A new and mandatory terms of service approval for Adobe Creative Cloud requires users agree to the company getting free access to users' projects, for whatever they want to do with it. That's unacceptable.
Time to switch to Linux 😁👍 (there are plenty of Adobe alternatives for it,
Unfortunately this is not really true. I think people who say “just use GIMP” have only ever used PS to open and crop images. Inkscape is also nowhere near Illustrator, and Scribus feels more like QuarkXpress circa 1998 than a viable InDesign replacement.
I have to agree. I’ve used a great many software packages over the years, but having been given an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription by my university, as several of Adobe’s programs are required for the degree I’m doing, I’ve been very annoyed to discover that the alternatives really aren’t on the same level. They work, sure. You can get the job done with them. But I am genuinely finding Photoshop to be significantly more powerful than everything else I’ve used. And it’s really annoying because I’ve never liked Adobe as a company.
The only apps I’ve used that come even remotely close are those by Serif/Affinity, but even they don’t have feature parity. They were also just bought out by Canva and will likely become fully enshittified soon.
The one thing I’ve been dissatisfied with Photoshop for, in comparison to another app, is its traditional media analogues do not come even close to Painter’s, and I’ve not been able to get any brushes set up in a way that replicates them. There’s professionals that use Painter in addition to Photoshop because of that, and I expect I will as well - but I really notice the features missing that I use a lot in Photoshop.
Been a while since I used Krita, so it’s hard to compare Krita from 3 or 4 years ago with Photoshop 2023, but it was okay. Better than GIMP, but unless there’s been some major changes, it doesn’t have anywhere near the versatility in tools and filters as Photoshop.
This feels like the key difference between Photoshop and the others. There’s an awful lot of stuff that previously I would have to do manually, sometimes over several hours, that Photoshop can do in seconds, either because there’s a tool or filter for it, or sometimes just because Photoshop is so much more responsive. This is really hard to quantify in an objective way, far more so than pointing out whether a feature is present or absent, but… I use an art tablet and Photoshop just responds to the pen better.
So like it’s not really that it’s impossible to do amazing work with the free apps, it’ll just take a lot longer. I liked your analogy in your other comment, about the e-bike vs pickup truck: you definitely can move that half a ton of crushed stone with an e-bike, but it’ll be quicker and less work with a pickup truck.
This is just even more justification to use alternatives. If a mass migration to alternatives occurs, those apps will flourish and more dev time can be arranged via new devs interested in volunteering or outright being employed to meet demand.
Adobe is only so big because of their userbase. Migrate that userbase to a less cancerous set of applications and the userbase stands to benefit greatly.
That would probably work for hobbyists, but I have my doubts that professionals, who rely on Adobe products for their livelihood, could use unsuitable software for years in the hopes that volunteer devs will eventually add the features they need. In the other post about this topic, someone commented that GIMP’s devs are refusing to fix problems that are repelling new users, which is not going to encourage Adobe users to make the switch. GIMP still doesn’t have fully functioning, reliable non-destructive editing, which is 100% essential for anyone beholden to a boss or client who is going to change their minds a couple of times between now and next month.
Adobe is big because of their userbase, but their userbase is big because they make genuinely powerful software that fits the needs of professionals. The free options (and the cheap proprietary options) are not there yet, and probably never will be. Professionals aren’t going to switch until the features they need are there (because seriously, why would anyone use a tool for their job that doesn’t actually allow them to do their job properly?), but the features aren’t going to be added until the professionals switch over. Catch22.
use unsuitable software for years in the hopes that volunteer devs will eventually add the features they need.
There’s an opportunity here to unbundle Photoshop from itself.
Since my background is print, I can say for at least a few more weeks, there’s an audience interested in reading RAW, cropping, toning for both CMYK and RGB, scratch removal on negatives and cutouts. And literally nothing else.
And so now imagine anyone else. They don’t need CMYK. What the fuck is that, anyway?
That Photoshop has gained bloat is not something to emulate. FOSS shouldn’t try to replicate it so long as there’s a universal file format one can jump between apps to manipulate.
