Stock photo companies and photo software companies often have excellent forums. Here are two that I like.
Dreamstime forums. Dreamstime is one of my preferred microstock sites as both a designer and a contributor. You need to be a registered member to post, but you don't need to have had any images approved for sale yet.
Serif Affinity forums. They publish the superb and unbelievably inexpensive
Affinity Photo software (a competent replacement for Adobe Photoshop), as well as the equally superb and inexpensive
Affinity Designer (a competitor to Adobe Illustrator). They also have a desktop publishing program,
Affinity Publisher, in open beta; and a lot of inexpensive
add-ons for their software.
All of Serif's software is sold by outright purchase rather than subscription, and is frequently updated with bugfixes and new features. I don't know if there's a fee to renew the updates. If there is, they haven't billed me for it yet. Free trials are available for all of their primary products. I don't know about the add-ons.
Serif is an interesting company. They've been around for a very long time and have always had the same philosophy: Offer a small selection of excellent, but inexpensive alternatives to more expensive software, particularly imaging software. I remember using Serif Draw Plus in the late 1990's as my go-to application for simple drawings.
Serif has outdone themselves with the Affinity suite, however. They're now recognized as a serious threat to Adobe even for professionals. This is especially true if you're new to professional photography or design work and don't have an existing portfolio built with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and to some extent the no-longer-supported Fireworks.
I have hated Adobe's subscription model ever since it was introduced, and I hate Adobe even more for abandoning Fireworks. It was Affinity that enabled me to finally and forever cut my ties with Adobe. I highly recommend that you download the free trials of Affinity's software if you're at all serious about photography. I use it literally every day and think it's the best software bargain I've ever purchased.
And no, I don't own stock in Serif.
Adobe also has forums that are available to their customers, but I won't even honor them with a link because I despise the company. Other stock photo and
microstock companies also have forums available to registered users. Most don't require that you have any images approved yet because one of their purposes is to help new photographers get images approved. They're worth checking out.
Rich
