Arguably the most crucial tools, if you ask me. If money isn’t an obstacle, you’d most likely go with some version of the Adobe Creative Cloud package. After all, it’s more or less the industry standard. I’ve worked with Photoshop — part of the Adobe family — since 2000. If I remember correctly, I started with version 5, which was soon updated to 5.5. A few years later, InDesign and Acrobat were added to my toolbox. Since I work very little with vector graphics, I never really needed Illustrator. For me, Photoshop is still the best of the bunch — partly because I’ve used it for so many years.
For both personal and financial reasons, I’ve wanted to find alternatives to Adobe CC products for quite some time. One serious contender, available for both Windows and Mac, is Affinity Photo 2 (or the full Affinity Suite, if you also want publishing and vector tools). A small but dedicated community also speaks highly of GIMP, which is available on all three major platforms. It’s definitely an option, but it has a few downsides: it’s a large program with a somewhat cluttered user interface. It offers plenty of features — possibly even more than Photoshop — but after using Photoshop for over 20 years, I found Affinity Photo 2 much easier to approach and adopt than GIMP. Its logic and user interface feel more familiar, so to speak.
That said, I actually had all three — Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and GIMP — installed on my computer, and I’ve used them all for the material on this very site. Still, around 90% of the content went through Adobe Photoshop. That’s about to change, though, since I discontinued my Creative Cloud subscription and bought Affinity Photo 2 instead.
I have to add that while I was able to work with GIMP, I didn’t enjoy the experience. Tasks that took mere seconds in Photoshop could take several minutes in GIMP — and often required Googling for instructions. Sure, some features in Affinity also required a bit of online research at first, but overall, I’ve found using it to be much smoother.
I’ll admit, there are plenty of tutorials available for all of these programs, so if you’re determined, you’ll learn whichever one you choose. I chose Affinity Photo 2.
For simple tasks like editing drawings, any of these three programs are honestly overkill. You can easily manage with more basic and affordable tools like Photoshop Lightroom, PaintShop Pro, or ACDSee. Even XnView MP is capable of basic editing, though I mainly use it to replace Adobe Bridge. The latter is an asset manager included in the Adobe CC suite that allows you to preview, organize, edit, rate, and publish images to Adobe Stock.
A very quick note about Procreate — it’s an awesome app, but I don’t use it. It’s a versatile drawing (or more precisely, illustration) tool, not an image editor. Also, it only runs on iOS — meaning iPad or iPhone. I no longer use either device, so this isn’t relevant to me anymore. But for a brief time I had an iPad with Procreate, and I have to say, it’s an excellent tool for sketching, drawing, and creating mockup designs. However, once my iPad broke, I didn’t have the money — or the need — to replace it. Besides, I prefer drawing on actual paper with a pen anyway.