Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you: Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application. As a medium it has fundamentals, a

Right -- you have to know something that people don't ever tell you: Photoshop is a medium as much as it is an application. As a medium it has fundamentals, and once you know those fundamentals, you're not really chained to Photoshop. In my experience it's the occasional users of Photoshop who have the most trouble switching to anything else, because for them it is still icons and buttons and sliders and menu items they expect in certain places. If you've spent enough time with Photoshop and learned what is really happening, what blend modes are, how layers work deeply, switching is easier because it's much easier to recognise those same principles elsewhere. This, I think, is why Adobe has the predatorily priced Photoshop plan and is unwilling to put true power into Photoshop Elements (which was last a "cut down Photoshop" back at version 3.0 or so). They know that the underlying skills are portable.