As I noted in the first post of this series, even though I’ve been a Creative Cloud Education customer since it was first offered, I’ve wanted to dump Adobe and its subscription model in the worst way.
Short Version:
Spend $39-$49 and get Affinity Photo to replace Photoshop
Long Version:
All users have different use cases when it comes to creating and using images. In my teach-flow I primarily create a lot of simple raster images compiled from lots of layers. I use this to create diagrams concepts, such as the difference between theology, religious studies, and philosophy of religion; or to create original diagrams, such as the panopticon; add color and diverse media to my LMS classes, et cetera.
Accordingly, I made heavy use of Adobe Photoshop. And it met my simple needs very well.
When I went hunting for a replacement, my goals were to find something that was feature-rich, affordable (less than $100 and no subscription model), and easy to use.
2nd Choice: GIMP, Awesome in Theory, High Learning Curve
I started out with the most commonly-cited alternative, GIMP, with stands for Graphic Image Manipulation Program. From what I’ve read, it is free, extendable, and powerful.
Even better, it is licensed under the General Public License, which “ which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software.”
Quite naturally, given my values, I was excited to start using GIMP.
However, coming from Photoshop, I found the UI to be a mess, from the arrangement of tools to the native install having a tiny UI on high-DPI displays. Now, all of this, in time, could be learned or worked around, but there are also alternatives. I spent about an afternoon looking up ways to make GIMP more user-friendly, but I wasn’t very successful. I ultimately decided to look up other programs that might be more my speed.
First Choice: Affinity Photo
What I ended up settling on was a paid program, Affinity Photo. It runs $39–$49 depending upon whether or not you catch it during one of Affinity’s periodic sales (such as the recent one over the holidays, during which I snagged Affinity Designer, their alternative to Adobe Illustrator).
Coming from Photoshop, I was able to get up to speed in about 5 minutes. I actually found Affinity Photo to be more user-friendly than Photoshop.
What’s nice about moving to Affinity Photos is that it is able to open Adobe *.psd files with ease. So if you are a long-time Photoshop user, making the switch won’t necessitate anything in the way of loading up prior projects.
Since moving from Affinity Photo from Photoshop, I’ve been able to whip out raster images with ease as I’ve had to rapidly prototype a working Logic class over break.
While I would have preferred to use something like GIMP or Paint.NET, Affinity Photo ended up being my ultimate choice. It is not open source (list of possible open source alternatives), it did meet my criteria of being
- affordable ($39–$50 one-time cost)
- easy to use and
- feature-rich.
