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Best alternative to Photoshop?

C

Chris152

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I restarted my imac recently and can no longer get Photoshop CC to work, apparently my free trial has finished (I've subscribed since they brought in the CC version so no idea what's happened). As I no longer need it for work, it's probably a good time to stop paying them each month and get a free alternative. Doesn't need to be complex, and my mac is running on OS X 10.11.6, so old. What are you all using that's free, simple and half decent?

Thanks, Chris
 
Do you need photoshop capability, or will Photos that comes on Mac's anyway enough? If it's just processing JPEGs then it is reasonably good these days. The presets aren't amazing but most things can be tweaked including sharpening and noise reduction.
 
I use a Nikon camera and I have just lost my access to adobe cc, but I haven’t used photoshop for a few years, I use the free Nikon editing software NX Studio it does most things I need.

Pete
 
Thanks all, really helpful - I'll look through them tomorrow and see if anything looks like it'll work for me.
I thought of Mac's 'Photos' app after I posted but it is more limited than I was hoping for.
I guess I'll be limited by my OS, but we'll see :-)
 
Yep, Gimp. It's excellent, free, and open source.
 
I still use lightroom 5, it's very old now but I love the workflow of lightroom, it's a shame adobe don't offer the option to buy perpetual licenses anymore.
 
I’ve been using Lightroom mobile for a year now and I’m very pleased with it. I use it to process my RAW photos which are then seamlessly uploaded to the cloud so I can make further edits on my iPad or iPhone. It’s very powerful, certainly for my use, and once I’m done with editing I save as JPEGs to IOS photos. As Adrian says, the latter is a good imaging tool in itself with a particularly good print dialogue, so I can print to my Canon printer from my ancient iMac. The only drawback is the subscription, £48 pa, but for me at least it’s worth it.
 
Yes, I agree about lightroom. It was intuitive and had good workflow. I was never happy with creative cloud - it always felt as if I was being forced to buy things I didn't want and I detest licensing software every year as you are so locked in. Eventually I just stopped with adobe. Tried GIMP a few years ago and I always found it clunky. It was well behind the curve when AI features started to emerge. Lacked proper lens aberration correction and what I regards as essentials such as focus point identification (I started out with Mac Aperture so it goes back a long way). GIMP may well be better now.

I don't bother much with RAW files anymore as I just don't want to invest the time in workflow and practically everything we shoot is aimed at the web anyway where it needs to be a JPEG of a certain size. For me what makes a good photo editor is a comprehensive library tool fully integrated with the photo editor: and that allows me to switch seamlessly from preview into the editor software and doesn't overwrite with things like DXO files which are just annoying. I like customisable pre-sets that will do individual and bulk images too, and a tool that will do bulk resizing on a batch that is being sent into a media library in our website builder software.

Photos in OSX is OK ish and has the library functions, but the presets are pretty dire really, only a couple are usable for me. But plenty good enough for most smartphone snaps.
 
marineboy said:
I loved Aperture. I was very disappointed when Apple ceased to support it.
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Me too. It was head and shoulders above the rest at the time. And still much better than Photos today. This was before apple dumbed down software for mass use.
 
I have recently started with Darktable (on Linux). I am beginning to really like it for photographic processing, and getting excellent results. Previously I used Bibble, which was bought by Corel Corp. and became "Aftershot". I had a full licence, but it's now not-quite abandonware, which is sad, because it was good and a lot faster than Photoshop, with a less-steep learning curve, too. Reluctantly after around 15 years altogether, I've had to give up on it.

Darktable seems to do things differently from Lightroom/Photoshop (but that's not a bad thing), although it is workflow-based. It doesn't have the AI elements either (which really aren't of interest to me, presently), so you can't have it remove people from group photographs, etc.. But it does have a lot of features I want, for example DIY lens correction based on Lensfun.

I have a 'boutique' 15mm fully-manual lens for landscape and 360VR panorama work, a Laowa "D-Dreamer". IMHO, it lives up to its "zero distortion" claim, but it does have significant chromatic aberration.

Using Lensfun I can build my own correction data, and add that to my local Lensfun database, so the correction is automatic. This is very helpful when each 360VR image comprises up to 28 full frame images (well, parts of 28 frames, anyway). From Darktable, the images go to Panorama Tools, for stitching (the gui front-end for this is Hugin), then into Pano2VR by Garden Gnome, and finally back to an equirectangular jpeg, with GPS data, etc..

