There have been many posts about Adobe’s aggressive and unethical updates to their terms of service. For many companies, like those in healthcare, use of Adobe products is now off limits. I don’t think an update to their terms can rebuild the lost trust. At the same time, most professionals have only ever used Adobe products like Photoshop and they may resist moving away. What reasonable alternatives even exist for each of Adobe’s major products? Are there any true equivalents?
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If/when I ditch Adobe, it will be for an open source stack.
I used Premiere for about two years but never liked it as much as Final Cut Pro X, so I'm back on FCPX for video now that I've got a better Mac to run it on.
FCPX and Affinity are both one-time purchases, which I appreciate.
It is also reasonably priced and no subscription.
1) Photopea (quite brilliant for most of the things photoshop can do)
2) paint.net for not too advanced edits
3) Krita
For After Effects:
1) Natron
2) BlackMagic Fusion
For Premiere Pro:
1) DaVinci Resolve
2) KdenLive
For Illustrator:
1) Inkscape
2) Graphite
Please note that most of these are not feature for feature replacements, but for the most part and most common tasks, they are very good offerings.
https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/
What about Corel products?
https://www.coreldraw.com/en/all-products/
I had enough with Adobe mostly due to cost. It's robbery to pay those prices for a tool she uses 3 times a year. I tried installing Krita for her and she struggled with everything. Couldn't find anything and just complained all the time. It occurred to me to try something else and Photopea is absolutely amazing. Wish I knew about it sooner.
Illustrator (used since 1990s) -> Inkscape, Krita
Photoshop (used since v3.0) -> Gimp, imagemagick, rembg
If I were doing loads of design work I would still prefer Adobe. However, I can use the above with a Wacom tablet on Linux and feel very productive. Linux largely allows scripting so I open Gimp a lot less then I used to use Photoshop, eg. due to imagemagick convert/mogrify, rembg, etc. Haven't used PS in a decade maybe. Haven't used Illustrator in a year or more. Hope that helps.
The poster child for this is easily the layers palette. It looks like a scrolling list widget like you’d find on any major desktop OS released in the past 30 years but doesn’t behave like one, with oddities like inability to multi-select. Instead, the user is expected to learn GIMP-specific behaviors that aren’t useful in any other program. There’s not really a good reason for this, aside for familiarity for existing users and while that’s an important thing to consider I’m not sure it’s worth impeding retention of new users.
I feel that people switching to another proprietary thing will just run into problems again in the future. It makes more sense to come up with a permanent solution.
I say that with deep regret not only because of the update to the terms of service, but because they are terrible OS citizens, downright user hostile in many situations and a monopoly.
I used to feel this way. And then I discovered their Spectrum design and React libraries. I use them in production. And I am a huge fan. I don't think anything like this exists. Opensource or commercial.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of UI libraries. But nothing has the breadth of coverage that Spectrum does, including design guidelines.
https://spectrum.adobe.com/https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum
And Spectrum 2 is expected later this year.
Their apps are such foreigners in their ecosystem that they make Electron apps look good by comparison. Also, Creative Cloud spreads itself over every folder it can touch, keeps nagging me to use cloud-whatever, fights me for auto launching and updating, etc.
That's what I meant as a bad platform citizen.
Affinity Photo for bitmap editing (which is vanishingly rare these days).
Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma.
Affinity Publisher for print design (aka when I need to update my resume...).
Instead of Adobe Stock, I use Pexels, or just generate a sufficiently generic image on ChatGPT.
Instead of Adobe Fonts, I just stopped being a web developer, ha ha. Google Fonts, of course, is one alternative.
I got rid of all Adobe products in 2019. Or so I thought. Last year, my laptop fan started going crazy, and the whole machine was heating up. When I looked at my processes, I saw that some little remnant of Creative Cloud had refused to be uninstalled through the regular process, had survived on my computer for years, and just at that moment decided to attack. Maybe it was trying to remind me why I hate Adobe.
Can you elaborate? I like Figma for its interface design capabilities, but feel like Illustrator has more complex vector design. Would you consider Affinity Designer as more similar to Illustrator feature-wise?
A practical example would be the "Divide" operation. This is the boolean operation that creates new shapes out of overlapping sections, for example if you had two partially overlapping circles and you used Divide on them, the result would be two pac-man shapes and a leaf shape.
Though it has Boolean operations like Union, Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude, Figma doesn't have Divide at all. Both Affinity and Illustrator do.
Divide is a really, really powerful step in building complex shapes out of simple ones, so when I need to use it, sometimes it's easier to just open up Affinity Designer, even if the rest of the design is in Figma.
Beyond this, Illustrator has a host of neat ways of working with vectors that neither AD nor Figma do. All kinds of warp actions, meshes, and a really nice system for recoloring shapes quickly. It's been 5 years since I opened it up, so I am probably forgetting a lot of important differences.
https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
After the first $49 purchase, I spent another $15 and then $19 on upgrades over the years.
It's very effective. The interface is extremely familiar if you're used to Photoshop, and it's wonderfully Mac-native.
I highly recommend it!