In this increasingly "Software as a Service" world, it's nice to have a good alternative where you actually own the software you are using. Being FOSS is just icing on the cake. Huge respect to the team behind Krita, and the KDE community as a whole.
While I share your appreciation of Krita and FOSS in general (long live Gimp and Inkscape), I have to point out that there are good commercial software that are not a total subscription rip-off (I'm looking at you Adobe). Here are some I know of and have used (bugs and limitations and everything):
- The Affinity suite
- Corel Painter
and perhaps a few others. They do their job of paying their developers, cultivating artist communities, doing R&D and pricing their products at something reasonable for the average artist.
Yeah, I picked up Affinity a few years back and haven't regretted it. I don't do graphics work enough to justify a subscription. Affinity's products hit a good price sweet spot of being affordable, and they're well supported.
I actually ended up more heavily switching to Krita though, just because I could install it on machines that weren't "mine" without worrying about the license, and it was enough for my purposes in most cases.
I also love Acorn on the Mac. It’s not as advanced as Photoshop, but I can do my layers, “curves”, selections, masks, etc. And I find the UI easier to manage than GIMP. I think it’s about $30 and you have to pay for major upgrades. I’ve paid twice I think in maybe 5 or 10 years.
Yeah the Affinity programs completely cover everything I used to do with the Adobe Suite. I'm not a professional designer but I often have to do small photo editing / vector design tasks and Adobe always felt like such a rip-off, especially once they switched to their subscription model. Very happy there is some competition in this space.
Corel painter has terrible UX, to the point where I deleted it from my computer after three hours attempting to follow tutorials. On Mac, I strongly recommend Pixelmator.