I don’t particularly want to jump between a dozen different apps to have access to every single tool and filter I use, especially when even when using a single file format (PSD), not every app treats layers in the same way. In a detailed digital paint, you can very easily have hundreds of layers, so it’s absolutely a deal-breaker if your layer groupings or group masks are destroyed when switching between apps.
How often does “a bunch of non-devs flock to a half-baked community FOSS project and suddenly gain a bunch of devs” actually play out?
The one reasonable possibility is that they might pick up a designer or two, but how many community FOSS projects seriously consider non-code or non-art contributions? Because based on the FOSS software I’ve used, it’s a vanishingly small number.
Coders over-value code, and under-value everything else.
We’ll agree to disagree I suppose. The alternatives don’t necessarily have to be FOSS either. A perfect example of a viable alternative to a predatory “industry standard” exists in the audio production world; REAPER.
When I was in College, Pro Tools was the required software. Pro Tools at the time was a walled garden ecosystem, trapping anyone who sunk their hard earned cash into an environment rife with anti-consumer practices, hardware brand restrictions and invasive DRM.
It cost me over $600 CAD at the time for a bundle containing a feature-limited copy of Pro Tools and a Digidesign MBox.
Meanwhile, REAPER’s noncommercial license was $60. That $60 got you a full featured copy of the DAW with support for the next two full version upgrades (which turned out to be nearly a decade of updates). You could also use any hardware interfaces you desired without restriction.
REAPER also has a free trial that is full-featured. No restrictions at all, even the trial length is unlimited. Why? Because they respect the consumer and trust that if you find value in the software you’ll support their work by paying for a copy. That purchase is one of the best I’ve ever made.
In my experience, REAPER was equally as capable as Pro Tools or any other DAW on the market at the time. As of now I’d wager it’s the superior product.
A world where consumers are respected currently exists, its just not in the hands of the corporate world. The best way to make a better future for everyone in the software world is to not put up with anti-consumer practices and engage with companies and developers that respect our time and hard earned cash instead of treating us like cattle.
I feel like Linux alternatives often falter by trying to offer as extensive of a feature set as the proprietary options. GIMP would be better if it simplified it’s menu’s and focused on offering a strong central feature set, then expand on that core over time to offer a powerful workflow of it’s own.
I noticed this especially with FreeCAD, which is trying to do like 12 things for some reason? Just offer intuitive parametric cad and focus on it. We don’t need OpenSCAD inside FreeCAD because OpenSCAD is already it’s own thing for example.
This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.
In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.
I’m curious about what you think is missing from Inkscape. I use it and illustrator for design work all the time, and I’ve never run into issues with something missing from Inkscape.
For example you can’t adjust spacing between paragraphs at all. I think that’s because it’s unsupported in the SVG spec rather than an Inkscape issue, but still. Adding printer’s marks is also a total shitshow.
I will say however that Inkscape vs. Illustrator is the closest matchup of the three Adobe design apps. I like Inkscape and use it whenever I can to avoid firing up my Windows VM.
If you just want to crop and adjust levels, GIMP is fine. If you want to clone stamp or replace backgrounds etc (or of course work with motion graphics) then there’s no comparison. Nondestructive editing has been a huge drawback for GIMP since its inception but they are finally adding that, which is good. I’m not even sure if they’ve added CMYK support. Text editing is also godawful. I could go on, but for real work, it just isn’t the same at all.
People who say they are interchangeable is like saying an e-bike is the same as a pickup truck. If you just need to commute downtown, they can both work. But if you need to move a half ton of crushed stone, they are not comparable.
Photoshop select tools are awesome back to like CS4. Magnetic Lasso and Quick Select are super powerful and let you chain other tools together, and I remember something about Photoshop having good feather select features as well. Not having that base in other software severely limits what you can do.
Photoshop’s healing and clone stamp tools are also good at predicting what I want to fix or patch. If GIMP or other OSS editors have those features, they’d be in my toolbox for sure.
Disclaimer, my old copy of photoshop was “gifted from a friend” so I’m not trying to shill them. I haven’t used GIMP in a few years, so maybe (hopefully) it’s better than it was back then
Unfortunately this is not really true. I think people who say “just use GIMP” have only ever used PS to open and crop images. Inkscape is also nowhere near Illustrator, and Scribus feels more like QuarkXpress circa 1998 than a viable InDesign replacement.
