I’m not a hardcore Lightroom/Photoshop user, but I have hundreds of RAW product photos that I need to cycle through a few times a year, and a few new ones to add whenever I make a new product. I long-since canceled my CS subscription because it wasn’t worth hundreds of dollars a year to me.

The artcraft versions are rough, but good enough for what I do. Mostly background removal, blemish removal, exposure and white balance adjustments. A professional’s mileage will almost certainly vary.

I’ve tried Gimp, photomator, a few others. The artcraft versions at least retain the muscle memory of the creative suite apps, whereas the alternatives all feel like I need to start from scratch to relearn their features, limitations, shortcuts, and quirks.

If Adobe had frozen features and offered a paid perpetual license pinned at a certain version I probably would’ve bought it.

I tried the Lightroom alternative, it was garbage, not even close to a replacement. They have spent decades fine tuning the smallest of features, you’re not going to replace that overnight.

I'm using it daily. It's not as good as Photoshop with brushes, the quick selection and masking features and the type engine is not as sophisticated. But for the simple edits I need to do, it is more than adequate.

I use it everyday- I don't need Photoshop anymore- its faster and does everything I need it to do- the only other "creative" artcraft app I've really tried to use is Filmcraft, the Premiere replacement but I'm still using Davinci Resolve Studio as Filmcraft isn't as far along as Photocraft but Davinci Resolve Studio is slow, bloated, can't customize the UI and barely has an API so I can't wait to dump it

Nobody uses it. It’s completely broken and was dead on arrival. It can’t even reliably save files. Maybe eventually it’ll get to a sort of working state, but I doubt it.

I think that’s one of the things that’s jumped out at me in this latest slop wave from the last few weeks. Part of releasing meaningful software is the time investment by the creator is at least the barest of assurances that it’ll get some kind of support going forwards. Obviously not always, but the bigger the scope the more likely that is I think. If somebody spends 6 months on a project then it means it was worth at least 6 months to them and I believe there’s a higher chance they will continue to support it.

With stuff like this, it’s unusable and unmaintainable, and it got crapped out so fast that the creator has absolutely no emotional or personal investment in it beyond the token costs. I’m not suggesting every project needs a minimum amount of time spent on it, but it’s certainly a factor in how I judge software now, and choose what I want to interact with.