What replaces Photoshop?

ozmoose said:

You are in good company here... I cut my teeth on a Morgan Plus Four, which has to be the most frustrating car ever built…

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I’d have to say that my most reliable is my 1983 Volvo 240 wagon that I’ve owned for over 3 decades. It’s the best car that company every built. It’s got over 200,000 miles on it and runs like new. While I have a ‘65 Triumph TR4 which is a gas to drive, I am emotionally attached to my ‘59 Volvo that I bought in 1977. I was driving it today and it simply brings a smile to my face.

Capture One

Capture One is nowhere near replacing PS...it's advantage Vs PS is that it's more automatic about producing decorative effects (in other words, PS is less automatically decorative).

I don't believe any CS6 applications work on any of the newer Mac OS. I think Yosemite might be the last one, you might need an older computer.

The new Nikon NX Studio and Affinity 2 won't run on my old Win7 so I upgraded to Mac Ventura. I tried Win10 and decided if I had to learn a new system it wouldn't be windows.

Nikon NX Studio is free and the best tool for Nikon RAW. Affinity 2 was $40 during their introduction sale. I have incredible WiFi now which may solve the problems with Adobe Security but the photoshop money went to Topaz for their Fantastic photo suite. Photo Ai. Gigapixel, DeNoise and Sharpen.

jtk said:

Capture One is nowhere near replacing PS...it's advantage Vs PS is that it's more automatic about producing decorative effects (in other words, PS is less automatically decorative).

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Capture One is very good at doing what you would do in the darkroom. It is not retouching software--PhotoShop's original purpose.

Another vote for photoline, or maybe GIMP.

A dark horse: Picture Window Pro... nominally discontinued but now freely downloadable. Built specifically for editing photos. Very different interface from other photo editing programs..

alanrockwood said:

maybe GIMP

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I use GIMP all the time. For all its advantages and the really remarkable feat of getting something as functional as this on the road without major investments from a commercial backer, it does have some serious drawbacks, at least from my perspective:
* No adjustment layers. You have to duplicate layers, do adjustments on them and then mask them out. Adobe's approach is far more flexible.
* No native CMYK support; GIMP is RGB only. This is a problem if you're exploring digital-negative based color printing processes.
* By extension, GIMP natively doesn't support CMYK decomposition, but there's a plugin for it that's now packaged with GIMP by default. However, this does not support custom spot colors.
* GIMP's printing interface is a collection of awkward bugs and essentially dysfunctional. This has been the case for, well, ever, and it's acknowledged widely by the GIMP community. There appear to be no efforts to improve this. So for printing, it's in virtually all cases necessary to divert to a different application.
* No PostScript support.
* No support for pdf/X1A which is a major standard in the printing industry.
* No support for scanning multiple images at the same time, e.g. from an application like Epson scan (marquee select multiple areas - works fine in PS, GIMP will acquire just one image).
* No support for scanning at 16 bit color depth; GIMP acquires 8bit/pixel only.
* GIMP's color management functionality, though present and functional, is somewhat awkward. It tends to revert to a non-managed workspace by default, and color management functionality is spread all over a couple of menus.
* Image manipulation tool menus are just not as intuitive as Adobe's, although they have improved massively over the past few years.
* GIMP's AI-assisted healing tools for retouching etc. are at the level where Adobe was around 2012 or thereabouts. These also have come a long way, though, and currently work fairly well for basic spotting & retouching of scans.

The short of it, if my work involved image manipulation, I'd happily shell out the bucks for a PS subscription. As an amateur user, I prefer to put that money into other things like film. So it's great that we have GIMP in the first place, but it's not a true alternative to PS for everyone.

Another vote for ON1 Photo Raw from me. It’s a complete package with layers, masking and noise reduction software all in one. It does everything I have ever needed to do. It can be bought without a subscription and support is good. The only downside is they push new releases out quickly and it can be buggy for the first month or so after an upgrade. I just delay my upgrade until the first patched version is released a few weeks later. The upside to all this is a new release is always packed with great features.

I checked and ON1 Photo RAW is $99.99. The upgrade to ON1 Photo RAW is $79.99. How quickly do they push out new versions. Annually?

faberryman said:

I checked and ON1 Photo RAW is $99.99. The upgrade to ON1 Photo RAW is $79.99. How quickly do they push out new versions. Annually?

