Did Adobe Just %#@$ Up?
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So Adobe "just" released a new terms of service for most of their creative products like Adobe Photoshop and Substance 3D and lets just say some of the new t...

Shoutouts

Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!

  • bruhduh
  • Toes

Free Open Source Alternatives

[Visual/Graphical]

For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to

[Audio]

For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to

[PDF]

Acrobat Reader to

[Video]

Premiere to

There’s also an excellent thread started by urska@lemmy.ca

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.

    However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.

    Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.

    The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.

    And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.

    That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.

    I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.

  • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.

    https://www.reaper.fm/

    If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Reaper is great, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to get my VSTs properly working on linux, especially ones with a full GUI like a lot of drum vsts do. It’s literally the only reason I still dual-boot windows on that machine.

    • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Until it gets bought by some big corp and suddenly has spyware integrated and goes into subscription anyway Happened to a lot of good proprietary software, and this is a reason why open source is superior.

      • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        FOSS is always a better option, as of today I don’t think anything compares. And since they aren’t a big company doing shady things, the licensed version is permanent, no big company buyout is going to impact anything other than upgrades.

      • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        No, just a nag. If you’re recording/editing a few times a year, it won’t be a bother. If you’re in their often, it’s worth the few bucks.

  • accideath@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.

    Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.

  • Autonomous User@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Anti-libre software, Adobe anything, bans us from removing malicous source code and service as a software substitute is even worse, so else did we expect?

  • elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Not open source, but pro grade, often nicer to work with than adobe stuff. The Affinity suite. Pay once per major revision. Decent upgrade plans. No subscription. Designer, photo and publisher.

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      The business model could change very quickly and promises by companies aren’t worth the paper they are written on. The CEO might tomorrow decide to sell the company to a large tech company which more often than not leads to the destruction of the software the company developed. Only open source or, even better, free software can guarantee that your software wont be enshittified.

      • EddoWagt@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        They’ve actually been acquired a few months ago, they promised no changes to their business model but I’m not hopeful

        • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          They will boil that frog slowly. Soon there will be an alternative subscription with a discount for previous license holders. Then they hide the option to buy a perpetual license so only people who spent time to search for it can find it; and finally they will remove the option completely and claim that they did that because “Nobody was buying it”.

    • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      thanks for the recommendations!

      I added openshot and left out IFME (it doesn’t seem like the devs understand software licensing unfortunately, the project’s also a bit of a copyright landmine😅)

  • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Man thanks for not suggesting GIMP I hate that thing so unintuitive, like bro you’re no blender, you’re not allowed to be unintuitive

    • PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Krita can’t do the same things Gimp can though + I already know where all the buttons are from years of using it. I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much. I’ve never run into an image editing task that I couldn’t do in gimp.

      • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much.

        Because they’ve spent years learning Photoshop’s unintuitive interface rather than GIMP’s unintuitive interface. I learned them both more or less in parallel and found them both equally awful. (So who does have an intuitive interface? Paint Shop Pro, back in the days that JASC owned it, came the closest of any piece of raster image editing software I’ve ever used.)

        In all fairness, there are a few features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn’t, but the ones I’m aware of are professional level stuff (spot colour support and some complex editing constructs), and there’s usually a way to do without them or compensate with some other program.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        The UI and shortcut keys are unintuitive. Simple tasks that would take me seconds in Photoshop take me 5 minutes in gimp. I’ll never understand that there is always one person replying like you are here.

        • PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          If paying all that money to use photoshop is worth not learning a different ui to you, then you are their intended customer. I’m glad you found something you like.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Dualism everywhere. Jfc

            I hate adobe and it’s precisely because they fucked me. I’ll never give them another penny. I want gimp to be good but it absolutely isn’t. I would be quite happy if it were

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          My advice: Don’t do hotkeys. Just use the toolbars for literally everything. Can’t find the paths window? Check under the Windows dropdown. Real simple. Don’t like the organization? Click and drag the boxes to reorganize, stack em where you want.

          I think for several versions it’s come as Single Window mode by default which is nice, imo.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            So here’s the thing. Just about anyone in a creative field learned Photoshop inside and out. We learned the shortcut keys and relied on them to be much much faster at our jobs. So not using them feels like a huge handicap and having to relearn them would be bad enough, but there are common things in gimp that I found have no shortcut keys at all. And the ones that do exist largely don’t make sense, even when ignoring the Photoshop conventions. When I’m struggling to zoom without clicking several times, the app is the issue, not me.

            • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              I’m sorry all of you put your eggs into one basket which enshitified into an interface for babies. BTW, I’m an artist both digital and traditional. When I got my degree in science I was able to get arts degrees at the same time fulfilling electives requirements. My favorite programs are Clip Studio Paint, Gimp, Blender, and Autodesk Fusion 360, but I don’t use hotkeys for any of them, except occasionally rigging in blender, or I would be memorizing like 300+ different hotkeys.