Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif Ltd.  Its first version was available in 2016.

This immediately conveys a sense of business, from a conventional but easy to navigate interface and GUI font selection.

The most interesting thing is the adjustment layers and the ability to group them with layers. It’s a great way of non-destructive painting.

My original annoyance was that you could not see the layers and the brushes as they were on the same tab. But I found that the brushes could be floated and put to the side of the main window. This results in the best implementation I have seen of quick brush selection in a graphics program.

With the youtube tutorial videos I quickly came up to speed for 90% of what I knew in GIMP.

Due to the special half price sale, I got it. This is definitely better than GIMP and looks to be my main workhorse for graphics work.