Adobe photoshop (CC which I think is the newest version) is the most widely used by magazine publishers as well as many artists and studios. That said I have to say Adobe currently has a subscription based price model that goes month to month. In some cases this can be a good thing, however I do like having a phsyical copy installed on my pc as Adobe had recent issues with their cloud storage (it might be integrated into the service). I read elsewhere about a magazine who failed to meet their publishing deadline due to the service having an outage, and them being unable to access many in house created elements (as well as their concern about Adobe's data breach a few years back and them possibly having work stolen).

You could do the monthly trial for a limited or use to use basis. The other option would be Gimp for Windows. An Adobe alternate. There was a shop for Gimp which changed the front end of Gimp to sort of look like Adobe.

I've used previous versions of Corel Painter and that's nice too. I will say I'm only a hobby person, nowhere near as professional as many of the artists here. Hopefully one of them will provide a more detailed and helpful answer :)

The dust settled, thinking "what a fine home, at least for now" not realizing that doom would soon be coming in the form of a vacuum cleaner.