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Luminar is a recent PS alternative, its ok but seems more for the iphone filter generation/mentality and just not really something i use nor is ps , i just dont need it most of the time, gimp is fine. I use none of these sort of things for astrophotography ever except maybe resize and save a jpg to use online. Pixinsight is my AP program of choice when I want accuracy and control in my stack, otherwise I use Astropixelprocessorwhich does an awesome job with little effort, When I tested is default workflow against the bestI could do with pixinsight (time consumingas it was) the result from APP was indistinguishable and I never really could get into StarTools but I guess I was just more comfortable with the complicated PixInsight. APP has plenty of stuff to configure but you really dont need to tweak anything and its pretty simple, you dont get forced into doing thing according to how a developer wants you to work. You can feed APP just a bunch of jpg lights and get a great result, you dont require darks flats or biases etc but if you take any or all of thou can add them in and it’ll make use of what it can where it can, doesnt tell you you needsome sort of frames and just abandon you. I think its a great first purchase (it is a purchase NOT a subscription) once you want to move on from DSS and if PI seems too complicated and expensive. I know others recommend other programs and they all have their merits, I bought a few but found they were good for certain ways of working and not flexible for me and I’m not flexible anymore .
Anyway look at Luminar for PS alternative. Its not a clone of PS features and does things differently but I think Gimp and paintshop pro are the most mature alternatives and have a wide communities to help you out.
For my real photography I use a leica camera and have it configured to my liking and so I can use jpgs straight from the camera most of the time and maybe just need something basic to crop/resize and save to jpg. For autocorrection prettification I use Photolemur. I don't Need photoshop and its never impressed me anyway, its “big” advances have always been taken from open source or shareware programs , they didn’t invent autofilling they just took something that someone else invented and stuck it in their program. Its overhyped software and not worth the cost they want IMHO.
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