On 12/31/18 9:13 AM, Mayayana wrote:
The question of photo editors comes up often. I don't
remember whether this one ever got mentioned. I came
across the code awhile back. It's written in VB6. The
code is freely available. The program seems to work nicely
and does much of what a full editor can do, including
"effects" plugins. Yet it's only 52 MB installed.

Disadvantages:

* No help file.

* A curious oversight in terms of functionality. There's
no line or shape tool! (At least I can't find them.)

* A kiddie-style, Metro-esque UI that takes up too much
space.

But it has a full stock of filters, color adjustment, layer
functionality, etc. There's not much missing that you'd get
in Photoshop for a very steep price, in a spyware package,
with a rental model, and a wildly bloated installation.

The lack of line and shape tools is odd. I use those regularly
and in terms of code they're much easier than creating
effects like "oil painting" or "windblown". But for someone who
only wants to work on photos without doing graphics, Photo
Demon looks like a very good choice.

https://photodemon.org/



I had run Photoshop almost exclusively as a "trial" for at least two
years up until a year ago. By "trial", I really mean that. I had hard
drives set up so that, after the 30 days and existing trial was over, I
could swap hard drives with one that never had PS installed, reinstall
it, and start over. This got really tiresome and I didn't use the
program everyday, so I switched to Affinity Photo and GIMP as secondary.

Affinity was the closest Photoshop competitor that I could find that
offered functionality as close as possible to Photoshop. It still lacks
some features, but the developers run a forum and are very responsive to
suggestions and bug reports. That being said, it still seems to have
stability problems and, from my research and experience, most of the
issues happen with older computers (not enough ram or fast enough CPU,
etc). I myself continue to have issues with random crashes, screen
black outs and such, but getting the program during one of the sales for
$35 was no issue for me. I refuse to go with Photoshop's subscription
model. I think the most significant difference between Affinity and
Photoshop though is that the former offers far more functionality in 32
bit mode than the latter! This can make a surprising difference in
processing outcomes (32 versus 16 bit processing).

GIMP is my standby. I try to use the features it has to substitute for
missing Affinity functions that Photoshop had. I recently had to do
content aware scaling on a photo that could benefit from it. Since
Affinity lacks such a feature, I was able to find it in GIMP with one of
the plug-ins (liquid rescale). So, in that case, while Affinity did
most of the heavy work in processing, GIMP saved the day. I have had no
crashes with GIMP, unlike with Affinity, but it's format still isn't
quite what either Affinity or Photoshop offers, so it remains a standby.