As with woodwork, the trick for a low stress workflow is to standardize the components as much as possible!

Darktable's editing and tonal correction is also very powerful. My present desktop machine isn't, however, so, like Photoshop, it really needs a bit of horsepower to make it work well. There will be a PC upgrade in due course, I expect.

Of course, Darktable and Lensfun are both totally free, for Windows, Macs and a range of Linuxes.
And there are several channels offering Darktable tutorials on YouTube.

E.

Darktable is here
Lensfun is here
 
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Another vote for Gimp , Darktable and LensFun ..all my interweb connected machines are linux. Cameras now are a mix of Canon and Lumix.
 
Thanks for the replies all. Once again, I seem to be up against my old OS, not capable of running these applications.
For some reason, Photoshop's still running properly on my lad's laptop so it looks like I'm stuck with that for now - a smaller screen but maybe better quality (I'll know when my new glasses arrive next week!).
As I get older, the digital world becomes more and more alien to me. And as it does, my contempt for it grows - since PS failed, I've been digging out my old film cameras, looking at them and wondering.
 
I sympathise totally Chris. It is the realty of the commercialised consumerist world we live in. How else can the computer manufacturers make money than by devising ways to make their hardware obsolete. My late 2009 iMac succumbed to the same fate. Chipset will no longer take an OS upgrade and more and more apps would not run on the outdated OS.
Imagine the impact on the manufacturers if we only had to buy one computer in our lifetime?
 
This of course ^^ is a great argument for keeping a computer that will just do photo processing, never upgrade the OS and do not buy subscription software.
 
Can you not plug a larger screen into your dad's laptop ? What are the output screen connectors and what is the highest definition that it says it can run as an auxiliary screen ? If you can run two screens from it, and you can run one as an "extension" or "extended" ( different images on each screen ) then you will find that having two screens is a far better way to work. As would be plugging in a graphics tablet, especially for photography. You don't need for the tablet to be a wacom, their patents expired and now there are some superb graphics tablets and screens coming out of China.
 
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Chris152 said:
Thanks for the replies all. Once again, I seem to be up against my old OS, not capable of running these applications.
Click to expand...
If it's just the OS being unsupported and not the computer being too slow, one option might be to install VirtualBox (which is free and open source) or VMWare Workstation Pro (which is free for personal use but a pain to get to the download page) and use it to run a (free) Linux desktop in a window on the computer.

Any Linux desktop will be able to run GIMP without issues and I'd expect a 2016 era machine (I'm guessing that date based on 10.11.6 being released in 2018) would run a virtual machine fairly easily. This is what it looks like with VMWare running on Windows 11 with Linux & GIMP running (note that I've deliberately made the screen small so you can see how it works; you can also go full screen if you want to).

1741261882300.png

With a virtual machine you can lock everything down to a specific revision of everything (OS, photo software etc) and not worry about updates making anything obsolete (although it's worth disabling the virtual machine's network if you're doing that so there's no risk of the virtual machine getting hacked if you don't bother to update it).
 
Chris152 said:
As I get older, the digital world becomes more and more alien to me. And as it does, my contempt for it grows - since PS failed, I've been digging out my old film cameras, looking at them and wondering.
Click to expand...
Don't worry, this works the other way around too. My career has me about as deep into the details of the digital world as anyone you're likely to meet, and my cynicism towards the whole thing has also only been growing over time.
 
I just tried to Grab the details of this iMac, but it does so in Tiff, and I can no longer convert it in PS to jpeg to post to the site! But here's the hardware (Grab taken last year), and the OS is now updated to OS X 10.11.6. Clearly, it's all creaking but not worth the investment to replace it.

iMac.jpg

I'm looking at the option you described Al, but tbh it's easier just to work on the lad's laptop, which is about 2016 and more up-to-date.

I keep thinking about the film cameras and processing the film myself, but any digitisation of the negatives would require PS to edit, so back where I started! (A darkroom's out of the question.)

On a related matter, I had a Clikpic site for my photography years ago, which expired when I stopped paying for it, and I'm thinking to rebuild it on Wix or similar, for posterity. Maybe doing that will satisfy my urge to fiddle with photography again - and it's free!

