If you don’t want to fly the pirate flag and support honest developers, there are some decent low-cost alternatives available, such as Affinity Photo ($35, Win + Mac) or Pixelmator Pro ($50, Mac only). Also Photopea is a decent web-based alternative if you don’t mind ads.

I’ve been using Pixelmator for a while and it does everything I need while being far less bloated and significantly easier to use than Adobe’s stuff. Despite only charging a one-time payment, they keep pushing out regular updates and actually useful AI features like automatic subject detection.

If you don’t want to fly the pirate flag and support honest developers, there are some decent low-cost alternatives available, such as Affinity Photo ($35, Win + Mac) or Pixelmator Pro ($50, Mac only). Also Photopea is a decent web-based alternative if you don’t mind ads.

I’ve been using Pixelmator for a while and it does everything I need while being far less bloated and significantly easier to use than Adobe’s stuff. Despite only charging a one-time payment, they keep pushing out regular updates and actually useful AI features like automatic subject detection.