I immediately switched to Affinity and haven’t looked back. Yes, there is a learning curve and you will have to spend a few hours Googling how to do the same thing but it’s easily been able to do the same thing that I was doing before.
The ONLY two features I miss from InDesign is GREP and scripts. Other than that, FUCK ADOBE.
Hey chatGPT, what would Blackbeard have to say about Adobe licensing?
Adobe, be drivin’ me to madness with their confusin’ schemes. Ye need a map just to make sense of it all! They be chargin’ a king’s ransom for their software, and what do ye get in return? Aye, a license that’s as flimsy as a ship’s riggin’ in a storm.
It’s a never-endin’ voyage through their terms and conditions, and I can’t fathom their logic. It be like navigatin’ the high seas with a broken compass. They be restrictin’ the use of their software, demandin’ we pay a ransom every month, and heaven forbid ye want to use it on multiple devices! They’ll make ye walk the plank for that.
And don’t get me started on their audits, me heartie. They be sendin’ their parrots to check if ye be usin’ their software properly, threatenin’ to keelhaul ye if they find a single violation. It be daylight robbery, I tell ye!
While I often have to use Adobe stuff in my line of work (its unfortunately the industry standard) I made the decision a couple of years back that Adobe software isn’t allowed to touch my personal devices. On the Mac, Creative Cloud is essentially malware. I use Affinity to replace photoshop and illustrator, while Apple Photos has been enough for me so far to replace Lightroom.
This is exactly why I have been running the same Adobe software for the last, what, 15 years now? Whatever the last one was before they changed to a subscription model, that’s the one I have.
I literally just wanted to esign a document the other day, and in order to get the functionality I wanted ONE TIME, I had to create an account, give them my credit card info for a free trial, let Acrobat Reader download all the other functionality I didn’t need, which took 10 minutes. The program crashed, buttons didn’t work, it didn’t save the first time.
I fucking hate Adobe.
What’s a good PDF editor that does e-signatures that I don’t have to pay a long-term subscription for? Foxit is nice, but requires a subscription.
They have money, and with it comes power. Also, main Adobe users seem to not care about shady bussiness practices because they “need” Adobe’s products.
GIMP is painfully behind the times that I only use it out of sympathy for FOSS. I even prefer Photopea despite half the working area wasted on ads and browser UI.
Because ten years ago GIMP was a good alternative to whatever version of Photoshop was out at the time. So those people ditched PS and used GIMP. But now Adobe has pumped tons of features into PS that the GIMP crowd doesn’t even know about, so they still think the two are still comparable.
I still use GIMP exclusively but I’d be lying if I said watching others use Photoshop didn’t make me jealous.
Not saying its a 1:1 alternative, but I used darktable a few times to do this and for post processing.
I am definitely not a photographer or graphics expert by any means, but I used it on recommendation of someone who is and was also complaining about Adobe lol.
I really don’t know if it lacks anything compared to lightroom, but all the fancy switches and bars and stuff looked pretty cool and too advanced for me to understand,
A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite. She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is “bad”. I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Capture One fan here. Good software buy they are also pushing towards subscriptions although you still have the option to buy and get support for one year as well. Affinity Photo is similar to Photoshop and had a great price, but has less tutorials out there.
I like Darkroom and use it exclusively. Cons are it’s slow as beans, even on my decent machine. Pros are it has a ton of features. Another con is no AI tools built in, and it has a steeper learning curve because it doesn’t have the automatic adjustment tools Lightroom does. You can get a better result but it takes work.
Lots of the AI related stuff is a big draw for current Lightroom. There’s also a lack of Adobe colors, which aren’t a need unless you’re printing a lot
Full disclosure It’s been a bit since I’ve used it, but I may try to import the ~800gb photo library I have into it again and give it another shot
Version 4 has been a decent upgrade. I still have some gripes with the overall behavior and interface, but it’s very capable software.
With the exception of AI Denoise the AI stuff is of little interest to me. I got in on the Kickstarter for Abode and am hoping that will be a suitable paid alternative.
I use and love Affinity. Back on v1 I used RawTherapee to do the initial conversion, then AP for the “photoshop part”… but in v2 the raw conversion in AP is pretty good, so I just use that for my whole workflow.
I usually figure out what it is that my users are trying to accomplish, which is usually something absolutely insane to buy Photoshop for, like resizing or adding text to pictures, and steer them toward some basic app like Paint.NET.