I don’t like Adobe, but you have to understand that their business is not selling software, it’s keeping people locked into their platform.
A rival being free matter not a jot when you’ve got decades of work in Adobe formats, and no end of experience with Adobe software. Especially when the company is paying for it all anyway.
Good, fuck Adobe.
After CS6 did Adobe started going downhill, beginning with subscriptions replacing paid licenses.
Currently using Krita, and sometimes Paint(dot)net for touchups.
People pay for Adobe?
Haven’t used PS in ages. Gimp, Audacity, Inkscape, etc
Gimp is still not an alternative to Ps. Not even close.
Depends on what you’re doing with it. For your average person it’s more than fine
Exactly
I hate these Mott and Bailey arguments.
The discussion was about professional use. Then you moved the goalposts.
Gimp is still not an alternative to Ps. Not even close.
I was responding to your comment specifically, which didn’t mention anything about professional use, and if you’ll re read it, you’ll find that I said “it depends on what you’re doing with it”, which even if you were talking about professional use, my statement perfectly aligns with your position. I even said to your average person (i.e. not someone using it professionally) it’s fine.
No need to get defensive and whip out terms from debate class, especially if the statement isn’t even a debate.
Most people don’t. There is a theory (and I don’t know if it was ever verified officially) that Adobe stuff was made so easy to pirate and crack intentionally. That way students and people learning how to use their tools (primarily photoshop) would master it and therefore force any employer they later worked with to get and stay with Adobe and their expensive enterprise licences. The lower the barrier of entry the more people in the workforce could be competent with it.
With how smartly evil these assholes are, I have no issue believing it.
My organization pays over $200,000 a year for Adobe products :( I swear most of it is just for the ability to edit PDFs
Not paying for Adobe, but tried out Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative and damn its UI just felt so unintuitive - many tools and menus were laid out by a different logic than the one I’m used to. Also it still doesn’t properly support CMYK colours from what I can see on their website.
Photoshop and Lightroom are what keep me with Adobe. The Open Source stuff simply doesn’t cut it for my needs.
I actually prefer Inkscape over Illustrator. I also still have a lingering fondness for Corel Draw, but I think that’s mostly because I started using it back in 89 when it released.
I also sometimes miss the simple days of learning to use a mouse with Dr Halo.
I mean isn’t it more of that the industry is just recognizing the war that Adobe started years ago?
full disclaimer all I’ve read is the damn headline
Good. Adobe is crap
A few years ago I replaced Photoshop with Affinity. Affinity’s user interface is pretty awful, even compared to Photoshop, but it does at least run a bit better. A few years ago I switched from premiere pro to da Vinci resolve, and though resolve has a bit of a learning curve, overall I think it’s better than premiere - it’s definitely faster and crashes a lot less.
I’m hoping that audacity 4 is a good enough audio editor to replace audition - we’ll see, audition is actually pretty good imo but I’d accept a slight downgrade if it means I can get away from Adobe entirely.
If you think Canva won’t pull the same shit Adobe does once they have the market dominance to do so, you’re deluding yourself.
The only future-proof, user-respecting, dignified alternative is FOSS.
Canva surely would become assholes if they had a monopoly, but it’s a loooooong way from “gaining some market traction” to “Adobe is defeated and powerless to compete”
If only gimp wasn’t garbage… Tbh I’m also kinda wondering how Affinity did pull off the move they made with their 3 programs turning into one, at the same time redoing so much of it.am And why foss can’t do it.
Of course there’s money and closed source is probably messier in a lot of places than foss is (or at least targets to be), but is that it?
Unironic question: is it possible to explain to a non-artistic, non-graphic-design techie like me what makes GIMP so inadequate? I hear this refrain a lot but have never heard an explanation for why it falls SO short that it’s not a viable alternative for most people.
A few years ago I tried putting text on a path (think “curvy text”). First tried gimp, quit frustrated after about a hour. While at some point I “kind of” got it to work, it looked like shit. Then I opened photoshop, was done in about three minutes. Note that I never did it before in photoshop nor gimp.
Luckily, nowadays I just open photopea whenever I would have used photoshop in the past. The fact that one single guy built a better photo editor than gimp should tell you everything.
The UI feels quite haphazard, it doesn’t follow the same approach to UI like other drawing tools and it feels like it’s trying to reinvent the wheel when people are already used to certain areas on the screen being used for certain things, and personally the UI scaling looked quite rough last I looked at it. It just gave me the vibe of a programmer made tool to have something graphic to edit things rather than one a designer spent time r&d-ing from the bottom up.
It’s been a long time since I last used it so I don’t remember specifics, but I found really basic stuff that would take a couple of seconds to do in photoshop were a lot more difficult in gimp. Krita is better…
Was it more difficult or just unfamiliar? Like, if you’d given it a couple of weeks maybe it would have become intuitive? Or was it just bad UX?
I use gimp at least weekly. The UX isn’t great imo, but I’m used to it now, and I’m sure Photoshop would boggle my mind. It also has improved quite a bit in the past years.
I know its not realistic, but I just imagine how great GIMP would be if people donated just 1/20th of what they pay Adobe to the GIMP devs.
