I am sick of trying to find good alternatives, and I really really want to install photoshop (have sub through work) but I really really _really_ don't want to install creative cloud.
@PeterFalkingham Is Gimp not up to the task? I ask because I also miss Photoshop, which I don’t have on my new computer, so I’m trying (but failing) to give Gimp a chance. I can’t work out if it’s just a learning curve I need to get over or if it’s fundamentally inferior.
@AdamStuartSmith @PeterFalkingham I grew up on the GIMP and have never found it a problem. The few times I've tried to use PhotoShop I found it clunky and awkward. My conclusion: they are probably pretty much equivalent, but it's difficult to make the sideways step in either direction. My advice would be to stick with it.
@mike GIMP lacks a lot of the advanced functionality I use like object selection and AI filters that are just miles ahead in Photoshop (miles ahead of almost anything, really).
In this case, what prompted my outburst was less than stellar ARW raw support in Affinity Photo. CameraRaw (part of photoshop/lightroom) is also hard to beat with FOSS software. Plus I think GIMP is slow and Ugly, but that's just me - give Krita a go, I find it the superior free bitmap editor.
@PeterFalkingham What does RAW support get you? I know photographers are always going on about it, but I just don't get it.

@mike Much bigger dynamic range, and more data to work with than a JPEG - so it's easier to brighten the dark areas or darken the bright areas of an image later, for instance. Basically, more info stored in the image than in a JPG or TIFF.

More complexly, it's the raw data from the sensor of the camera, before any processing or denoising etc is applied.

I don't often use them, but in this case I've got some sunset/snowy pictures I'd like to play with contrast and exposure on.

@PeterFalkingham Ah, hidden dynamic range in the dark areas is a pretty big win!