Adobe Photoshop is for image editing as Microsoft Office is for the office: absolutely dominant, and in a professional environment, you can’t get around having it. However, if you aren’t using Photoshop and the Creative Suite—or Creative Cloud, as it is now called—for professional reasons (and even if you are), the package has become very unattractive since the introduction of the subscription model more than a decade ago.
If you only want to edit a few photos every now and then, you probably won’t think that a monthly subscription for around $9.99 is worth it—because most of the time it is not.
A cheap and affordable alternative to Photoshop is Affinity Photo, which was released in its second major version in late 2022. Here you get an unlimited license for an extensive image-editing toolbox for $69.99 (the iPad version costs only $18.49 up front).