Same with LibreOffice vs Office.
We are really missing out on some potentially fantastic software so that a few people can be in the centibillionaire club and it makes me sangry
I know that’s true about more than just software, but the way to “fight back” here is so easy and low risk compared to fighting the other cartels that farm us for $$. It is as easy as not using their products and services if there is a viable alternative that respects your humanity.
it’s difficult to tell if it’s bad ux or unfamiliarity when you’re good at using one and not the other, and not really worth the effort when switching to krita was easier.
Have you tried Reaper daw? I’ve been using it for years at this point. It has a free unlimited lifetime demo, or you can pay them $60 for a lifetime license.
It’s not a lifetime license though. The license is valid for one major release meaning if you buy now, at v7.69, you’re covered for the last v8.x release.
You are correct. It’s been so long since I bought my license it feels like a lifetime. I checked the website and if you buy now it’s valid up to v8.99. That could be years from now. I bought my license in 2020 at v6.05. 6 years is extremely generous considering the software subscription environment we live in today.
I’m already an fl studio user, I was more interested in an audio editing program instead of a daw
Oh, you can edit audio with it.
Affinity is good, and runs OK on Linux with recent versions of wine. Resolve is very good. A credible alternative to Premiere, though Fusion isn’t all that compared to Ae.
Ardour is great right now. As is Reaper.
Awful? I’ve found it so much nicer, especially with how seamless moving across their suite was before they made it a single app
I had to use Google to work out how to crop to a rectangular selection on affinity 2. Not sure about affinity 3. I was also really unhappy with the ‘personas’ UI pattern which locks away different photo editing tools into whole parallel universe user interfaces. As a new user it just looked like those features were missing and I had to Google again. It’s not hard to learn but my first impression of the software was googling to work out how to do things that are obvious in any other image editor. Maybe it’s better in affinity 3?
Reaper for DAW if you’re okay with a learning curve.
I’ve been using Affinity since 2016 and it has been a good decision so far. Since Affinity Publisher also replaced InDesign (Affinity Designer had already been sufficient for most things), I retired my old CS5.
At work I introduced the programs to my bosses; afterwards all the computers were switched to Affinity, and none of my colleagues miss the old Adobe stuff.
Only one old machine still has an old CS version installed, just for checking and viewing legacy files — it doesn’t cost anything anyway.
Swapping out one proprietary app for another is just delaying the inevitable.
Sometimes buying yourself time is a valid strategy, as long as you understand that it is only a delay and not permanent.
Fair, but why not put energy into learning to use the FOSS tools now instead of getting used to another interface that will eventually betray you?
Is there a light room equivalent
The most fitting app from my point of view would probably be “Dark Table.” I tried it once but found it a bit too complicated for my needs. I’m not sure whether it offers the same feature set as Lightroom these days.
Pretty much does, they’re adding object selection masking as well in the next version
Maybe not a good look to go “AI! AI! AI!” when the actual creatives who use the product get attacked for using AI:
good
Anyone who knows if I can migrate a huge old light room library. I closed my subscription about 3 years ago and my library has just been sitting there since. All my eddits should be saved in sidecar files but there is probably other stuff saved in the library that could be useful. I tried darktables back then, but I kinda dropped photography as a hobby so never looked much into it. I want to pick it up again some time soon tho
I’ve been using darktable for about a month now, way better than the bank Photoshop raw editing I’ve been doing in the year or so since I started actual photography.
Been a while but last I checked it’s unlikely you can, editing software isn’t really an open system, and while they might use the same sidecar file that doesn’t mean you can get the same edit from one in the other. Best option is exporting as high res TIF files and calling it a day.
'bout time
Good
Obligatory comment: we’re never getting that hbomberguy video
I choose to believe, one day he shall return
I’m ready and waiting for a viable alternative to indesign but I haven’t seen one yet
Have you tried Affinity Layout (formerly Publisher)?
Unfortunately, until it fully integrates with a Photoshop equivalent and an Illustrator equivalent, it won’t be able to replace InDesign.
That’s why Adobe beat Quark. Their layout tool integrates so seamlessly with their raster and vector image editing tools.
until it fully integrates with a Photoshop equivalent and an Illustrator equivalent
If you weren’t aware, that’s Affinitys top feature. The new version is one app that can seamlessly switch between Vector, Pixel, and Layout modes without changing applications. It’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign rolled into a single application with dedicated workflows for each.
That gives me pause. And it’s not quite what I said.
When you try to integrate everything into the same application, you have to make compromises. Even if they have separate workflows, you’re not optimizing a tool for a specific use. You’re creating something general-purpose.
InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator are separate applications. That allows each to fully specialize in what it does best. And each one does a hell of a lot of things that would simply bog down the other two applications.
The applications need to integrate with each other. But no single application can be excellent at literally everything.
Edit: oh, Affinity is made by Canva? Yeah, I’m not touching that shit. No reason to trade one evil empire for another.
1st. Affinity is not one application that does all, but three specialized application that integrate tightly.
2nd. Affinity is made by Serif, which was bought by Canva. Serif has been around since the age of diskettes, making affordable pro graphics software.
