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 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.
Good. Adobe is crap
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.
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?
People pay for Adobe?
Haven’t used PS in ages. Gimp, Audacity, Inkscape, etc
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.
After CS6 did Adobe started going downhill, beginning with subscriptions replacing paid licenses.
Currently using Krita, and sometimes Paint(dot)net for touchups.
This is great news for everyone.
Wonderful! Now I need an Acrobat alternative that my work will accept, and I can kick adobe to the slims from which it came.
Bluebeam revu?
Edit: it’s comparably priced to acrobat but is significantly better on all fronts (opens and runs faster and more reliably, markup tools are leagues above, pdf editing tools are more comprehensive, review tools are significantly more advanced, everything is more user friendly. It’s wild how much better revu is when it’s literally the same price point.
Our engineering department uses bb revu. I’ll look into it as a replacement for Acrobat. Thanks!
My last firm used revu and switching back to acrobat at the new one has been crippling. Acrobat is an abomination.
Have you tried Firefox or one of its offshoots like Librefox? They are surprisingly good at viewing and editing PDFs. Just drag the PDF into an empty tab. But I’m sure there are other ways to open them.
I have. But it’s not a replacement for what I use Acrobat, regrettably. I think it’ll get there eventually, though.
Adding images, adding text (not editing existing text), resorting pages, extracting pages, adding and deleting pages, and signing (less important).
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?
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
that article is like an alternativeto list
Autodesk next, please
Dassault too. Solidworks runs like a dumpster fire and the backwards incompatibility is a daily frustration for me. Their ham-fisted attempt to pivot to online products is so divorced from the reality of how their products get used that it’s abundantly clear no engineers were consulted when defining the new product.
The situation would be laughable if any of the alternatives weren’t also garbage in their own unique ways. Solidworks is only dominant because it’s the least shitty, not because it’s good.
Maybe not a good look to go “AI! AI! AI!” when the actual creatives who use the product get attacked for using AI:
Personally I love how acrobat has different colour pallets for markups depending on how you access the objects properties and think its a perfect example of how well put together their software is in general.
