Ok, time to notify our design team not to use any Adobe products anymore and notify the commercial team to stop paying for licences.
What can you replace Adobe with? Serious question. I despise Adobe, but every alternative I’ve tried throughout the years either cannot do the job or ends up disappearing.
It seems our designer team doesn’t really use Photoshop. They switched to Figma from XD and most of their workflows don’t use Adobe software. They still use Illustrator occasionally, but they’re looking at Inkscape atm. If you have Photoshop in your workflow, you’re kinda fucked. https://www.photopea.com/ might be an option, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. If you need Lightroom, then Darktable is a good alternative. It’s a bit janky here and there, but fully functional and stable. If you’re using Premiere then for fox sake switch to DaVinci Resolve already, it’s so much better than everything else and is free for many workflows and even for commercial use.
While I’ve no idea of your exact needs, I’ve been a happy Affinity customer for almost 3 years now (freelance web dev/designer).
It has everything I need (vector work, photo editing), and no subscription.
This is good to hear. It’s been a few years since I last tried to quit Adobe. I will have another go with Affinity and Krita (someone else suggested Krita as well).
People complain now, but they’ll renew their subscription. It’s the same unhealthy relationship people have with Windows.
It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.
To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.
Isn’t Photoshop by a lot of big corporations. Why would they sign up to that? Or do they get an exemption that isn’t available to private individuals?
Sufficiently large orgs probably will be eligible for exemptions under the theory that they are agreeing ahead of time.
But also? The Adobe suite are just leagues better than anything else in that space. Smaller companies with smaller contracts can get away with, frankly, lesser software. But at scale? You need stuff like the “Oh shit, we should stop calling it AI” plugins. And workflows matter a lot when the vast majority of your applicant pool have been using Adobe software for literally decades.
A decent number of the tech youtubers have done “We tried to not use Premier for one week” style videos. And they usually end up coming out with “I guess we could maybe make it work but it just isn’t worth it”
Much like with “this is the year of gaming for linux”, it is going to need massive amounts of grass roots effort to actually focus on UI/UX over “We don’t need that because we are smarter” bullshit. And, eventually, it will be good enough for influencers/taste-makers to give it a chance.
Corpos are too big and stupid to react in time for this
Tell me you don’t want money from NSFW artists without telling me.
I mean… they ARE telling you?
Expect a LOT more companies to do stuff like this. Because “deep fake” porn is a plague and nobody (reputable) wants their software to be the go to for violating people.
Photoshop != deepfake porn. Although it might get used to touch up some images for realism.
Which isn’t where the money is in NSFW digital art.
Yes. Photoshop is not currently equal to deepfake porn. It is a few popular plugins away from being it though. Hence getting out ahead of things with content policies.
And… NSFW digital art is not as good money as you think it is. At least, not at the corporate/software level.
What do you mean by “at the corporate/software level”? What corporations are drawing furry porn?
Artists for furry porn aren’t generally paying for 100+ enterprise licenses. But then, people doing more questionable stuff probably aren’t paying at all so it still doesn’t make sense.
That’s what I was thinking. Deep fakes have existed since photo manipulation was invented, and Adobe hasn’t cared one iota about it before. The only reason I can see for them to care now is if they think they can get in legal trouble for what people create with their products.
I mean, have you seen Gadget?
But also… that is kind of the point. Adobe and basically every company that isn’t a porn company doesn’t care about the revenue from porn. And the companies that DO care about the revenue are constantly fighting piracy.
There are some patreon-like artists who make bank for getting their Source Film Maker on. But they are a handful of licenses, at best.
That’s what I was thinking. Apart from the porn locked up in the Disney vault, big companies aren’t in the business of making porn. And the companies that do aren’t going to be interested in deep fakes. The people who are using Photoshop to create porn are small fries to Adobe. Deep fake porn has been around as long as photo manipulation has, and Adobe hasn’t cared before.
Bearing that in mind, I don’t think this policy has anything to do with AI deep fakes or porn. I think it’s more likely to be some new revenue source, like farming data for LLM training or something. They could go the Tumblr route and use AI to censor content, but considering Tumblr couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs, I think that’s one fuck up with a major company away from being litigation hell. The only reason that I think would make sense for Adobe to do this because of deep fakes is if they believe that governments are going to start holding them liable for the content people make with their products.
Imagine getting banned from all of adobe just for drawing a dick with the brush tool in their expensive image editor.
If any large organizations want to make a large donation to Inkscape, GIMP, Krita and Blender that would be great.
