IbisPaint. Autodesk Sketchbook. Gimp. Medibang. There are an enormous number of free digital art programs, and while they may not have all the features of Photoshop, they can do a good job with a little finagling and some custom brushes from the end user.
Gimp is the popular option, but it’s far from the only option. IbisPaint has a reasonably powerful phone app for art, and Medibang comes with plenty of downloadable brushes. Where Gimp’s layout can be difficult to navigate, AutoDesk Sketchbook’s layout is intuitive, and makes tools like crop or lasso easy to find. No single app has all of the same tools, but a digital art program doesn’t necessarily need to be holding Photoshop as the gold standard just because it’s the most well-established. One reason websites choose to rank these programs based on likeness to Photoshop alone is because Photoshop is the ‘pro’ option, the one professionals have been using to edit photos and illustrate digitally for decades. As such, the people who want to leave will want to onboard with another program as easily as possible, to get back to work as soon as possible.
And people do want to leave. Photoshop is owned by Adobe, which has been in the news multiple times in the last decade as it cut off features that used to be included, jacks up exit fees, adds an auto-opt-in for customers to add their art to Adobe’s AI program, et cetera. Further issues include when Pantone exited the company, and rather than grandfather in works already completed in the Creative Cloud, they instead chose to remove the colors picked for an illustration and replace it with a black void if the customer didn’t cough up an additional 16-ish dollars a month to use Pantone colors. On top of the other subscription to use Photoshop and Adobe programs. When having Pantone used to be free! How much worse can the deal get? Customers don’t want to find out. They want to leave.
For individuals who don’t or can’t agree to those terms, jumping ship is the only option.
The downside to free programs is a lack of professionalism – something that matters when transferring designs to a company on commission, but not nearly so crucial when one is just making art to sell as prints or post online. A studio will almost certainly be expecting a .psd file when you send your work to them, but not all of these programs can save files as .psds. A .png won’t have separate layers unless each layer is sent separately (a huge hassle) and a .tiff file may not cooperate with all versions of Photoshop. However, if you’re manufacturing prints on demand, a simple .png and some color data would be plenty. It won’t be as easy as it could be, but it won’t be as expensive, either.
https://petapixel.com/2023/01/05/adobe-may-be-using-your-photos-to-train-its-ai
https://creative-boost.com/adobe-removing-pantone-colors/
