[DeKay]

Ive been using Affinity Photo on my 12.9” iPAD Pro in the field for some time now.
Prior to iOS13 it was a PITA to get the RAW photos from the camera into the iPAD, but with iOS13, I can put the SD card in an adaptor, copy to files on the iPAD, then access with Affinity for RAW processing even before I get back to the office.
And I’ll be honest with you, it took a little time to figure out where everything is, but its all there.
I haven’t even fired up Photoshop in the last 12 months! Don’t miss it at all and haven’t missed lugging around a laptop either.

And here’s the real kicker, Affinity Photo opens, edits and saves photoshop format. So you still have access to all your old files without having to pay Adobe for the privilege.

[kevinWE]

I'm a long time use of PS. I see no reason to go elsewhere as of now. The price is reasonable on my budget, but I do understand others may be on tighter budgets.

I have Aftershot Pro 3 and Corel Paintshop Pro on my PC, but rarely use either.

[Take-5-JB]

I use DCU5 to convert to jpeg or tiff. I have Corel Paintshop Pro 9 Ultimate and use the 64bit version on my PC with Win 7 (came with 32 & 64 bit, & Aftershot). I am going to check out RawTherapee. I have a MacBook Pro but I still do the processing on my PC. I don't do as much in depth post processing as I read about on here. I do some sharpening, denoising, minor color, cropping, minor artifact removal (dust spots, gnats, etc), and resizing. The stitching and overlays, etc, are not in my bailiwick at this time.

JB

[ashurbanipal]

I'd like to know how many people are like me, and when Adobe went to the subscription model I went straight to FOSS. First tried Darktable, then ended up with RawTherapee. Took a while to get used to, but a full-featured package for $0 is a bit better than $120+ a year, with increases whenever Adobe feels like it.

You can count me in that category. I remember doing a trial of LR a long time ago and thought it was decent although far from perfect, but they've likely addressed most of those issues by now. My main problem with it was I also wanted to move away from Windows and, since a Mac wasn't really in the running, Adobe simply wasn't a contender. I also had a lingering mistrust of the company after running into issues with an upgrade to Acrobat Pro and incompatibilities with other previously-purchased Adobe products, so I decided they weren't really for me. I ended up using a combination of Digikam and darktable for the most part, with Hugin for stitching. I never really warmed to the interface in RawTherapee, although it certainly produces wonderful conversions and is quite powerful. Probably need to spend more time with it, but for now I'm just happy to have options.

[BigDave]

I have been using PSP for years and find it great. Photoshop had much more than I ever needed, and when they went to subscription model for pricing, that sealed their fate for me. I HATE recurring charges to my CC! How soon before their financials get breached?

PSP, now on 2020 Ultimate, and I like the ability in the RAW converter to do White Point recovery, excellent tool (and not sure this is done in PS).

[Urs]

Using Lightroom and Photoshop combo and am happy with it.

[Liney]

I guess I'm just too stingy to pay for anything, and too distrusting of applications that use the cloud or any form of on-line processing, so I like to keep everything on my computer where I can keep an eye on it. Hence my current suite of software includes Gimp, RawTherapee and Darktable, all of which I use with various degrees of skill at some point of another.

[WorksAsIntended]

I used Lightroom and Photoshop but just switched to darktable and gimp.
It is not about the pricing modell, I am used to pay for much more expensive software, but due to performance. Lightroom (classic) in my opinion is much oversimplified these days and misses a good plugin api.
Performance is a joke, I am running a 10k€ workstation which I update about every two years and still get bad performance. Darktable (which also supports Gnu/Linux which I prefer over Windows, on multi socket systems even more) on the other hand runs really quickly and I got no issues at all. I can get every plugin I need and get a much more customised workflow.
It needs a bit more time to setup, as out of the box it propably is not setup the way users want it (mutiple plugins basically doing the same etc), but after that it is just better for me.
Learning raw development on the other hand might be much easier in Lightroom, just because you can easily start with low knowledge and find a hell lot of tutorials, on of those propably fits anybody.

[newmikey]

I've actually never had to make any decisions. I use everything available and ever since I made the conscious switch to Linux back in the Dark Ages (2003 or so) I used whatever was compatible with that OS. Ever since, Gimp (CinePaint for 16 bits back then) has grown from clunky yet capable to extremely powerful - especially with GMIC thrown in and we are spoilt for choice with raw converters. Whereas I started out with DCRAW in scripted mode, went on to UFRaw, I now use both RawTherapee as well as Darktable. Digikam has become my DAM of choice.

I'm afraid the commercial software companies such as Microsoft or Adobe never made a penny off me and I contributed plenty to all kinds of open source initiatives over the years in the form of donations, bug hunting and testing, translations and support to noobs. So I consider that my cost of ownership.

Nowadays, and especially with Pentax raw files to work with, I feel F/OSS seems to even deliver more power than the more traditional offerings.