So finally it looks like Adobe has some serious competition...
The pricing model of Adobe in the recent years is really ridiculous. I mean 60 euros monthly fee for single Photoshop license?!
The major problem is that SW such as GIMP, ZonerPhoto etc. are nowhere near what PS or Illustrator can do. Well, looks like finally someone has come up with a similar product and for a fraction of the price.
The Affinity company is already selling a Mac version and now also Windows version is available (still in Beta, which also means you can use it and download it completely for free).
The final price will be 50USD - one time payment. This btw. is basically 14 days of using Photoshop.
I downloaded the demo yesterday on my office PC. I should point out that my big hobby when I was younger was digital macrophotography and so I have been using Photoshop for over 10 years now and I have a legal copy on my office PC.
When I opened Affinity Photo, I saw a very familiar environment and within 10-15 minutes I was able to do almost everything I wanted to. The design is very modern, features are very similar to Photoshop - layers, history, filters, levels, adjustments etc etc.
So for those of you who want to try some very good and I dare to say SW equivalent to Photoshop, for free (!), have a look and try it out. The Beta version is basically ready for release and I did not encounter any problems at all. I also compared some of its functions and the results side by side with Photoshop and usually it was very similar, and sometimes one or the other was better, but overall there was no clear winner.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/windows/Reading the discussion forums, many photographs are saying this is the end of their Adobe subscription. Affinity also has another SW for vector graphics, which is similar to Illustrator. Unless Adobe now changes their pricing model, this is going to be a serious problem for them.
And just as a side note - this sort of reminds me of Davis... also no competition -> and therefore no real motiviation to improve or develop anything new. Let´s hope some new manufacturer also enters the market with equivalent product, which would help to drive the R&D and bring the prices down.