I love FOSS alternatives, but let’s not pretend that GIMP is anywhere near being a viable alternative for professionals, unlike Blender who has got their shit together. I wish GIMP figured out actual decent UX.
Holy Shitballs:
Also, hilarious that I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.
I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you fucking kidding me??
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
Can someone there give me an email for someone who can cancel my subscription without having to sign in and agree to these new terms first?
Wipe your system. Then it’s uninstalled.
Cancel your recurring payment. Then that’s done too.
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
I’m pretty sure this is not legal in EU
Those reasons being stealing people’s work for AI garbage.
Fuck Photoshop. Use Gimp and/or Krita.
Any good recommendations for replacing Lightroom? I once tried Luminar but it’s extremely sluggish.
Darktable is one of the foss apps that actually is almost as good as the Adobe app. In many ways I like it better. https://www.darktable.org/
Thanks, I’ll give it a go! How’s the denoiser in the software? I’ve really grown fond of LR’s “ai” denoiser. For the most part, ai is bullshit. But it does wonders for denoising. I suppose there are some good standalone applications for that, right? Photography is just a hobby, so I don’t really know much about these things.
I haven’t used the ai denoiser but the noise reduction in Darktable seems decent to me, has lot’s of options. I am pretty new to raw image manipulation so maybe I’m missing something I don’t know about but it seems fine?
Unfortunately, neither are good replacements for professional work.
I use Krita professionally on a daily basis, it’s fantastic. It has some rough edges but absolutely nothing that prevents you from having work done. It also beats the Adobe suite hands down when it comes to ergonomy, and the performance with big files is really good (I work on formats up to 14k*7k for print, no issues).
This is good to hear. Thank you. I will give it another look. Adobe needs to be dissolved in a vat of acid.
Yes it does ! I feel bitter because it’s such a waste of good engineering. I’d love it if all these developers just migrated to FOSS projects. I’m sure with the right communication you could secure crowd funding and let Adobe be a thing of the past
Don’t forget Inkscape!!!
Inkscape is amazing for vector editing
Krita
GIMP
This is 100% because they are rolling out more AI features and they want the government to ban all open source competition because they aren’t “safe”.
Terrorists use GIMP so we gotta ban it!
Hard fucking pass.
Gee, yet another reason why mine is a Corel shop and we don’t use Adobe for anything.
Can Adobe be used on a machine that’s sandboxed / offline? That way you can do your projects while disconnected from their servers, once the project is complete, just move your files onto an external drive and away from Adobe access?
Yes, with a virtual machine. But the experience will not be the best because the VM will lack a GPU. I’m sure there is ways to share some resources of the GPU with the VM to have a smoother experience but I have never done that on Windows
Hm… I wouldn’t think you’d need a VM, rather just disable your ethernet card, disable/disconnect wifi, or unplug ethernet cable.
VMware workstation supports using a GPU. You can even use it in “pass-through” mode to give the VM full, exclusive access to the GPU.
Wild. My old place we relied on this despite me urging us to use Figma/Sketch and Blender (amazing for 2D art). Naturally logistics factored into it as our clients relied on Adobe as well, but there were plenty of projects that didn’t need it.
We also had the dumbest guidelines to ensure no leaks. I would routinely get app requests refused despite the fact their source was right there on GitHub.
So now what are they gonna do? Because if they use Adobe, they can no longer ensure that a clients work won’t hit the net. May not seem like much for small indie projects but if we snagged the next GTA or Valorant, you bet that would attract some serious lookiloos.
Not sure if a client would find “it wasn’t us it was Adobe” all that comforting!
Figma
Did you even read what I wrote edgelord?
Yes and it was insightful.
We use Figma for UI design at work. I really like it.
I’m not a designer, but I’m a developer that has to build the system. It has our internal UI library integrated into it, so the mockup looks practically identical to the actual implementation. When I click on a component, it shows the component name and a link to its documentation. Runs great in a browser without having to install an app. Really nice piece of software.
I’m glad the Adobe acquisition didn’t go though… I was scared Adobe would ruin it. I feel bad for all the Figma employees though… They were going to all receive a lot of money as a result of the acquisition, and everything was going well until it was blocked :/
Yeah totally agree. Figma removes a lot of the translation between design and implementation so design and dev are most always on the same page. Ps is an image program. It’s not meant for UI design. At all. Adobe tried to wedge in some UI design frameworks and flows but it’s Adobe. They could fuck up a cup of coffee. And no one uses Adobe XD. It’s too little too late. That’s when at my old employ I pushed for it. When I joined them, most of the designers were using Ai and Ps. Insane to me as Ai is even less suited for UI work. But they were like 20 and right out of school, which shocker, likely had a deal with Adobe so they pushed their software down their students throats.
