PSA re Adobe alternatives

Is GIMP still the best free PS alternative? I never really liked the UI.

I've been using Affinity's Photo and Designer, and there's a lot good about them: Hell of a lot faster than Photoshop ever was (which I can say with some confidence because I'd used it professionally more or less continuously from version 3 up through the Cloud era), and a minimum of feature creep. Downside is the UI doesn't have a good flow; even simple things like tab-key order through fields within a floating window doesn't work right, and there are some edit processes that I should be able to do which are apparently impossible (such as directly modifying a bitmap within a pasted element of a layer).

Since Affinity's products cost me a flat $35 apiece as opposed to Adobe's $10-to-$20 per month ad infinitum, I am willing to put up with a lot of quirks.
Incidentally: Adobe's Photo suite subscription is about to double in price: https://www.macrumors.com/2019...

I saw this earlier. If you're not a professional, there's some good options to consider. Also, Resolve should be in Pr not Ae.

@ardgedee I, too, am using Affinity Designer and Photo and they are the first real applications to be production ready on the iPad. All I need is Sketch on the iPad and I’m all in.

If you do painting/illustration in PS I can't recommend Clip Studio strongly enough.

I'm digging these comments.

hahahahaha! resolve is SO not an alternative for AE. Fusion, not Resolve (same company)

if you want a high-end compositing package, look at Nuke ($$$$) or Mistika ($$). there is also Natron, Cinelerra.

Oooh this is useful, I need to pull the trigger (finally) on buying Photoshop and InDesign, then again I have a bunch of files saved as these that I need to regularly tailor and it looks like the alternatives (particularly Affinity Publisher) doesn't import them... yet.

@waldopepper I think you’re right about the “yet” part. Affinity Designer and Photo open .ai and .psd files just fine. Something a little less expensive is Pixelmator, which opens .psd files.

@waldopepper AFAICT most paint apps open PSD files these days. The main problem right now is that they won't necessarily import certain layer data, particularly when the layer data is tied to certain Photoshop effects or third-party plugins.

Also don't forget Apple's Motion as an AE alternative. It's only $50 all the updates have been free and the built in particle system is far superior to AE's.

Thanks for the info all, I'm mostly wanting to edit InDesign files not PSD but it seems like InDesign is only the current way to do this?

@waldopepper Yeah, I can’t think of any app that successfully opens .indd files.

I also have InDesign as my primary app, but getting good PS- and AI-alternatives *might* give me the ability to subscribe to one single app instead of the whole CC.