Gimme like $300+ per year, chump.

I had adobe Photoshop pirated for a while, butsomehow it shadow updated and adobe took away my access to using Photoshop without paying for it. That was for the most recent version of Photoshop. I guess adobe found out how to stop people from cracking the .exe.

There are a lot of great replacements for Adobe programs. If you're going to spend money, maybe try them out and then donate to the ones you like!

GIMP or Kita for video editing are solid, DaVinci Resolve is an excellent video editor, and now browsers like Firefox can edit PDFs! Adobe should get bent with their insane fees.
- *image editing (instead of the first instance of "video editing"), and you probably meant Krita not Kita
- I've found the free editors, including Firefoxs, will often treat an Adobe/AutoCad made PDF as a flat single image. Everything has been merged together. Adobe was the only thing that would let me still treat every line and box and text as individual.
  
  Any suggestions?
- I use and love gimp, but Photoshop does have great selection tools for easily removing backgrounds and objects. I can manually do it on gimp, but making the process easier is always nice.
Photoshop alternatives have been making some headway lately:

First, the one everyone knows, GIMP. And yes, it's a steep learning curve, and yes, it's incredibly frustrating. But it's feature rich and (last I checked) the most comparable to Photoshop in what it can do. If you're patient and willing to learn it, it can become a permanent FOSS replacement for you. If you use Photoshop a lot, I'd say this is very much worth the effort.

There's also PhotoGIMP which is an addon that revamps the GIMP interface to make it more user friendly for people that only know Photoshop. Think of it like a translator.

Other options are Photopea: browser based, but is useful for the basic stuff.

Darktable: don't know much about it, seems like it might be more of a Lightroom alternative, but I've heard good things.

And there's the rising star Krita: it was mostly for artists but they're branching out into more photography-based features lately. It's pretty robust.

There's also Affinity Photo 2, which is a true Photoshop alternative in that it's paid software, but it's a one time payment for a permanent license, like Photoshop used to be.
- Affinity just got bought by Canava. 1 time purchase license for now. But we will have to see !!!
  
  Yeah, that purchase worries the hell outta me tbh.
  
  Been using Affinity Designer and Photo for years, and happily paid for version 1 and the upgrade to version 2.
  
  Now, I'm worried they'll go for a new sub-based tier and limit features to the sub-version over the perpetual license, or hold features back for a version or two of the perpetual license version.
  
  Or the amount of AI-related bullshit they'll stuff the apps full of now, that will require a separate payment model for generation of images or fill-ins.
  
  Eurgh.
  
  Shit, really? I suppose that was inevitable but God damn it.
- I think GIMP is fantastic but when I bring it up I always get comments from people saying the UI "sucks", "makes no sense", is "backwards" etc. But they never say why. Is it the menu layout or something? I'm genuinely curious. I used Photoshop for many, many years before learning GIMP and I did find it confusing to begin with but it's a different piece of software. I had to learn Photoshop when I started using that too.
  
  You answered your own question. That learning curve, that confusion, you got over it because you're likely more technically minded and appreciate that new software requires learning new skills. Other people find that more frustrating than you and cannot get over it. This is especially true for people that don't use photo editing software all the time
  
  And to be fair to them, GIMP deliberately tries to differentiate itself from Photoshop. It is not at all concerned with helping people make that transition. Some people will make it, some people won't.
  
  I hate Gimp with passion not only because it has a clunky interface that never got better, but because it's unreliable with big files. I lost many hours of work when trying to do the incredibly complex act of choosing a different font, only to see it crash and burn and lose all the changes.
- I really like photogimp.Although I have been using standard gimp for so long I get a little confused on the ui here and there (I'm terrible at remembering keyboard shortcuts.) The biggest upside to Photoshop is that the tools really are top of the line and work more efficiently than gimp's tools.
I've been on the GenP "forum". They provide a lot of good resources and it worked for me.

Why bother? Adobe's pdf viewer is a bloated mess. It takes up a huge amount of space and processing power, and it constantly phones-home. It isn't something I'd want on my computer even if they were paying me to have it.

Alternative Take: There's some pretty damn good alternative software. Nothing is a drop in 1:1 replacement, but damn good options. You can easily edit a PDF with LibreOffice.

libreoffice suite got me through university!