After 6 months, I've had to resubscribe to Adobe PS. I work with too many people who send me PS files and there is no alternative that can open and save them reliability. It sad how many "helper" apps Adobe installs and how often they try to connect to the internet. I block them all, but it's scary. I have to unblock them every 30 days. Please do not suggest alternatives unless you know for a fact they load and save .psd files seamlessly. Do not suggest GIMP or I block you.
@grumpygamer If you're happy enough with psd to continue accepting them, and people are paying you to work with them, then you could just continue to pay for PS or, ya know, pirate it, since Adobe is perfectly fine with exploiting their userbase.
If for some reason that doesn't sound peachy, SAI and CSP have worked with psd files just fine for me. Obviously if you're looking for specific features that only photoshop offers, you're not going to find an interchange format for those, probably.
Definitely look into different interchange formats than psd though, and if the artists you're working with refuse to send you work in a different format, then... find different artists who know enough about digital art to work with different formats.
@grumpygamer Affinity loaded and saved all my psd seamlessly. Even with hundreds of layers and adjustment layers. But then, they are bought by canva now so... soon they'll be adobe 2.0
@grumpygamer My PS installation is a still working CS5 on a Mac born in 2006, which I expect to die in the foreseeable future. I've bought affinity as replacement for all my graphical needs, and so far it does the job. PSD files are opened and exported without trouble, but I haven't tested thoroughly with text layers. The other program importing PSD is TVPaint, a great animation software which likeley is of no use for you.
@grumpygamer as a massive FOSS advocate who's used Linux as a primary O/S for 20 years, and as somebody who's built a career working with designers... I can confirm there's sadly no true Photoshop replacement, sorry. 🤷♂️
There are a lot of great tools out there, and I personally do find Gimp (please don't block me 😆) more intuitive for many things, but Adobe are masters of adding regular changes to a proprietary file format and making other tools' importers look terrible. They've won the market.
@grumpygamer Try to get them to send you TIFFs. I haven’t found much that can’t be put into a layered TIFF file. I’m sure Adobe is testing the limits, though.
@grumpygamer I had a bunch of psd files that broke GIMP and Pillow - IIRC they used extra alpha channels. I think the psd-tools python package was able to extract the data I wanted, but it was still a pain.
@grumpygamer ImageMagick can save PSDs to other formats, including exporting separate layers. I've only used it as a command line tool though, not sure about the GUI experience.
@grumpygamer Since you're a Mac user, you probably know Pixelmator Pro, right? As an Ex-Photoshop user it's a fantastic replacement for me (even uses many of the same shortcuts), it can import and export .psd files, and it's a onetime pay: https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/
@grumpygamer yeah :-( I have decades of muscle memory for PS yet I’d be willing put in the time to learn other tools to avoid Adobe. But the lock-in from exchanging files with others is the thing that would make the attempt pointless. I wish there was a way out!
@grumpygamer I literally cancelled my subscription today (they increased the price again?!) Currently I'm winging it with Affinity + Clip studio, but I then don't have anyone sending me .psd files, which is much easier. But yeah, currently, I don't think there's any real alternative.