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Yes, they usually push out the big upgrade every fall. You can get a 20% discount code for ON1 on Scott Davenports site. https://scottdavenportphoto.com/on1
As far as I can tell the offer code is also good for renewals.

He also has fabulous tutorials on YouTube. It’s a great economical way to learn more about the software. His free videos are as good as any that I have paid for.

koraks said:

I use GIMP all the time. For all its advantages and the really remarkable feat of getting something as functional as this on the road without major investments from a commercial backer, it does have some serious drawbacks, at least from my perspective:
* No adjustment layers. You have to duplicate layers, do adjustments on them and then mask them out. Adobe's approach is far more flexible.
* No native CMYK support; GIMP is RGB only. This is a problem if you're exploring digital-negative based color printing processes.
* By extension, GIMP natively doesn't support CMYK decomposition, but there's a plugin for it that's now packaged with GIMP by default. However, this does not support custom spot colors.
* GIMP's printing interface is a collection of awkward bugs and essentially dysfunctional. This has been the case for, well, ever, and it's acknowledged widely by the GIMP community. There appear to be no efforts to improve this. So for printing, it's in virtually all cases necessary to divert to a different application.
* No PostScript support.
* No support for pdf/X1A which is a major standard in the printing industry.
* No support for scanning multiple images at the same time, e.g. from an application like Epson scan (marquee select multiple areas - works fine in PS, GIMP will acquire just one image).
* No support for scanning at 16 bit color depth; GIMP acquires 8bit/pixel only.
* GIMP's color management functionality, though present and functional, is somewhat awkward. It tends to revert to a non-managed workspace by default, and color management functionality is spread all over a couple of menus.
* Image manipulation tool menus are just not as intuitive as Adobe's, although they have improved massively over the past few years.
* GIMP's AI-assisted healing tools for retouching etc. are at the level where Adobe was around 2012 or thereabouts. These also have come a long way, though, and currently work fairly well for basic spotting & retouching of scans.

The short of it, if my work involved image manipulation, I'd happily shell out the bucks for a PS subscription. As an amateur user, I prefer to put that money into other things like film. So it's great that we have GIMP in the first place, but it's not a true alternative to PS for everyone.

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I use it, but not as extensively as you. But the price is free and there is no monthly rent.

alanrockwood said:

A dark horse: Picture Window Pro... nominally discontinued but now freely downloadable. Built specifically for editing photos. Very different interface from other photo editing programs..

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Another vote.

My vote for PhotoLine. It is very close to Photoshop in look and feel. Some things in PhotoLine are better than in Photoshop, some worse. There are lot of things in PhotoLine that not available in Photoshop at all. There are also some things in Photoshop that not available in Photoline. I moved to PhotoLine 2 years ago. It was so-so app with huge hidden potential. So i started to send bug reports and improvements requests to developers and now 3 years later it feels like all new app. By the way, PhotoLine was started somewhere in 1990s, near same days as Photoshop was started.

Some advantages of PhotoLine:
- All in one raster and vector editor. I mean REAL raster and REAL vector editor. For my personal point of view vector tools in PhotoLine are very intuitive and easy to use compare to other vector apps.
- Image Browser.
- Real PDF editor.
- It can create multi page documents for books publishing.
- Batch processing.
- Panorama Stitching.
- HDR merge (up to 3 images only)
- RAW import supported by LibRaw.
- One of not so many apps that can give you debayered RAW image without any additional hidden gamma correction and without color space transformations.
- It can read Photoshop's brushes, curves, use Photoshop's plugins. Even some limited support for PSD file format.
- Very flexible and intuitive layers structure.
- Very accurate and high resolution Histogram.
- All adjustments layers and filters can work in 8, 16 and 32-bit depth.
- Real 16bit depth processing (as you may know Photoshop only use 15-bit processing).
- It is possible to work in 32-bit depth with any gamma. It don't auto convert to linear like most other apps.
- Some adjustment layers can benefit from clipping free logic 32-bit depth. It is also possible to paint with colors in extended 32-bit HDR range.
- Non destructive Color management. For example it is possible to transform colorspace/gamma or even color model from layer to folder and from folder to all document in real time without re-encoding source image.
- Non destructive bit depth management. For example i usually set layer to 16 bit and document to 32 bit. So all my color correction works in 32-bit, but .PLD file size remains same as 16-bit tiff.
- HaldCLUT and CUBE LUT support.
- It support huge amount of vector and raster file formats.
- It works very fast.
- Small team of developers, quick communication, quick bugfixes and response to user feedback.
- New Beta version every 2-3 weeks.
- Low cost, but you need to pay for update after every 2 full versions releases. Sort of once per 2-3 years.


