Artists got an unpleasant surprise when they opened Photoshop this week, as they were shown a pop-up window asking them to agree to new terms of service. Among the changes: Adobe now says it has the right to access customers’ content through “automated or manual methods.”
Now it’s true that when we use cloud services, we sacrifice a certain amount of privacy. And it’s not unusual for social networks, for example, to claim similar rights — when you share your photos on Facebook, you’re also giving Facebook the right to use those photos. But we’re not talking about your personal Facebook or Instagram photos; Photoshop is used by many, many professional artists for their livelihoods. They might also be working on sensitive or confidential material.
The moment you upload your data to some company cloud you no longer have control over it. They can use however the want it.
Officially they say it’s to comply with law and that they’re not using that data to train AI.
That kind of panic is bound to happen when people start wondering what cloud services can do with their stuff.
The answer is simple : in theory, everything. Abuse will happen. Say no to SaaS as much as you can.
Say no to SaaS as much as you can
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don’t work in that profession.
With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they’re going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won’t be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill
Thank you for saying that out loud. I always find the GIMP hate to be phenomenally ridiculous. I love GIMP too.
I’ve worked on a couple of Saas in Europe and thankfully GDPR has shaken things a lot. What you have to look for is terms of use where you are the controller, and the Saas is only a processor. In that case they don’t have the right to use the data you generate for their own purposes. This generally excludes telemetry like product analytics and logs, but even those must not include any user data, just an opaque id and technical informations.
Affinity V2 is 50% off right now (75% if you upgrade from V1). You pay once and keep that version indefinitely. And yeah yeah I know Lemmy users will complain it‘s not open source but it‘s definitely the closest you can have to Adobe‘s core suite.
I see at leat one limitation, Adobe action scripts are not supported.
Oh there are even more limitations, especially when it comes to their Photoshop counterpart Affinity Photo. There is nothing on the market that does the work as well as Photshop, but Affinity comes the closest by a long shot.
Affinity Photo is also superior to Photoshop in many ways. Depends on what industry you’re in.
Too bad they’ve been recently acquired by Canva :(
They said they will not change the business model. Can we trust them ?
I’m hoping. I’ve been a Serif customer since the 00’s. Not much we can do except be very vocal, and remind Serif and Canva that if they go the Adobe route, they’ll risk becoming irrelevant. Difference is their power.
Now might be a good time to start getting familiar with Krita and/or GIMP. They will have different workflows and might not fit well in every situation, but reducing reliance on user-hostile corporate terms and closed, poorly-defined file formats is likely to be worthwhile in the long run.
Yeah, say that to professionals whose workflow rely on the thight integration and features of Adobe’s software. I’m sure migration to a piece of crap software with a S&M name that can’t even do CMYK will work great.
Affinity is a good alternative still, at least until Canvas implement the subscription model (which I still believe they will do).
It can do color separation. I do that for cyanotype and carbon negatives. It’s a little round about that someone programmed for it. That’s the benefit of opensource. If you know how, you can make it quak like a duck and look like a cow. If you want it to bark but don’t know how, just search to see if someone has done it or if someone will help you do it.
As a side commentary, a friend of mine owns a Cessna and flies around it. He also flies around it. And he can fly the Cessna too. Anyway, if you ever took a look at the dashboard of a 737, it looks nothing like the Cessna. But both fly pretty good. So if you wanna fly all the time without the captain telling you what peanut to chew when, then get your little Gimp plane and fly. Otherwise, you wanna do the same as the rest of the sheeple, just find your seat and ask the attendant to do the art for you while you watch how its done out the side window. I’m sure you can get paid the big bucks for that. Being sarcastic ofcourse, plus how can you concentrate with the darn open hole where the safety door used to be.
the man is being downvoted but is right. at least suggest affinity or krita.
anyone who ever did image editing professionally knows how bad gimp’s workflow is.
