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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.
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
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, fuck Adobe.
I'm a creative. I've used InDesign since version 1.0. I've built my career with Adobe tools.
Adobe Creative Cloud peaked around ten years ago. Since then, it's totally jumped the shark. I'm not even talking about the company, just the software and its features.
When I open InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator I'm trying to work. It's software I've used for, in some cases, 25 years. My point is, I know it inside and out.
The past few years, every new "feature" gets in the way of my work. Adobe has been changing things that already worked very well, or has added extra steps to do something that used to be easy.
Even worse, Adobe has started to fill its software with notifications that can not be disabled. Invasive blue dots. Invasive blue buttons. Invasive blue overlays that stay visible on the screen even when the software is minimized. Rich tool tips that aren't disabled by the option to disable rich tool tips.
Adobe has lost me as a devotee. It's been taken over by venture capital. The company only cares about adoption of new features.
Now, I use it out habit. Because my workplace provides it. Because it's what folks on my team are used to... but because they've come to the ecosystem so late, they only know a fraction of its capabilities.
If Adobe faces demise, I will mourn what if once was. But not what it has become.
Been using Photoshop since 3.0 released on windows. I knew when they went cloud that shit was going sideways, but it was the acquisition of substance painter that did them in for me. Even though CC was kind of a mess, instead of building on the value proposition and including substance, they decided to have it as a separate charge.
Fuck adobe. Fuck subscription software.
Fuck Adobe & their subscription model. I switched to affinity & never looked back
Same. Just waiting on a native Linux version.
Yeah, same. I hear using wine affinity kinda works, but if they release a native Linux version I can wave goodbye to microslop windows
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.
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.
I'm already an fl studio user, I was more interested in an audio editing program instead of a daw
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?
Good. Adobe is crap
Well deserved
Adobe has always been pricy. The tradeoff was that you were getting one of the best, if not the best piece of software for that nieche.
They have failed to keep their product the best while trying to lock in users with cancellation fees, which is going to backfire hard.
The only thing they can do to try and maintain dominance now is to go back to quality software that offers features that creatives want.
I mean, I use every alternative I can. Vapoursynth scripts, libraw-based projects, random GitHub repos, DaVinci…
But there are some features I just can’t get great support for outside of definitely-not-high-seas Lightroom Classic:
Good lens profiles for weird lenses.
Proper HDR PQ/HLG editing and AVIF/JXL export support.
RAW support for newer cameras, like my little R50V
I have yet to try DaVinci’s photo editing mode though. That’s very interesting.
We're in a mature software stage for these art software applications. Easier to catch up than create new features that people make essential to their workflow. Today it's commercial alternatives that have closed the gap well enough. Someday in the future open source stuff will. It's inevitable
