What is the best photoshop alternative for windows?

I find your comments to be very dismissive and quite rude. I would you would try to be more open minded in future posts.

It is not the price that I have an issue with, my photography buisness is quite successful. I have actually been experiencing technical issues with photoshop that I cannot seem to overcome, which has cause financial difficulty. 

Since we are talking alternatives, I'll throw in a couple of other good ones:

For painting:

Krita, free and open source, and arguably beats Photoshop for digital painting in most areas (and Corel Painter in certain key areas). And the compositing part, layer stack, and general filter options aren't half bad either. Krita's layer stack pulls off some tricks which Photoshop cannot match, such as colorize masking, multiple layer masks per layer, and live cloned layers. Also animation is possible. My painting tool of choice nowadays, aside from ClipStudio.

Paintstorm is quite interesting as well. Sort-of a "Painter on the cheap", with some very nice brushes. Not very suitable for compositing tasks, however. But keeps up with Corel Painter in terms of creative brush techniques.

ClipStudio EX: industry standard drawing and painting tool in the East, and without a doubt some of the nicest "drawing feel" of all drawing apps. Really meant for comic creation and illustration, with powerful page management tools, and a number of excellent helper tools. Also supports animation, and outputs animation directly to OpenToonz (professional open source animation production package) for a high-level 2d animation production workflow. I absolutely love inking in this.

For layer based photo editing, retouching and compositing:

PhotoLine. Pretty much equivalent to Photoshop in regards to compositing, if not surpassing Photoshop in many areas. The layer stack is one level over Photoshop with its impressive non-destructive capabilities, and Affinity Photo can't really keep up in this area at all. Drawbacks are its old-fashioned painting tools and the user will need to find a secondary app for focus stacking or HDR stacking. On the other hand, it works really well together with other applications, and can serve as a primary image editing hub application. PhotoLine even does DTP, and can do things no other image editor is capable of because of this. If the race would be about complex non-destructive image compositing and editing alone, I'd say PhotoLine would win the 100 meter dash with Photoshop by half a meter, or so.

Corel Draw Graphics Suite is an oldie, but is a viable alternative with the inclusion of Corel Photo-Paint. Quite powerful, and although it's lagging behind Photoshop, still pretty good. Not the most inexpensive option, though. I'd probably just go with the Affinity line of products.

Now that I mentioned Affinity: Affinity Photo is a pretty good PS alternative, although its basic workflow is still missing quite a lot of expected core functionality, which can prove to be a frustrating experience. I have a license, yet I pretty much only use it to balance out a couple of missing features in PhotoLine. That said, it does deliver on many fronts, and it is still early in the game. And PhotoLine doesn't look nearly as attractive on the outside, which seems to be of major concern to some blinded by glossy varnishing.

With the forementioned software being quite capable, Photoshop Elements has become a bit of a tough sell for most compared. Elements can be 'upgraded' though with the purchase of a simple plugin, and then enters the realm of more higher level image editing: Elements XXL. This plugin exposes much of the missing functions compared to Photoshop image editing options.

Fusion: a direct competitor to Nuke for nodal based compositing, and the base version is (amazingly) completely free. The full version is incredibly powerful just like Nuke, but FAR more affordable (couple of hundreds instead of thousands of dollars). Fusion also mitigates the loss of animation capabilities in some of the products listed above. The free version is pretty awesome, and includes everything excepting a number of triple-A features. Nuke, eat your heart out.

Thing is, for about a year's worth of Photoshop rent ($120), one could equip one's toolkit with PhotoLine, Affinity Designer/Photo (both are on sale now), Krita, Fusion, Inkscape, Raw Therapee, Adobe Bridge/XNViewMP, and call it a day.

Not for everyone, though, of course. And one would miss the convenience of having good up to great level tools all in one application, rather than spread out across several ones, which requires a different pipeline, even if those tools may outperform Photoshop in their specific areas. Whether that is an attractive proposition or not depends on someone's personal preferences and work/hobby situation. And if tutorial support is important (and it often is), some of the mentioned alternatives have very little to help newcomers (looking at you PhotoLine).

Photoshop remains the best all-rounder-have-it-all-in-one Swiss army knife, with some caveats, but still.