- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
You must log in or # to comment.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Oh, you can edit audio with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reaper for DAW if you’re okay with a learning curve.
Good. Adobe is crap
'bout time
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.
Interesting to read. Since I never used Adobe products much (aside from PDF) I can only notice the parallels: it’s not only there.
It’s everywhere.
Even excel is a hot mess when doing basic things like scrolling and it redraws a. Simple worksheet. Everything has degraded to total inefficiency.
A software giant like that can only go two directions:
- suck the installed base tit for paychecks while cutting costs as much as possible
- grow, innovate, expand
They are still trying to be 2 when a lot of people would like them to be 1, and they have to show new feature adoption statistics to prove that all their expensive employees are still worth paying.
See, that’s a false dichotomy.
Modern corporate America demands expansion and growth. But expansion and growth do not need to be required for innovation.
That’s where Adobe is a victim of the vulture capitalists who’ve taken it over.
Both of them can grow profits, which is what’s demanded. Yes, investor demand for constant growth is the pressure that causes it, but the dichotomy is all too real.
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” is my near-daily mantra. I actually utter it out loud at least once a day, if not more. I used to teach PS and worshipped at the temple of PS. These days, FUCK ADOBE!!! I cannot wait for ANYTHING to replace Photoshop/Adobe. Adobe MUST die!.
I was like the other commenters in the thread, but I grew up on even somewhat liking Gimp (yet with PhotoGIMP plugin). It’s good enough for me, and in some places it’s even better. All I want from it is to have a bit better UX here and there, but that’s not too critical.
Consider supporting ArmorPaint. It’s not a full Substance replacement yet, but it’s affordable and evolving well.
yeah I haven’t spent any time with it for about a year, it’s time to circle back. Thanks for the reminder.
We can always use older versions. I stayed in cs6 until I migrated full FOSS
Not if it’s for work, generally speaking.
As someone who has a full FOSS stack, can you explain to a non-graphic-design techie like me why people are so allergic to the FOSS alternatives? I just don’t know enough about design to understand why people will put up with so much abuse from Adobe when there are completely free alternatives that are not weighed down by AI and actually respect your privacy.
Because I spent an hour trying to figure out how to make a clipping mask in GIMP recently, gave up, loaded Windows and Illustrator, and did it 35 seconds.
This is a real answer
Allergic? No. Need certain features for my work that FLOSS software either doesn’t have or takes a lot more hassle to achieve? Yes.
It’s because Adobe truly does have the best feature set. It’s partly because they spent so many years building good software, and partly because they own patents that prevent other tools from operating in some of the same ways.
Adobe applications are interoperable. I can seamlessly move content between them. They all have the same interface and work in basically the same way. I can (and have) put together a 300 page book while taking advantage of many advanced automations. And back before Adobe went to shit, they really did put a lot of effort into making their interfaces intuitive.
And when you have 25 years of muscle memory dedicated to a set of tools, it’s REALLY difficult to completely replace your whole tool set.
Dude, you keep asking this question throughout the post and I don’t think you’re going to get an answer that satisfies you.
The short answer is industry inertia and professionals not realizing the amount of power they gave away to toolmakers of their profession through the computer age.
Long answer is most people use these tools to work and the vast majority of paid professional work doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is, in fact, a team effort. So that effectively sets the floor and ceiling for use and adoption. Remember, most real people who get paid real money don’t give a shit about which software package or which version of whatever-the-fuck. In fact, they’d rather most of that bleed away so that they only have to think about what they got hired to think about. Also Bob the CISO really fucking hates anything that ends in .py.
That is the most satisfying answer yet.
Sorry for soapboxing. I get a little spicy when discussing intellectual property rights.
Adobe faces demise, I will mourn what if once was
What wait? You can mourn what it was even now. 🤷♂️
While their boot is on your throat, it is difficult to mourn what your oppressor used to be.
I agree. Try telling them this. They just gaslight you. “We can’t replicate this issue.” Always blaming your device.
Have you tried Gimp and Inkscape?
Neither was worth the time it took to uninstall them when they proved almost unusably inferior to the industry standards.
These things are the standard for a reason, OSS hobbyists who are not graphic designers or admin workers generally will never be able to make something that is in the same league for the exact same reason that I couldn’t build a compiler better than the industry standard one, even if I technically had the coding skills to make it, because I haven’t spent decades using one professionally, so I wouldn’t know what an industry pro would want from it.
The great thing about open source is that it’s generally developed by people who use it. Proprietary software is just developed by people who get paid by someone who’s just doing it to make a profit…
Then that’s even worse, because the design of the OSS “alternatives” to everything I use daily for work screams “hobbyist who just needed the basic functions of a word processor and spreadsheet editor for school”.
