As much as I am loath to admit it, nothing comes close to feature parity with Photoshop. All the others are pretty replaceable, but if you are a professional who depends on a lot of the really advanced features you’re going to have a hard time replacing it. GiMP isn’t even close tbh. I admire the work they’re doing but they are a decade behind PS.
But that’s what makes GIMP special. There’s some users who feel that Photoshop has stopped being relevant for some uses among those users. GIMP may be a decade behind but it could be swimming in what people remembered best about Photoshop before its enshittification and retains that kind of nature.
If you’re getting down and dirty with color correction, object removal/replacement, and just depend on a lot of plug-in’s for your sauce, Affinity is lacking. Most people who use photoshop, however, do not need all that. Affinity is a solid program that definitely works for prosumers and below, as well as some professionals (depending on use case).
And I get it’s not popular to talk about but Adobe has fully embraced AI and some of their tools are legit. I don’t use it, but some folks really like firefly.
Affinity being prosumer puts it perfectly. If you only work on your own on smaller projects it does everything it needs to do but as soon as you work with other people professionally and have to share files? There‘s sadly no alternative for Adobe whatsoever. I am very happy with Affinity 2 but it‘s not a standard in the industry.
Personally I can not recommend using Adobe‘s AI features at the moment. I had to work on completely AI generated images for difficult customers and I assure you it was anything but pleasant. In the end it would‘ve been cheaper, faster and give far better results to use a stock image and edit it traditionally than being told to fix this and that with endless prompting.
As much as I am loath to admit it, nothing comes close to feature parity with Photoshop. All the others are pretty replaceable, but if you are a professional who depends on a lot of the really advanced features you’re going to have a hard time replacing it. GiMP isn’t even close tbh. I admire the work they’re doing but they are a decade behind PS.
Good news is that is not most people.
What is the closest thing to PS in terms of features?
But that’s what makes GIMP special. There’s some users who feel that Photoshop has stopped being relevant for some uses among those users. GIMP may be a decade behind but it could be swimming in what people remembered best about Photoshop before its enshittification and retains that kind of nature.
Makes sense!
What’s your opinion on Affinity (Designer/Photo)?
If you’re getting down and dirty with color correction, object removal/replacement, and just depend on a lot of plug-in’s for your sauce, Affinity is lacking. Most people who use photoshop, however, do not need all that. Affinity is a solid program that definitely works for prosumers and below, as well as some professionals (depending on use case).
And I get it’s not popular to talk about but Adobe has fully embraced AI and some of their tools are legit. I don’t use it, but some folks really like firefly.
Affinity being prosumer puts it perfectly. If you only work on your own on smaller projects it does everything it needs to do but as soon as you work with other people professionally and have to share files? There‘s sadly no alternative for Adobe whatsoever. I am very happy with Affinity 2 but it‘s not a standard in the industry.
Personally I can not recommend using Adobe‘s AI features at the moment. I had to work on completely AI generated images for difficult customers and I assure you it was anything but pleasant. In the end it would‘ve been cheaper, faster and give far better results to use a stock image and edit it traditionally than being told to fix this and that with endless prompting.