxwell

They raised the price of the Photoshop subscription from $10/month to $15/month. Apparently they sent out emails on this a few months ago, but I only realized it had happened when I examined my last couple bills from them.
An amount I can still afford, but I'm no longer willing if I have a choice. I've left and come back to Photoshop multiple times already for various reasons, and I'm hoping I won't have to again. I've never liked Adobe, but they do have the best 2D editing software.
What are some good alternatives people have been using?
Last time I tried bailing on Photoshop years ago people were recommending Gimp or Krita, but they were not even comparable in quality.

myclay

That´s a bit too broad and Imo depends on what OS you want or need it for.
If you need perpetual licenses, portable version(s) etc.
What features and file formats you want/need.

As an example;
Affinity Photo is only available on Apple devices and Windows systems.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
DDS file format is not supported and there is thus no BC1-7 compression

No 1bit texture support.
pixel snapping/half pixels can be problematic.
Pixel art and the forced anti-aliasing can be problematic.
channel packing is at best cumbersome and without heavy tricks could be simply marked as non existent.

Affinity Photo has imo the best PSD compatibility but if your workflow relies on PSDs with editable Textlayers, you are screwed.
Exported PSDs will always have Textlayers rasterized.
you could quickly and easily open the native file formats afphoto,afdesign,afpub in all three of the Affinity programs.(Designer/Photo/Publisher.)  An almost seamless and glorious experience to jump with one File within the entire Affinity Suite.

If you bought all three programs, you can within Publisher, use and access the majority of all features inside of it.

Knowing all that, Affinity Photo can be helpful as long as it´s shortcomings are known,complimentary software can be used for compensating its shortcomings.

Gimp... is ok for packing .icon files.

Eric Chadwick

I’ve been amazed by https://www.photopea.com/ lately, for my home projects. All the same functionality (almost all) and all the hotkeys as PS.

There’s a subscription nag whenever you export a non PSD file, easily bypassable.

Adobe keeps innovating with PS tho, seems more 3D being integrated.

thomasp

Affinity is closest to Photoshop when shopping image editing alternatives but it lacks automation beyond the most basic macro recording feature. No e.g. automated file I/O if that's something you need. To me it's the one major bummer with this software. 

Promises to add scripting in some upcoming version were made ages ago but what is in there now isn't even comparable to PS actions from like Photoshop 4.

Krita is a paint program, not an image editor - it's cool but not really comparable in featureset as you have found out.

Muzzoid

Hopefully the painting program I'm making will be the best in a few months time

*if you want a rock solid paint program, and don't need a ton of features anyway

Zack Maxwell

myclay said:

That´s a bit too broad and Imo depends on what OS you want or need it for.
If you need perpetual licenses, portable version(s) etc.
What features and file formats you want/need.

Thanks for the suggestions. I primarily use Photoshop for creating promotional images and UI elements.

thomasp

For UI elements the combo Affinity Photo + Designer might be interesting. As myclay mentioned you can pass data back and forth between vector and pixel graphics pretty seamlessly.

Come to think of another thing Affinity is sorely missing but Photoshop has had since time immemorial is animation capabilities (timeline feature). I use a ton of anim Gifs in my work to show before/after states. Not possible in Affinity and explicitly ruled out by the devs as a feature.

Eric Chadwick

When I'm editing anim GIFs, two tools I use regularly are Screen2GIF and GIF Movie Gear. Screen2GIF has really good auto-palette features on save, and GIF Movie Gear is unparalleled on per-frame editing & optimization. 

Ruflse

I honestly really like Krita, for 3D art I don't think you need much else: it has filters, masks, easy to use UI, symmetry, lazy mouse, etc. Some people seem to think that it's just for illustration for that's not the case, though even if it has some vector functionality it's not the thing I'd use for graphic design like UI elements probably. Inkscape is a thing and it's free but I haven't used it too much.

gnoop

Affinity  Photo /designer lacks an ability to  work with packed  RGBA files  .If alpha is zero  Affinity opens it  as a black hole in RGB  channels.    Also  I miss  pattern  preview  from Photoshop .   You can construct the same in Designer  using symbols.   But it would be a mess of layers .      Brushes and layer system are both   more advanced in  Affinity  although.  I love "erase" bending mode . Layer linking is more advanced.

There is also Photoline.  They added cryptomatte support    in last version to extract masks . The only true  vector+bitmap image editor.    Their layer composition  system is also way more flexible than one in  Photoshop. 