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone.
 
I'm wondering if your mac could be persuaded ( at boot time ) to boot from an USB with linux on ? if so you could try it, install it and switch to linux. Linux will run Gimp, and a whole load of other software, free, open source. Linux Mint is probably the most user friendly of the versions, resembles older macs and win XP in the interface.it can be easily adjusted to look and feel very XP, or Win 7, or even Mac ish. It is ideal on older hardware , it is less resource hungry than MS Win or Apples operating systems.
 
I have a 2009 Imac and a newer Mac Mini which I don't use that much because Apple make their systems obsolete after a few years.

I have now gone back to windows on Laptops. Windows seems to operate much better than in 2009 and is better for CAD work than an Apple machine which is one of the reasons I changed back to windows.

Paint Net is a simple windows photography programme, also as already said Gimp is very good.
 
meccarroll said:
I have a 2009 Imac and a newer Mac Mini which I don't use that much because Apple make their systems obsolete after a few years.

I have now gone back to windows on Laptops. Windows seems to operate much better than in 2009 and is better for CAD work than an Apple machine which is one of the reasons I changed back to windows.

Paint Net is a simple windows photography programme, also as already said Gimp is very good.
Click to expand...
You and I certainly have different definitions of "a few years." I recently replaced my functioning 2009 iMac and MBP with a MacMini and MBP so I could use newer versions of some applications and new applications that require current versions of the OS. In the 15+ years I used the same computers, my wife replaced her Windows laptop four times.
 
Likewise Mike. I have kept hold of the 2009 iMac as an emergency backup, if the MM were to fail I will have at least have access to WWW and email on something easier to use than a phone/iPad.
 
Chris152 said:
Thanks for the replies all. Once again, I seem to be up against my old OS, not capable of running these applications.
For some reason, Photoshop's still running properly on my lad's laptop so it looks like I'm stuck with that for now - a smaller screen but maybe better quality (I'll know when my new glasses arrive next week!).
As I get older, the digital world becomes more and more alien to me. And as it does, my contempt for it grows - since PS failed, I've been digging out my old film cameras, looking at them and wondering.
Click to expand...
Surely the only reason it is alien is that you are failing to accept that technology and operating systems move on.
 
RogerS said:
Surely the only reason it is alien is that you are failing to accept that technology and operating systems move on.
Click to expand...
Not sure about that, I'd say I'm failing to make the financial investment to keep up, and failing to do the learning that might allow a workaround; thus, I become alienated from the technology.
 
Technology advance is something of a failure if it forces customers into having to relearn what to do. Steve Jobs knew this back in the day and a lot of Apple's focus was on making everything user friendly and intuitive. Software developers would do well to remember this as user disaffiliation inevitably hurts sales. What we mainly see now is trivial "improvements" that don't greatly improve the user experience, so customers don't bother to upgrade and fall behind. AI may be the next step forward, but the constant and tedious focus on advertising may cause acceptance drag.
 
Totally agree, Adrian. There is a corollary IMO in connection with the pointless overloading of callcentres (particularly finance) where before you can even get to talk to anyone you have to sit through a couple of minutes of utterly pointless drivel re privacy blah blah blah. And how many of us bother to read through all the stuff they shove at us. And please don't get me started on bloody cookies ...accept, legitimate (was there ever such an oxymoron) interest etc.

Going back to finance telephone lines, I find it amusing and annoying in equal parts that when, finally, you get to the end of the speech, they say "Please treat our staff with respect". Of course one should but I can't but help thinking that if the telephone call didn't start with all that c**p that steals four or five minutes of my life then one's frame of mind might be more charitable.

I do realise that it is the regulators who mandate all this nonsense.
 
RogerS said:
Define 'a few years'. Our last iMac ran for 11 years.
Click to expand...
When Apple updates it's operating system you can and do loose the functionality of some software until it gets to a point where the Apple software simply will not run or you can not install the latest OS.

My 2009 Imac will not open a lot of web pages, has lost the ability to run some of the original programmes and this happened a few years ago. I would say you have defined a few years as 11.

