Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
There's actually been some really cool stuff on the consumer side coming out for Mac recently. Pixelmator and Sketch in particular are quite good Adobe replacements.
I recently bought Pixelmator and Acorn because they were both on sale in the Mac App store. I think I paid about 40 Euros for the two of them together.

For the longest time I was a die hard photoshop user even though I only scratched the surface of its functionality. Never mind that they couldn't even make the pointer align with the pixel grid until CS6, I had to use the most feature complete program out there just for the sake of doing so. Now I'm starting to realize how silly that was.

The problem with older Photoshop competitors like GIMP is that they try to replicate as much Photoshop functionality as possible while having the horrible UI that people have come to expect from open source software. These new Mac alternatives are great because they put the user first, and are adding functionality bit by bit only if they can do so in a good way. Pixelmator for example is starting to add Illustrator-like vector functionality, and while I've only given it a quick spin it seems great so far.

My academic Adobe licenses are running out soon, and I don't think I'll be subscribing to Creative Cloud.