Some disadvantages and limitations of PhotoLine:
- Brushes, Mask/Lasso Clipping, Layer Styles & 3D Light Effects are 8-bit only, even if used in 16 or 32-bit document or layer. (Hope this problem could be fixed somehow)
- No "Mean", "Median" and other stacking layers modes used for temporal noise reduction.
- UI use system theme and have no complete universal look. It also looks slightly different in macOS and Windows.
- UI icons and cursors are not too pretty (but it is no problem anymore if use my custom icons set from PhotoLine forum)
- Default RAW controls designed in very unusual way. There is no hidden raw modules and all done with usual adjustment layers. I personally don't like raw workflow concept in PhotoLine, but lucky is easy to change it in other way. I described this in PhotoLine forum thread.
- Rather basic debayer quality of Fujifilm X-Trans sensors. I personally prefer to use Iridient Developer, because it provide way more accurate debayer quality.
- No fashion AI options like Lens Blur with AI depth and perspective detection. in new Photoshop/LR versions.
- I personally not a big fan of concept how to work with text in PhotoLine. Text always framed inside blocks and there is always some space between text and frame of that blocks. When you do design work, it is not too easy align letters to exact place. Guess this concept works well for books or newspapers editing when you can build multiple amount of lines with text blocks. Anyway hope it could be changed or improved in future.
- Not too popular app hidden from mass users. For unknown reason it is almost no mass promotion or advertisement for this app.
- No fancy tutorials and endless youtube videos. But there is a small collection of links to tutorials available on PhotoLine forum.

I save renting the software and rarely use GIMP and put all my effort into the darkroom.

I've adjusted to the point where i can pretty much use Affinity Photo 2 as a main substitute for Photoshop CS6, which I can no longer run under current Mac OS. It has some strange differences, I can only use cloning for example if I create a new layer? That took me way too long to figure out. I do also use Photoline at times. To me the biggest advantage of Photoline is that it will work with Color Perfect. If I am having a real problem with color balance (mainly due to scanning color negatives) I have found that Color Perfect is the best way to fine tune things.

Roseha said:

I've adjusted to the point where i can pretty much use Affinity Photo 2 as a main substitute for Photoshop CS6...

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Did you ever use the original Affinity Photo? If so, is it worth the upgrade to Affinity Photo 2?

Duceman said:

Did you ever use the original Affinity Photo? If so, is it worth the upgrade to Affinity Photo 2?

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I have had both and if you use advanced features it's worth it. If you aren't in a hurry they have sales every so often. Check their site, maybe get on their email list.

Mal Paso said:

I have had both and if you use advanced features it's worth it.

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That's nice to hear, but is it different in terms of it's usage? Does it look & feel & operate the same or is it very different -- like Windows 7 vs Windows 10?

xkaes said:

That's nice to hear, but is it different in terms of it's usage? Does it look & feel & operate the same or is it very different -- like Windows 7 vs Windows 10?

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Yikes! Win10 made me switch to Mac! It's much the same just a lot more. I don't remember a learning curve. I do get lost trying things out but there is so much, I'll never use it all.

There is always GIMP.

Mal Paso said:

Yikes! Win10 made me switch to Mac! It's much the same just a lot more. I don't remember a learning curve. I do get lost trying things out but there is so much, I'll never use it all.

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Thanks. So if you don't need the additional features of Affinity V2 -- whatever they are -- just stick with V1. It's not like there are a lot of "bug fixes"???

cerber0s said:

There is always GIMP.

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That is what I use.

Sirius Glass said:

That is what I use.

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It’s pretty good bang for the buck

CasperMarly said:

Have and use Photoshop CS6 and it works well. One of these days it may not.

When that day comes I'll need something to replace it - a program I can buy and use, not rent or lease.

What is out there that will give me what Photoshop can do?

Am looking at Photo editing and finessing images. Don't use Lightroom or any other programs for images. Just Photoshop since version 2.

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I haven’t read all the posts but you could always try Photoshop 5 or 4, and just buy an older computer that will install and run it. There are people on this forum that are happy to buy a spare computer to run scanning software that is long discontinued and incompatible with new computers, so keeping old image processing software alive in a similar way should also be possible.