I have to agree. I’ve used a great many software packages over the years, but having been given an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription by my university, as several of Adobe’s programs are required for the degree I’m doing, I’ve been very annoyed to discover that the alternatives really aren’t on the same level. They work, sure. You can get the job done with them. But I am genuinely finding Photoshop to be significantly more powerful than everything else I’ve used. And it’s really annoying because I’ve never liked Adobe as a company.
The only apps I’ve used that come even remotely close are those by Serif/Affinity, but even they don’t have feature parity. They were also just bought out by Canva and will likely become fully enshittified soon.
The one thing I’ve been dissatisfied with Photoshop for, in comparison to another app, is its traditional media analogues do not come even close to Painter’s, and I’ve not been able to get any brushes set up in a way that replicates them. There’s professionals that use Painter in addition to Photoshop because of that, and I expect I will as well - but I really notice the features missing that I use a lot in Photoshop.
I couldn’t paint to save my life, so I didn’t know about that aspect. How does Krita stack up?
Been a while since I used Krita, so it’s hard to compare Krita from 3 or 4 years ago with Photoshop 2023, but it was okay. Better than GIMP, but unless there’s been some major changes, it doesn’t have anywhere near the versatility in tools and filters as Photoshop.
This feels like the key difference between Photoshop and the others. There’s an awful lot of stuff that previously I would have to do manually, sometimes over several hours, that Photoshop can do in seconds, either because there’s a tool or filter for it, or sometimes just because Photoshop is so much more responsive. This is really hard to quantify in an objective way, far more so than pointing out whether a feature is present or absent, but… I use an art tablet and Photoshop just responds to the pen better.
So like it’s not really that it’s impossible to do amazing work with the free apps, it’ll just take a lot longer. I liked your analogy in your other comment, about the e-bike vs pickup truck: you definitely can move that half a ton of crushed stone with an e-bike, but it’ll be quicker and less work with a pickup truck.
This is just even more justification to use alternatives. If a mass migration to alternatives occurs, those apps will flourish and more dev time can be arranged via new devs interested in volunteering or outright being employed to meet demand.
Adobe is only so big because of their userbase. Migrate that userbase to a less cancerous set of applications and the userbase stands to benefit greatly.
That would probably work for hobbyists, but I have my doubts that professionals, who rely on Adobe products for their livelihood, could use unsuitable software for years in the hopes that volunteer devs will eventually add the features they need. In the other post about this topic, someone commented that GIMP’s devs are refusing to fix problems that are repelling new users, which is not going to encourage Adobe users to make the switch. GIMP still doesn’t have fully functioning, reliable non-destructive editing, which is 100% essential for anyone beholden to a boss or client who is going to change their minds a couple of times between now and next month.
Adobe is big because of their userbase, but their userbase is big because they make genuinely powerful software that fits the needs of professionals. The free options (and the cheap proprietary options) are not there yet, and probably never will be. Professionals aren’t going to switch until the features they need are there (because seriously, why would anyone use a tool for their job that doesn’t actually allow them to do their job properly?), but the features aren’t going to be added until the professionals switch over. Catch22.
There’s an opportunity here to unbundle Photoshop from itself.
Since my background is print, I can say for at least a few more weeks, there’s an audience interested in reading RAW, cropping, toning for both CMYK and RGB, scratch removal on negatives and cutouts. And literally nothing else.
And so now imagine anyone else. They don’t need CMYK. What the fuck is that, anyway?
That Photoshop has gained bloat is not something to emulate. FOSS shouldn’t try to replicate it so long as there’s a universal file format one can jump between apps to manipulate.
I don’t particularly want to jump between a dozen different apps to have access to every single tool and filter I use, especially when even when using a single file format (PSD), not every app treats layers in the same way. In a detailed digital paint, you can very easily have hundreds of layers, so it’s absolutely a deal-breaker if your layer groupings or group masks are destroyed when switching between apps.
How often does “a bunch of non-devs flock to a half-baked community FOSS project and suddenly gain a bunch of devs” actually play out?
The one reasonable possibility is that they might pick up a designer or two, but how many community FOSS projects seriously consider non-code or non-art contributions? Because based on the FOSS software I’ve used, it’s a vanishingly small number.
