What is currently most often recognized as 'Style' is making the same photograph over and over with some variations. This can be subject matter and/or set processing procedures.
By today's standards, Cartier-Bresson and Edward Weston may not have qualified: Weston would have to shoot nothing but nudes or peppers for a decade before his 'style' would be 'recognized. HCB would have to severely limit his subject matter since in our environment, 'moments' wouldn't qualify. Edward Steichen might have had to produce reams of gum bichromate prints (process being recognized as a 'style' in lieu of content) before acceptance arrived. When they were shooting, there were so few professionals shooting for photography's sake that they were far easier to stand out. Now, in an ocean of mages flowing from seemingly-infinite hordes of photographers and poseurs, very little, if anything other than extreme and/or blatantly-obvious commercial styling is easily recognizable.
In the fine arts world, photographs no longer need to exhibit any depth or skill: a clever theme of bullish*t 'explaining' what you're looking at will suffice.
If you don't require any plug-ins, and you're not a professional retoucher as well as photographer, yes: Affinity Photo provides all the core functions to make adjustments and refinements to your images.
For a 'fine art' photographer, if you're not making photographs for the same motives that brought you to photography as a medium after you begin to sell some prints, you're cheating your consumers.
Of course the 11 tax hikes (to try and make up for the extreme economic bleeding) that followed the tax 'cut' are religiously ignored by the followers of Saint Ronnie.
A lot more money? Wow, you found some good hallucinogens for New Years.
I already feel that storing images on live hard drives rather than some reasonably-stabile medium (such as DVD) is a risk on the verge of delusion. The EMP nightmare scenario, or destructive hacking rules out the cloud, but even local copies on hard drives would be useless without electricity, but at least the ones kept offline are impervious to hacking or massive cloud disruption. In the case of EMPs, all electric devices would be thoroughly ruined. No one would have any use of anything dependent on power.
What's not to like? Let me count the ways.
1) Instead of securely purchasing software for as long as your OS/hardware combination will support it, you are coerced into paying 'rent' for life.
2) Regardless of how inane and/or irrelevant the updates are, they are mandatory. They can also be intrusive and retrogressive. Myself and most professional users I know would upgrade every 2-3 years. After the introduction of layer masks and a functional liquify, the 'updates' are most often aimed at amateurs and narrow-market specialists. The subscription model is in no way less expensive. On the contrary, costs have nearly doubled.
3) You CANNOT suspend your subscription. Within a short period, your software will be deactivated. That means your own files cannot even be opened. For many, that means you're out of business.
4) Technical support from Adobe is, and has been, one of the biggest sardonic jokes in the industry. Try and talk to someone. The subscription model made no change whatsoever to this intolerable middle finger to the public.
5) Would you rather own than rent ANYTHING vital for your livelihood or creative life? The subscription model demotes users from owners to renters. We become digital serfs–forever beholden to their corporate 'largesse'.
The Leki pole looks ideal. The logic of a trekking pole which serves as a monopod rather than vice versa is unassailable. Thanks for the info.
The simplest means to determine if it's corruption is:
1) Quit Photoshop, go to your preferences (on the Mac: Hard drive - Users - 'Your name' - Library - Preferences - Adobe Photoshop CC Settings - Adobe Photoshop CC Prefs.psp).
2) Throw out the Prefs.psp file, relaunch Photoshop.
3) If the behavior has vanished, set up your prefs again.
3) If the offending behavior remains, quit again and throw out the entire 'Adobe Photoshop CC Prefs' folder. Restart your system. If the behavior persists, you will likely have to reinstall Photoshop, but corruption rarely is that severe.
Once I have a clean preference file setup, along with workspaces, color settings, etc, I always clone it and keep it elsewhere on my drive so that rather than go through all the motions, I can simply replace the file(s). Corruption is so common and frequent that this is a worthwhile step.
'Better build quality'. '2/3 of a stop faster'. Are you going to a war zone? Do you have money to throw out of your window? If not, the 1.4 is a unicorn.
As Quark's policies became more annoying and their customer service became increasingly obnoxious, they created the market for InDesign. Adobe's software design and strategy, while becoming increasingly greedy-grabby, is growing the market for CaptureOne Pro, On1 RAW and others. CaptureOne's RAW conversion has always been superior, and now it's cataloging features are looking like a viable alternative.
The subscription model was just the first phase of Adobe converting it's user base from independent consumers into digital serfs–forever dependent on their masters. Now we're expected to be comfortable entrusting our entire photo library in their keeping as well? Even with a local copy as backup, that's not for me.
The Wacom tablet has become more finicky than it was in the past, and demands a perfectly-matching driver with the operating system you're using. You failed to mention which tablet you're using and what operating system so there are extreme limits on what can be precisely recommended.
As a stopgap, if you need the brush at 100% opacity, go to your 'Brush' palette in Photoshop and uncheck the 'Transfer' function which informs the pen to utilize pressure sensitivity. Make sure you're brush is set to 100% opacity. It's a crude, temporary solution if you're in a jam, but it works.
Longer term solution: update to the current OS on your system, and then de-install the Wacom Driver (using the Removal tool in Wacom Utilities which you'll find in your Applications folder). Download the latest driver for your [unnamed] tablet, and install it. That should rectify your issues.
It's how they go about making that money that's the issue here. The subscription model disempowered users from being owners to perpetual renters: digital serfs. The 'updates' are so innocuous as to be little more than a feeble attempt at further justifying the cost. It's not for nothing that most professional Photoshop users upgraded every 3-4 years. After SmartObjects (2006), there's been no game-changing technology added, just more fluff.