I dreaded the sale of Figma. So glad it was stopped. Adobe already has such a monopoly on the design industry.
I recieved today an email from Affinity saying that their whole suite of softwares is 50% off.
I’m assuming more people will be migrating to either Affinity or FOSS.
I currently use FOSS but I also really love Affinity. Especially since it’s a perpetual/lifetime license.
Until its not. Better pick foss. Request the features you want and make a donation. Simple as.
At this rate my owned outright copy of Adobe that requires no internet access, with hacks, will become a generational heirloom I can pass down to descendants with immersurable value.
Don’t pirate anything you use professionally. You are just begging for a lawsuit and to be treated as radioactive in the industry.
Sounds like a bit of an overreaction
owned outright copy
It’s not piracy if you bought the software and own a permanent license to it.
It is once you start having to “hack” it, as that user claimed.
If you bought photoshop back when it was not subscription and Adobe did not inform you that your license had an expiration date you can in fact do whatever the duck you want to it because you purchased it, you did not rent it, you did not subscribe. You purchased it and it is yours for life.
Matter of fact you have no idea if what you are suggesting would fly in court because I am pretty sure you don’t know about any previous case like this that has been even tried in court.
No, it isn’t. Hacking means doing something to it to fix a problem. Maybe that’s telling it to ignore an OS version check or something. That’s not illegal and it’s not piracy. You’re allowed to modify software you own. Even if the hack is removing DRM, it still isn’t piracy if you own it. It’s piracy to give it to other people who don’t own it.
The legality of modding, “modding”, and cracking software is still very grey. Arguably intentionally so. Because no company wants to risk a negative ruling and most users aren’t dumb enough to go to court with a fortune 500.
If the above user was really talking about just putting a new splash screen on Photoshop 1.5 from 10 years ago (… actually it would probably be closer to 20 or 30 at this point? Damn…)? Sure… but that is also the territory where using gimp or krita or paint.net in production is a much better idea.
But if those “hacks” are to increment versions or allow for plugins made for later versions of photoshop et al to run? That is where you are adding features you never paid for and where you start needing to be ready to cover your ass if you are profiting off of it because now you are “worth” suing.
And… good luck convincing a judge/jury when your argument is anywhere near as shakey as half the justifications for using pirated software in production in this thread are (I especially love the person who apparently feels that it is the company’s responsibility to sit down with you and explain the license agreement you are… agreeing to).
Learning a skill or even software? Pirate that shit. There is a reason companies like autodesk have REALLY good “free” versions of their software.
Running a smaller patreon and doing light gig work? You are starting to get into the danger zone but can probably get away with it because “nobody will ever know” so long as you aren’t dumb enough to upload the project files.
But once you start working for a “real” company or even reach “small business” levels of youtube? Now you need to actively hide what you are doing because that is the range where some bored person at Company X might look up in the database if you or your company have a license. And for the bigger companies? They might actively be working with Company X to iterate on features for a new release. And… That is also when you have enough money or exposure to be worth getting a C&D and told that you should settle and send them a large sack of cash.
Would you win the lawsuit? I… sincerely doubt it but we are also clearly in fantasy land in this thread and I am not going to bother to try to explain why “But I want it” won’t hold up. But… yeah.
See, this is the issue; it’s not illegal to turn off my internet, it’s not illegal to block a program from accessing it, and it’s not illegal to run software i paid for.
If that’s a problem to clients then find better clients.
Okay? Just… maybe set aside a bit of money for a lawyer. No reason
Seconding the request for a shred of precedent for the things 4am mentioned being grounds for litigation
That… isn’t how these kinds of things work?
If there is legal precedent, it is a no brainer. That is why you don’t use pirated software. https://www.technicalactiongroup.ca/these-companies-used-pirated-software-and-lost-millions-of-dollars/ is a random source i found that listed a bunch of legal cases.
But if we are in a grey area based on whatever vague “with hacks” nonsense was going on?
Company sends you a C&D because they decided what you are doing is piracy. They basically say “Give us money and we won’t go to court”. So you either give them money or try to go to court. At which point… setting aside a bit of money for a lawyer would have been a good idea. Wonder where that great advice came from.
The legal system in most countries (arguably all but I am sure there is a weird niche case) is inherently going to favor the large corporation with a team of lawyers on retainer. Which lets them more or less bully individuals and smaller companies to settle out of court which means that precedent is never actually established. That is where emulation generally lives, for example.
Weird hill to die on, friend.
Are there any cases of this you can point to as illustration?