Coders over-value code, and under-value everything else.
Adobe has probably employed dozens of top-level PhDs to implement and train AI models, optimized their code.
Hobby projects will never reach that level regardless of the number of users.
Even proprietary developers would have to close the gap made for 10+ years, with far less resources. Just look at the state of Affinity…
I don’t think it’s realistic.
We’ll agree to disagree I suppose. The alternatives don’t necessarily have to be FOSS either. A perfect example of a viable alternative to a predatory “industry standard” exists in the audio production world; REAPER.
When I was in College, Pro Tools was the required software. Pro Tools at the time was a walled garden ecosystem, trapping anyone who sunk their hard earned cash into an environment rife with anti-consumer practices, hardware brand restrictions and invasive DRM.
It cost me over $600 CAD at the time for a bundle containing a feature-limited copy of Pro Tools and a Digidesign MBox.
Meanwhile, REAPER’s noncommercial license was $60. That $60 got you a full featured copy of the DAW with support for the next two full version upgrades (which turned out to be nearly a decade of updates). You could also use any hardware interfaces you desired without restriction.
REAPER also has a free trial that is full-featured. No restrictions at all, even the trial length is unlimited. Why? Because they respect the consumer and trust that if you find value in the software you’ll support their work by paying for a copy. That purchase is one of the best I’ve ever made.
In my experience, REAPER was equally as capable as Pro Tools or any other DAW on the market at the time. As of now I’d wager it’s the superior product.
A world where consumers are respected currently exists, its just not in the hands of the corporate world. The best way to make a better future for everyone in the software world is to not put up with anti-consumer practices and engage with companies and developers that respect our time and hard earned cash instead of treating us like cattle.
I think the advancement in graphics and computer vision is too huge to be comparable to what happened in audio.
I feel like Linux alternatives often falter by trying to offer as extensive of a feature set as the proprietary options. GIMP would be better if it simplified it’s menu’s and focused on offering a strong central feature set, then expand on that core over time to offer a powerful workflow of it’s own.
I noticed this especially with FreeCAD, which is trying to do like 12 things for some reason? Just offer intuitive parametric cad and focus on it. We don’t need OpenSCAD inside FreeCAD because OpenSCAD is already it’s own thing for example.
This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.
In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.
That makes a lot of sense when you put it that way. For some reason I never factored that individuals were extending apps for their own use cases lmao
Pirate
I’m curious about what you think is missing from Inkscape. I use it and illustrator for design work all the time, and I’ve never run into issues with something missing from Inkscape.
For example you can’t adjust spacing between paragraphs at all. I think that’s because it’s unsupported in the SVG spec rather than an Inkscape issue, but still. Adding printer’s marks is also a total shitshow.
I will say however that Inkscape vs. Illustrator is the closest matchup of the three Adobe design apps. I like Inkscape and use it whenever I can to avoid firing up my Windows VM.
What I’m hearing is Scribus would be suitable if I’m deliriously tired and thinking in Quark 4.x shortcuts.
What features do you feel are lacking? I don’t think GIMP has full CMYK support yet, but I believe they’re working on it.
If you just want to crop and adjust levels, GIMP is fine. If you want to clone stamp or replace backgrounds etc (or of course work with motion graphics) then there’s no comparison. Nondestructive editing has been a huge drawback for GIMP since its inception but they are finally adding that, which is good. I’m not even sure if they’ve added CMYK support. Text editing is also godawful. I could go on, but for real work, it just isn’t the same at all.
People who say they are interchangeable is like saying an e-bike is the same as a pickup truck. If you just need to commute downtown, they can both work. But if you need to move a half ton of crushed stone, they are not comparable.
Photoshop select tools are awesome back to like CS4. Magnetic Lasso and Quick Select are super powerful and let you chain other tools together, and I remember something about Photoshop having good feather select features as well. Not having that base in other software severely limits what you can do.
Photoshop’s healing and clone stamp tools are also good at predicting what I want to fix or patch. If GIMP or other OSS editors have those features, they’d be in my toolbox for sure.
Disclaimer, my old copy of photoshop was “gifted from a friend” so I’m not trying to shill them. I haven’t used GIMP in a few years, so maybe (hopefully) it’s better than it was back then