Wow, imagine an .ml trying so hard to go to bat for corporations and proprietary software. Hilarious…
I hate that it is the way it is, but OSS “alternatives” are not serious tools for professionals. That said, I’m 100% in favor of nationalizing Adobe and Microsoft, since they’ve created a world where only their tools are good enough to do the job, but that’s not the conversation we’re having here.
Here’s a simple test: take all formatting out of a copy of Ulysses or some other doorstopper of a classic novel so it’s just a giant wall of text. Give two publishing pros each a copy of that wall of text, have one turn it in to a publishable book using the industry standard tools and one do the same task with the OSS “alternatives” and see who’s done first, and which version is the better looking final product.
Wanna place any bets?
I think your argument is a little outdated because libre software has come a long way in the past few decades. I couldn’t imagine not being able to turn a manuscript into a publishable product with FOSS software in the state they are today.
If your argument is that it would take longer because someone has to relearn the interface, that’s just because they’re used to one and not the other. If it’s because they prefer features that the other doesn’t have, that’s just preference but easily circumvented.
The only other way I could see there being a difference is because of patented features, but that’s a discussion that’s already been had in this thread. And it’s not about open-source developers being in any way worse than closed-source developers.
Or Krita
Is krita closer to gimp or inkscape? How does it compare/contrast to that one?
I find it to be a useful blend of Gimp and Photoshop.
Does it do bitmaps or vector images? Or both?
Gimp and Inkscape are excellent programs, I LOVE them. But, they are not Adobe replacements.
Why is that? Is it just the user interface? Performance? Or are they missing features that you need?
Please explain to non-artist techies like me why? I keep hearing that refrain but no one can ever explain to me what these FOSS alternatives are actually missing that keeps people from switching.
Based on my experience with Office -> LibreOffice I have to assume it’s some combination of laziness about learning something new, “the interface looks old” nonsense, and being unwilling to work through bugs/quirks (even though Office has plenty of its own bugs/quirks - they’re just different from LibreOffice’s and again, people don’t want to learn something new).
Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Specifically, what makes Photoshop not just better than GIMP, but SOOO MUCH BETTER that people are willing to give their money to bourgeois a-holes for the privilege of running software that they will never truly own, that spies on them, that injects unwanted AI into everything, etc.
Inkscape and Gimp developers, although busy, have still implemenyed some of my feature requests. That’s less likely with Adobe. If there is something you need in the open source ones, it’s likely already on their list to do. If not, request it.
Well, as I stated in a sibling comment, Gimp did replace Photoshop for me. I’m a semi pro user for two decades. My only issue is with its UX, but PhotoGIMP helps a great deal here.
Yes.
How do they compare, in your experience?
They are better than they were. But they are still at least 10 years from being able to match Adobe software - partially because we need to wait for Adobe patents to run out, so that other software can replicate an intuitive software experience.
Ugh, nothing “intuitive” should ever be patentable. Can you imagine if “horizontally-ruled paper” was patented? Or “handles on cooking pans,” “shirts with two sleeves,” or anything of that sort?
Like, why should anyone have to avoid an obvious feature just because someone else did it first? It’s insane.
Also, FOSS projects and non-profits should be exempted from patent restrictions.
I think my CS6 - the last non subscription Adobe Suite from 2012 - is still more intuitive and better to use than the newest GIMP version
Can you elaborate on this? The first time I hear there are patents regarding some intuitive interface. What is that?
Even if so, why not replicate the best of all similar apps, Affinity and Pixelmator too.
Not interface. Experience.
Do a quick web search and you’ll learn all about Adobe patents on features.
All I could find is some statistical overviews without much detail, and a more list of recent patents which are all related to AI.
Is there a specific feature that you wish was in the others? I don’t really understand the difference between UX and UI
What do you mean? I have no idea what to search for. I’d appreciate some links, or some unfolded explanation. Can you patent features? Sounds a bit absurd.
Can I patent booting the OS from a USB drive? That’s a feature, isn’t it?
Fuck Adobe & their subscription model. I switched to affinity & never looked back
Same. Just waiting on a native Linux version.
good
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
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.
“go back to quality software” that sounds expensive! How about we cut our users’ legs, so they can’t run to the competition?
’ - Adobe Executives
Hurt myself laughing at that last line. Are you doubting the mighty power of enshitification? Are you the last true believer in corporate quality?
Maybe not a good look to go “AI! AI! AI!” when the actual creatives who use the product get attacked for using AI:
Well deserved
