Is photoshop still the big dog? Should I continue using my version from 2012 and risk getting sued or should I move to some alternatives? If so, which?
Is photoshop still the big dog...
Photoshop is malware and only works on malicious operating systems.
I would suggest some colored pencils and a pad of paper. It won't beg you for cloud subscription and doesn't have any problem drawing circles.
the newer ones have some nice features but you're not really missing out on anything dramatic
Install Krita
Yeah I have the latest Photoshop because I consider CC to be cheap enough that I don't care, but it's really not that different from CS6. I wanna say Perspective Warp is a new feature but I can't recall off-hand.
You have nothing to worry about in terms of lawsuits unless you're a fortune 500 company or somehow somebody finds out what program you're using and snitches on you to the Adobe gestapo
Give the Affinity trial a try.
Personally I couldn't get into the UI and workflow, but if you can it is a great, more affordable alternative to the subscription photoshop bs.
>or should I move to some alternatives?
It really depends on what you're doing.
For all we know you're using it to only crop images.
Krita is pretty good for painting.
Lots of people swear by PaintTool SAI for painting as well.
GIMP and paint.net are free if you only need to do simple image manipulation.
Lots of other shit for specific niches.