Lightroom 6 and Photoshop CS6 on a MacPro 5,1 are my daily apps.
I occasionally use Affinity Photo and GraphicConverter.
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Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom (lots of plug-ins for all these) and Photomechanics (for culling and tagging photos)…if you want to be “compliant” in the pre-press and offset printing business, you need the Adobe Suit for full compatibility, it’s the unwritten industry standard in this line of business (like it or not).
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I agree, Javier. While a lot of people became upset with Adobe due to the subscription model – myself included – after looking into other comparable graphic editors, I too realized that insofar as feature sets are concerned, Adobe Photoshop just couldn’t be beat. Some people say that its code is now very old, but it continues to meet my needs just fine, and I use it just about every single day.
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These days I use Preview for simple stuff. I use Lightroom (which I don’t like nearly as much as Aperture) for more complex edits. I experimented with DXO raw editing in the spring and am hoping that goes on sale.
I still have Aperture on my laptop and have popped into it now and then for something I didn’t feel like importing into LR on the other machine.
I also have GraphicConverter, Pixelmator and one other - Acorn? I never got into the last two despite buying them.
I had Photoshop way back, 4 or 5 maybe? That’s on my old G4 which doesn’t seem to want to boot anymore.
Diane
On grounds of hate for yet another subscription I use Affinity when I do stuff myself. They even have plugins that can be accessed from within Apple Photos. Made in the UK, what’s not to like?
But my best decision ever was using FRANK ™.
Frank’s accrued fees per year for the amount of stuff he does for me come down to far less than the subscriptions would cost me and the results are better than what I could achieve. Outsource to your own Fred and your life gets a lot easier.
This is 100,000% true. There hasn’t been anything resembling a development app that can produce accurate test plates, substrates, specifications, or professional plates for printing other than Adobe stuff. And there ain’t no professional level proofing, color and image specifications, typography, color management, etc., etc. that competes with Adobe stuff either. They have the market covered.
I have landed on Affinity. I tried Pixelmator, Acorn…most of them. Most of them were capable image editors. I went for Affinty for the suite (and the three, honest-to-Steve, hard-bound-printed manuals.
Like several here, I am retired and could barely justify the cost of updates, much less subscription. I only occasionally do CD packages for musician friends. The last half-dozen, the printers wanted EPS. Haven’t had one since I retired Adobe, guess I will find out if it can actually cut it then. If not, I’ll pay somebody else to fix it. Affinity Publish did a great job of importing all my InDesign.idml files. Wonder if it works the other way.
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I’m retired, 66.5 years old, and I find that Pixelmator Pro does enough Photoshop stuff for me. It is affordable. And I asked a relative to give me a year’s subcrip. to InDesign 'cause I used to be a typesetter / typograher and Quark is outmoded and expensive and I can’t get into Pages enough to like it (too much like Pagemaker). So I find that the one app — InDesign — expensive as it is, is relaxing and pleasurable to work with. We’ll see if I can afford it when it comes time to renew.
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My Macs have been an Adobe-free zone since CC became subscription. I was already using Affinity Photo and now have the whole V.2 suite. While not as intuitive as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, the Affinity set is ‘honest’ software — a glance at the two websites tells you what I mean by this 
I particularly like Affinity Publisher. Making an attractive newsletter regularly in Publisher is just so easy — its tracking & leading controls work well, and all other layout features such as wrapping are instantly accessible. I’m very thankful for all of Affinity’s work!
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I began using Photoshop in the late '90s and stopped at CS-5 for the same reason, I wasn’t about to get sucked into paying for the program every month! I’ve kept an older iMac for that specific reason, which has CS-5 still running quite well, thank you very much!
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I use GraphicConverter. I’ve used it since Version 1.2 (now on version 12.0)
I’ve used Canvas and Photoshop until they went subscription and my fall back has always been GraphicConverter.
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I’ve been using Photoshop since version 1; so for me, anything else is a bit of a pain to use. It took me less than two minutes to eliminate Pixelmator Pro from contention when I tried it. I forget what the missing feature was, but it was something simple that I couldn’t believe every image editor wouldn’t have.
