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I've committed to just maintaining an "offline" mac for CS6 as on my 2016 Mac running Mojave I have _weird_ problems with visual artifacting using CS6.

I'm actually sad because I wanted to find a replacement that had:

- layers - Good text engine - good magic wand

I use Photoshop/Illustrator for very basic collage style works and those are the tools I need.

I was excited to try gimp, but it was slow enough on this Mac that I gave up. Inkscape is on the list, but my hopes are low.



Try Affinity Designer. It merges bitmap and vector tools. Works pretty good. And no subscription.


Affinity Designer is an excellent option. It’s way beyond what you would expect a $50 app to offer, and bests Adobe Illustrator in several areas.

That said, I think its low price point has started working against it. New releases come at a glacial pace, and a few broken features have literally had fixes in the works for years (expand stroke is the standout). When the last thing I bought from the company was a $50 purchase four years ago, I can’t really complain, but in retrospect, I wish Affinity had gone the Sketch route with an annual upgrade program. I’d like to pay more to see Affinity Designer advance faster, but presently there’s no option to do so.


Seconded. It's just different enough from Illustrator to be unsettling for the first few days, but the core of it is immediately and very obviously excellent. I persevered (it's vastly less money) and I'm very pleased I did. It's significantly smoother and faster in daily use than Illustrator (at least on my machine) and that counts for a lot for me. Updates are thoughtful and contain useful features. There's very little now that I actually have to work around and some parts of it are just intrinsically better - snapping candidates, for example.


I'm really liking it myself. Unfortunately I've got hundreds of hours wrapped up in making maps that I periodically update, and there's no good path to move them from Illustrator to Designer. PDFs move, but then every path comes over weird... And without the layers and groupings that are otherwise so helpful.


You should be able to open Illustrator files directly in Affinity Designer.


There's also Affinity Photo (their Photoshop competitor). It's not bad if you only need to edit things once in a while.


Also Corel Draw supports macOS now


Acorn is another option.


It's a pretty great option, I think! Acorn doesn't get as much press, but it's really powerful for its price.

Also, while people are even more likely to forget Graphic Converter since it first came out in 1859 or something (this may be a slight exaggeration, but my point is, it's been around a long time), it has some neat tricks up its sleeve. I sent business cards to a print shop that required CMYK PSDs by doing the work in Acorn and converting in Graphic Converter.


Try Affinity. Fast, actively developed and an affordable one time purchase.


Pixelmator is pretty great.


Pixelmator Pro, while not any more “pro” than the original Pixelmator, has a dramatically better interface in my experience.


Have you tried pixelmator? For me it has removed my need for photoshop.




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