I’m a creative. I’ve used InDesign since version 1.0. I’ve built my career with Adobe tools.
Adobe Creative Cloud peaked around ten years ago. Since then, it’s totally jumped the shark. I’m not even talking about the company, just the software and its features.
When I open InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator I’m trying to work. It’s software I’ve used for, in some cases, 25 years. My point is, I know it inside and out.
The past few years, every new “feature” gets in the way of my work. Adobe has been changing things that already worked very well, or has added extra steps to do something that used to be easy.
Even worse, Adobe has started to fill its software with notifications that can not be disabled. Invasive blue dots. Invasive blue buttons. Invasive blue overlays that stay visible on the screen even when the software is minimized. Rich tool tips that aren’t disabled by the option to disable rich tool tips.
Adobe has lost me as a devotee. It’s been taken over by venture capital. The company only cares about adoption of new features.
Now, I use it out habit. Because my workplace provides it. Because it’s what folks on my team are used to… but because they’ve come to the ecosystem so late, they only know a fraction of its capabilities.
If Adobe faces demise, I will mourn what if once was. But not what it has become.
Been using Photoshop since 3.0 released on windows. I knew when they went cloud that shit was going sideways, but it was the acquisition of substance painter that did them in for me. Even though CC was kind of a mess, instead of building on the value proposition and including substance, they decided to have it as a separate charge.
Fuck adobe. Fuck subscription software.
We can always use older versions. I stayed in cs6 until I migrated full FOSS
As someone who has a full FOSS stack, can you explain to a non-graphic-design techie like me why people are so allergic to the FOSS alternatives? I just don’t know enough about design to understand why people will put up with so much abuse from Adobe when there are completely free alternatives that are not weighed down by AI and actually respect your privacy.
Dude, you keep asking this question throughout the post and I don’t think you’re going to get an answer that satisfies you.
The short answer is industry inertia and professionals not realizing the amount of power they gave away to toolmakers of their profession through the computer age.
Long answer is most people use these tools to work and the vast majority of paid professional work doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is, in fact, a team effort. So that effectively sets the floor and ceiling for use and adoption. Remember, most real people who get paid real money don’t give a shit about which software package or which version of whatever-the-fuck. In fact, they’d rather most of that bleed away so that they only have to think about what they got hired to think about. Also Bob the CISO really fucking hates anything that ends in .py.
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.
If only gimp wasn’t garbage… Tbh I’m also kinda wondering how Affinity did pull off the move they made with their 3 programs turning into one, at the same time redoing so much of it.am And why foss can’t do it.
Of course there’s money and closed source is probably messier in a lot of places than foss is (or at least targets to be), but is that it?
Unironic question: is it possible to explain to a non-artistic, non-graphic-design techie like me what makes GIMP so inadequate? I hear this refrain a lot but have never heard an explanation for why it falls SO short that it’s not a viable alternative for most people.
It’s been a long time since I last used it so I don’t remember specifics, but I found really basic stuff that would take a couple of seconds to do in photoshop were a lot more difficult in gimp. Krita is better…
Was it more difficult or just unfamiliar? Like, if you’d given it a couple of weeks maybe it would have become intuitive? Or was it just bad UX?
I use gimp at least weekly. The UX isn’t great imo, but I’m used to it now, and I’m sure Photoshop would boggle my mind. It also has improved quite a bit in the past years.