I am still using Photoshop; but for my money, Photoshop CS6 was the best and most rock-solid version ever. I kept using Mojave for as long as I could just to keep using Photoshop CS6, but this was obviously not a long-term solution. Adobe does deserve a little credit for not raising the price of a basic Photoshop/Lightroom subscription, but every subsequent version of Photoshop I’ve used has been buggier than Photoshop CS6 was. If my Photoshop subscription ever gets too expensive, I will switch to Affinity Photo, which I already own. It’s really quite a good replacement, but I still prefer Photoshop.
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My first introduction to working with graphics was using Paint, MS Works, Altsys / Macromedia Freehand and Aldus Pagemaker back in 1984-5.
Never bought into the Adobe subscription model.
I did purchase Lightroom and PS Elements early on until its yearly updates were becoming costly with not many advantages anymore.
I currently use on the desktop:
the Affinity suite
Art Text
Luminar
Image Tricks Pro
Logoist
Pixelmator Pro
On the iPad I use:
Affinity Suite
Procreate
Photomator
Pixelmator
Subscription model for Adobe products is just inappropriate. I use the product for digital art so have gone with iPad app Procreate and Pixelmator. A lot of Photoshop learning passed into muscle memory which is a shame. It can be unlearnt.
I bought Affinity Photo when it first became available. Same for designer and then Publisher. I primarily use Publisher on the iPad and when needed use the Studio Link feature to pop over to the other two personas. Most of my work is document design/layout. Of the three apps Photo is my least used.
Serif have done a fantastic job with these apps on the iPad. Unlike Adobe slow, lumbering and still incomplete attempts, all three Affinity apps have full feature parity to the Mac/Windows versions.
I don’t do a lot of photo editing but when I do I usually just use the Photos app.
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I was a Photoshop — and later, Illustrator — user for a long time. I was initially positive about Creative Cloud, but while it seemed like a good deal at the time things soured after a few years. Adobe seemed more focused on protecting their market dominance than making their products more reliable. (Yes, I laughed sarcastically when they added auto-save to Illustrator, because that was long overdue!) The actual Creative Cloud app(s) were painful to use, not helped by Adobe stuffing lots of extra things in there. But the worst part was waiting after each new macOS release to see which CC apps would be broken by it and when Adobe would get a fix out.
These days I use Affinity’s apps for my occasional design needs, and I have to say that was money well spent. While they don’t have all the bells & whistles of their Adobe equivalents, they have all the features that I do need and use and then some. I just pray that Adobe doesn’t roll up and buy up Affinity then shut it down — something they’d probably do if they thought they could get away with it.
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And why is this appropriate? I don’t really care for subscriptions myself…but they allow a known revenue stream for the company which allows them to continue to pay devs to update and upgrade. 10 bucks a month for a Lightroom and Photoshop sub is 130 bucks a year…or 240 every 2 years and that’s about the same cost or less than upgrading to the new version…and you get interim feature updates as well. Some of the other cheaper products are obviously cheaper…but LR and PS does things that Photos or Affinity or Pixelmator simply cannot do.
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But you don’t need to upgrade to every version.
- I got Elements 2 bundled with my scanner
- I bought an upgrade to version 3, which I kept on using until I replaced my PowerMac G4 with an Intel mini (with macOS 10.7, Lion), and could no longer run a PowerPC app.
- I bought version 10 for use with that Mac mini, which I kept using until that Mac was upgraded to a 2018 mini (with macOS 10.15 Catalina) and could no longer run 32-bit apps.
- I bought version 2021 as a part of buying that 2018 mini. Which I’m still running today.
I fully expect to keep running 2021 until some unspecified time when I buy an Apple Silicon Mac and Apple drops support for Intel apps. Then I’ll buy whatever version they’re selling at that time.
I’ve found that the app keeps running just fine as macOS gets updated until it drops support for the app’s CPU architecture. Adobe may not support these installations, but I don’t care about that - the app still works.
Another CS6 holdout here: a long-established workflow involving PS-to-Acrobat, and many many shared files that depend on it. I keep a 2013 iMac w/High Sierra running just for that purpose (plus for one other irreplaceable app that’s stuck on 32-bit).
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David… I have moved on from Adobe… years ago. The apps that I mentioned work perfectly fine for my needs and dont require subscriptions.