The doctor needs a Photoshop alternative
I’m not a graphic arts professional in any way, shape, or form. But as a solopreneur, I’m often responsible for creating ads, flyers, business cards, signs and other collateral materials. I’m also responsible for editing the photos I shoot for books, articles, and online posts.
I started using Photoshop more than two decades ago and have used pretty much every version released since then. I used to buy a copy and use that version for years before upgrading. That’s no longer possible, since Adobe has moved to a subscription model for Photoshop and the rest of the former Creative Suite, which is now called Creative Cloud.
The result is that I now pay $9.99 a month (or $119.88 a year) for the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom plus
20GB of cloud storage. I don’t use Lightroom or the provided cloud storage but this bundle — the Photography plan — is the least-expensive way I can use the current version of Photoshop.
I’ve been OK with that for a couple of years, but it kind of rankles me that I’m paying for stuff I don’t need or want. And, to be frank, it rankles me even more that I keep paying for it, month in and month out.
Here’s my dilemma. I like Photoshop a lot and have become proficient. I’ve used nothing else for my image editing needs for as long as I can remember. That being said, I’ve begun a search for a reasonably-priced image editing app I can buy (not lease). Put another way, I’m looking for an app that can serve all of my imageediting needs, but without monthly payments.
My requirements are simple:
• It has to open and save Photoshop (.psd) files and keep all layers intact.
• It has to be as fast and easy to use (for me) as Photoshop.
• It has to cost $200 or less.
I’ve narrowed it down to a handful of contenders: Pixelmator Pro, Acorn, GraphicConverter, and Photoshop Elements (which you can still buy for $69.99).
My biggest problem is that when I’m in a time crunch, I open Photoshop. If I’m facing a deadline (and I almost always am), I don’t have the luxury of opening one of the contenders and figuring out how to do something I can do quickly and easily in Photoshop.
I’ve promised myself I’m going to spend more time testing these apps in the coming weeks and months. So, I’ll let you know if and when I find one I consider good enough to end my decades-long relationship with Photoshop.
In the meantime, if you know of another suitable Photoshop replacement that fits my requirements, I’d love to hear about it.
One last thing: I’m delivering my annual “State of the Apple” address to the Houston Area Apple Users Group (www. haaug.org) Saturday at the CenterPoint Energy Community Center, 7001 Fifth Street in Bellaire. The meeting begins at 9 a.m.; my speech will start around 11 a.m. It’s free, so feel free to come on down.