I’m so absolutely sick of it.
It’s always ethical to pirate from Adobe.
Or use Monkrus to get pre-cracked versions 😎
Monkrus does some good Adobe stuff, never had any problems with them
If you think Adobe is bad just wait until you have to deal with Autodesk.
I managed to drag my audit out for months by just playing an absolute idiot and telling them all my licenses can be found by logging in at autodesk.com and then giving them excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to get to the administration page.
They’re both bad
Firefox is getting the ability to edit PDFs. Its not quite ready for prod so I use SumatraPDF
Foxit is great too
Ah yes true sysadmin energy in this post
A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite. She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is “bad”. I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Thanks for your help!
Darktable is the closest, but it’s still missing a ton of features that are basic in Lightroom.
Lightroom and Photoshop are unfortunately good products with shitty licensing.
Just curious, what are the biggest features that you feel Darktable lacks? I use it occasionally but haven’t noticed any huge gaps from LR.
Lots of the AI related stuff is a big draw for current Lightroom. There’s also a lack of Adobe colors, which aren’t a need unless you’re printing a lot
Full disclosure It’s been a bit since I’ve used it, but I may try to import the ~800gb photo library I have into it again and give it another shot
Version 4 has been a decent upgrade. I still have some gripes with the overall behavior and interface, but it’s very capable software.
With the exception of AI Denoise the AI stuff is of little interest to me. I got in on the Kickstarter for Abode and am hoping that will be a suitable paid alternative.
I use and love Affinity. Back on v1 I used RawTherapee to do the initial conversion, then AP for the “photoshop part”… but in v2 the raw conversion in AP is pretty good, so I just use that for my whole workflow.
Capture One fan here. Good software buy they are also pushing towards subscriptions although you still have the option to buy and get support for one year as well. Affinity Photo is similar to Photoshop and had a great price, but has less tutorials out there.
Yeah same. And capture one don’t work on Linux too.
I like Darkroom and use it exclusively. Cons are it’s slow as beans, even on my decent machine. Pros are it has a ton of features. Another con is no AI tools built in, and it has a steeper learning curve because it doesn’t have the automatic adjustment tools Lightroom does. You can get a better result but it takes work.
This is just one reason why 2013 was basically the worst year ever. I’ll never forgive or forget what Adobe had done that year. It’s just insane.
Ah yes, the beginning of the subscription apocalypse that masked a 50% increase to annual cost behind a “cheaper monthly charge”. While I miss my time as a photographer, I’ll never miss Adobe.
That was the reason I lost my interest in animation completely.
As someone that had to deal with adobe for 5 years for an 800 person studio. Fuck Adobe. For the rest of forever.
I signed up for creative cloud and accidentally signed for a year. They want 60$ to cancel the subscription. Suck my taint.
How is that even legal
Unlike most online services that essentially do not offer refunds (you just ride out the subscription), Adobe has created more of a carrier type plan, where there is a yearly contract so it accrues the same penalty like any phone plan.
So yeah, legal. Just the worst kind of legal. And that’s Adobe. Just the worst kind.
Are you still stuck with this? My brother did the same not long ago, but I found a way to cancel the subscription without having to pay anything!
Hahahaaha omg ! This is hilarious. Thanks bro
Was it recent (and can you get the credit card agency to revert it?)
3 months in - it’s Definitely my bad
Change your subscription to something else, this resets the counter. You can now cancel without fines.
Whaaaa that works?
I did it a few months back, and immediately cancelled the new plan with no fees, worked a treat. Also FYI the educational discount is pretty great, I set mine up with my daughters email address no issues, I’m not sure how much they check this as it’s not a school email address.
No it’s always been that way. They have adopted a similar subscription as phone carriers. If you cancel early, you face a penalty.
Most other subscriptions don’t actually let you cancel and receive a refund (you just ride out the sub). But, that’s Adobe. They’ll always find the worst, shittiest way to make it happen.
I mean it’s the same company that held the internet down with Flash, that at one point was the top source of nearly all malware through a browser.
GIMP, Da Vinci Resolve, Blender
Inkscape, krita
Yeah these are way better than gimp
GIMP is painfully behind the times that I only use it out of sympathy for FOSS. I even prefer Photopea despite half the working area wasted on ads and browser UI.
Maybe that’ll change one day.
Every single time Adobe is mentioned, everyone rushes to mention GIMP. I’m convinced 90% of them have never even opened GIMP before.
Because ten years ago GIMP was a good alternative to whatever version of Photoshop was out at the time. So those people ditched PS and used GIMP. But now Adobe has pumped tons of features into PS that the GIMP crowd doesn’t even know about, so they still think the two are still comparable.
I still use GIMP exclusively but I’d be lying if I said watching others use Photoshop didn’t make me jealous.
This makes me sad. I usually only use GIMP for programmer art. I didn’t realize it was falling behind 😞
Paint.net I like still!
And if your like me and need Substance you can buy a perpetual licence on Steam
I’ve been able to steer 2 companies and my own business to adobe alternatives. Fuck, paying rent on software.
What software do you recommend?
Krita is a Foss alternative to photo shop.
I usually figure out what it is that my users are trying to accomplish, which is usually something absolutely insane to buy Photoshop for, like resizing or adding text to pictures, and steer them toward some basic app like Paint.NET.
The CEO of Adobe (Shantanu Narayen) is a greedy bastard.
He’s just a tool, though. The problem is capitalism, and in this instance, the expectation of intinite growth.
Hey adobe, how about you stop contacting everyone in our organization using a single non-profit license of a single product and telling them we should all be on a single cloud account so we can pay several times more for the same thing just to get access to sharing services no one wants?
They emailed our entire organization saying their license were expiring which resulted in 100s of calls to our service desk. Fucking hate Adobe.
This a thousand times. Maybe literally. They just won’t stop harassing us.
All I want is Lightroom classic for photo organization and I have to subscribe. Like come on.
Not saying its a 1:1 alternative, but I used darktable a few times to do this and for post processing.
I am definitely not a photographer or graphics expert by any means, but I used it on recommendation of someone who is and was also complaining about Adobe lol.
I really don’t know if it lacks anything compared to lightroom, but all the fancy switches and bars and stuff looked pretty cool and too advanced for me to understand,
Our company is using nitro pro for editing PDF.
I hate that people try to edit PDFs.
There’s a hundred formats more suited to editing.
It’s very common in the medical and legal analyst fields. There’s a lot of scanned paper in those industries.
Still using Photoshop 2003. It does what I need.
GIMP
