At this point I intend to avoid Adobe's services for the rest of my life. If I ever feel like I need Photoshop or Illustrator I'll find an alternative. There are a lot alternatives to these, both open source and proprietary from small businesses.
As a multi-decade Photoshop user, I find Affinity unusable. I know it comes very highly rated, but my muscle memory is so ingrained that I don't think I can make the switch. Not a single thing worked the way I'd expect, and trying to adapt to it was hours of constant digging through forums to do the most basic things, like move the canvas.
I started using Krita instead, and it's a good replacement without being so utterly different.
I use Linux but I'm mostly content with Gimp and Inkscape.
I know Photoshop have some "content aware fill" and things but that's just their re-branded name for neural networks that are already open source, it's just a matter of time before it's available in Gimp. I might even consider writing those plugins too but my time is limited.
There has been a GIMP plugin for this for a long time - no idea how the quality compares to Photoshop's content aware fill though:
https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer
I thought the big problem is that gimp uses only rgb color encoding, which is fine for non-print, but if you want to print something professionally you need at least cmyk.
RGB color in Gimp is fine for me because I only use it for photo processing, and cameras shoot in RGB so you aren't losing any information by doing your photo processing in 16-bit or higher RGB.
You can do color space conversions to CMYK after that stage.
On an interesting side note, realistically though, I've found the vast majority of people I've had to work with don't understand the difference between RGB and CMYK and just want "PDFs" and don't necessarily let me choose or interact with the printing agency directly, or the printer is some friend's wife's father's friend's friends' friend's company on WeChat that is going to be doing the printing at 1/10 the cost of every other commercial printing agency out there and they've chosen to use that company and it would look silly of me to suggest to use a company that costs 10X more just so I can get proofs. In those cases, I've found that if I don't have access to proofs, these days, RGB PDFs often seem to get more consistently rendered than CMYK PDFs.
Yeah if you need to work in CMYK you're kind of stuck. Personally, if I needed to do a lot of print work then I'd pick up an old Mac and an old license for Photoshop CS6.
PDF editor? I have always regarded pdf as a terminal file format, the place data goes to die. Only half joking but pdf was always the final form from some other program, the internal editable data was never pdf. I have never seen a program works on the pdf directly, Probably because I have never had that much exposure to adobe software. the few times I have needed to do so I had to use a pdf programing library.
If you mean desktop publishing software that outputs a high quality pdf scribus works fairly well.
thank you for the link, never came across scribus before!
When I deal with government documents, visas, etc. I frequently need to produce 200-page PDFs that contains bank statements, utility bills, or other documents that arrived as PDF or were scanned into PDF. Some of those were scanned upside down, and then you might need to compress or split the resulting doc because of file size limit. So I need serious PDF editing software to deal with this - converting from PDF and back ruins all the official documents and leads to problems.
If you don't need to edit the actual text or content of the document there's a lot of tools like pdftk and ghostscript that can flip, resize, compress and split PDFs.
If you're on a Mac then the built-in Preview app works pretty well for this type of thing. The only problem I've had with it are accessing signed PDFs from AWS SOC2 attestations.