No AI features although  but to be honest AI in Photoshop is something I hardly ever used.   Even Ai selection is not working properly on something materials related .   Their updated image upscaling in neural filters  is not as good as Topaz one.    For  illustration generation other  specialized AI systems are also better.         An only advantage of Photoshop is automation  by chat GPT  writing javascripts for you .   But you could  do it with image magic , pillow and python psd tools more reliably IMO.     As always Chat works with open source soft  just out of a box while it takes ages to make a working javascript for Photoshop or anything close sourced.

Lamont

I've been bouncing back and fourth on this and might be pulling the trigger soon (jobless bum atm). Here is the list I compiled last December based on what I use daily:

Media Encoder - https://www.shutterencoder.com/

Acrobat Pro - https://www.pdfgear.com/pdfgear-for-windows/

Premire - https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Photoshop - Krita / https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Illustrator - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/

Page Layout - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/

Lightroom - https://shop.dxo.com/en/dxo-photolab7-elite.html

Just cutting that will save me about ￥7,700 a month.

I am keeping my 3DS Max/RizomUV/Substance license up to date and ZB is never getting upgraded to the Maxon stuff. I have an old 3D Coat license that I use for retro style graphics (painting) so I am set on everything I need to get what I need done (a couple of other niche apps like Gaea are in my arsenal).

@Ruflse - Gonna take a look at Inkscape too!!

Another vote for Screen2Gif.

Lamont

So after posting, I went and activated my 3D Coat and saw 3DCoat Textura ( https://pilgway.com/product/3dcoattextura ) any users here? Going to grab the trial tomorrow and give it a go.

Noren

Isn't that just a 3D Coat "lite" with reduced features, i.e. just the painting tools?

Lamont

Noren said:

Isn't that just a 3D Coat "lite" with reduced features, i.e. just the painting tools?

Yeah. I saw the upgrade price for 3DCoat, and the cost to upgrade to current version is less than buying a lic of the painting app.

Lamont

Ok, just finished taking an asset through the painting process. Everything works, I can paint, bake and make custom materials. You can have 16k in viewport if your card supports it (Substance is 4k displayed max). And that alone is awesome as I can make my trim-sheets in the 1k x 8k size. Coming from V4 to latest, I can see the evolution of features. Viewport is always blazing fast... 

I just need to spend more time with it to really make that choice to move from Substance to 3DCoat.

thomasp

Some pretty cool features in 3D Coat and over the years I gave it several tries (including Textura) but could never get used to the interface. UX seemed painful when trying to manage lots of layers. In comparison Substance was just straight forward (but not entirely stable in my experience, depending on GPU driver).

Lamont

Yeah, I think the UX is what's holding it back. It feels dated.

Lamont

Been using Affinity Photo for a few days. I am impressed with the workflow, and with how I use Photoshop, I am not loosing out on anything, also, BIG ups to the Histogram too.

Gonna make the jump after this months use runs out.

Ruz

I though photoshop was just for saving out reference pics

Eric Chadwick

Anyone still using CS6?

Checking my Adobe account, realized I still have a registered version of CS6 on there! I can't actually finish the install though, says the serial number is invalid. Even though it's shown right there in my account page. Well, I didn't really think it was going to work, but it could have been a fun little nostalgia trip. 

zetheros

...be sure to drink your Ovaltine. That's your serial number, a crummy commercial??

Noren

Eric Chadwick said:

Anyone still using CS6?

An early adopter, I see. I installed CS5 last year on Windows 11 and I do remember having to jump through several hoops, but in the end, it worked. I can't recall everything, but I think the serial shown online didn't work for me either. I had to dig out the CDs and possibly had to use the serial of the original full version since CS5 was an upgrade for me.
Unless their policy has changed in the meantime, you might get lucky by reaching out to customer service.

pior

FWIW and as far as I am concerned the CS5 online activation has been working fine through successive reinstalls over the years, also leveraging the allowance for multiple machines (I believe 2 or 3 ?) running it. But perhaps this has changed now.

Also, on my end CS5 has an annoying behavior on win10, getting progressively less responsive if kept open over a few days over multiple sleep/wakeup cycles hence affecting long work sessions. This wasn't the case with win7. CS6 also exhibits this leak of sorts but to a much lesser degree. This is the only issue I can think of, and it is perhaps related to my own specific setup anyways. Other than that these versions are definitely usable !

Also FWIW, after a bit of back and forth I found that their customer support through their chat isn't bad. They actually granted me a CS6 license as a compensation for the performance issue with CS5.