Apple computers, although good, do not offer the same ability to run certain software. CAD software can be run on an Apple computer (I do have it on my IMAC and MAC Mini) but it is not as extensively supported as on a windows PC. I wanted CAD with more advanced features so made the change back to a windows machine. I currently have an Apple, Laptop, Apple Imac and Apple Mini, the Apple Mini is the only one that I can fully access the internet with. I have four windows laptops and a windows desktop all of which can access all aspects of the internet.
 
Mike said:
You and I certainly have different definitions of "a few years." I recently replaced my functioning 2009 iMac and MBP with a MacMini and MBP so I could use newer versions of some applications and new applications that require current versions of the OS. In the 15+ years I used the same computers, my wife replaced her Windows laptop four times.
Click to expand...
I still use my 2009 27" Imac but not for the internet, some of the programmes do not work any more so it is less useful in some respects than some of the older windows systems I have. The actual spec on the Imac is ok and it coulsd easily run windows 10. I buy what fits my requirements and budget and at the moment that is a windows based machine.
 
meccarroll said:
When Apple updates it's operating system you can and do loose the functionality of some software until it gets to a point where the Apple software simply will not run or you can not install the latest OS.

My 2009 Imac will not open a lot of web pages, has lost the ability to run some of the original programmes and this happened a few years ago. I would say you have defined a few years as 11.

Apple computers, although good, do not offer the same ability to run certain software. CAD software can be run on an Apple computer (I do have it on my IMAC and MAC Mini) but it is not as extensively supported as on a windows PC. I wanted CAD with more advanced features so made the change back to a windows machine. I currently have an Apple, Laptop, Apple Imac and Apple Mini, the Apple Mini is the only one that I can fully access the internet with. I have four windows laptops and a windows desktop all of which can access all aspects of the internet.
Click to expand...
How old are your windows machines and are they running the latest version of Windows ? Just curious.

Even with the latest versions of Firefox and Safari I find that there are many sites where one or the other is unhappy. Seems to me that website designers these days only bother to fully test on Google Chrome. But since I won't give that house-room.......
 
I never found any websites that refused to open with my 2009 iMac and Firefox. The straw that broke the camel's back was trying migrate from the free version of SketchUp to Fusion 360 so I could export files for CNC projects. The end of life OS on the iMac was several major releases behind the minimum requirement for Fusion 360. I was running AutoCAD Version 18, courtesy of my organization, on the iMac until I retired and had to give up the license.
 
RogerS said:
How old are your windows machines and are they running the latest version of Windows ? Just curious.

Even with the latest versions of Firefox and Safari I find that there are many sites where one or the other is unhappy. Seems to me that website designers these days only bother to fully test on Google Chrome. But since I won't give that house-room.......
Click to expand...
Interesting what you say about web sites only opening on some search engines.

My laptops:
One runs Windows Vista and is sometimes used to run MACH3 for my CNC.
Two laptops (i5 and i3) run windows 10. The i3 is used for my CNC.
Two (Both i7) laptops run windows 11
One PC (i7) Desktop runs Windows 10...All of my windows machines seem to be able to surf the net ok.

When I purchased my first Apple machine in 2009 (27" IMAC) I was very pleased with the OS and how well everthing intergrated and worked but as time went on and the OS were updated some of my software could not work with the new OS so I stopped updating and rolled back to a version that worked.

My Mac Mini has just been updated to the latest OS and that does not seem to have affected any of my installed software so maybe Apple have started to make newer OS versions partly backward compatible.
 
Couple of the large retail stores websites here, SuperU and LeroyMerlin has recently introduced a sliding jigsaw piece captcha before I can log in, supposedly to check that I am not a robot. This fails and refuses to let me log on both Safari and Firefox on the Mac Mini, tried with and without adblock plus. Java script enabled on both. OS and browsers all uptodate
Both sites work fine on the iPad fortunately but a PITA nonetheless as we regularly do a click and collect order.
I know not whether this is a Mac OS issue as I’ve no Windoze machines to try.
 
AndyP said:
.....This fails and refuses to let me log on both Safari and Firefox on the Mac Mini, .....
I know not whether this is a Mac OS issue as I’ve no Windoze machines to try.
Click to expand...
I think it is a Mac Mini issue....I told you to get a proper iMac ;) :)

I can slide that jigsaw on the LeroyMerlin site without any problem on my iMac using Firefox 136.0 and Safari Version 18.3 (20620.2.4.11.5). OSX 15.3.1 (24D70)

Also running ABP etc
 
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