https://affinity.serif.com is quite good. It's not the same, but I switched (95% personal use) when Adobe forced everyone onto subscriptions and it's been more than sufficient for that.

It is surprisingly good, it still lacks many features but it's a welcome competition in the field. However, I wouldn't go through the trouble of leaving Adobe for another closed source suite. The underdogs are always the good guys until they aren't.

If/when I ditch Adobe, it will be for an open source stack.

I concur on Affinity. For graphic design, pixel art, layout, and photo work I've switched to the Affinity suite.

I used Premiere for about two years but never liked it as much as Final Cut Pro X, so I'm back on FCPX for video now that I've got a better Mac to run it on.

FCPX and Affinity are both one-time purchases, which I appreciate.

I read that they were acquired by Canva. Does that create any risk of their pricing changing to a subscription model or maybe a risk of them adopting the same terms as Adobe?

Even before the Canva acquisition, their decision to release a separately-purchased "v2" of their suite ruffled a lot of feathers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_Photo#Version_2

Link for the curious: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/

Seconded. The whole affinity suite is really nice and feels pretty comfy.

It is also reasonably priced and no subscription.

Would definitely buy if they either had a Linux version, or ran in WINE.

Aren’t they also going the subscription way soon?

I canceled my Adobe Premiere Pro subscription a while back, not because of AI terms but because other dark patterns in how they bill gave me a bad taste. I switched to DaVinci Resolve, which has a pretty capable free version. (I haven't used it extensively enough to comment on whether I will miss Premiere in the long run)

Davinci Resolve is super powerful, even in its free version. Every project I have learned something new that it can do. Highly recommend.

Any good guides for basic editing? Tried it a couple of times some years ago and couldn't get it working and/or got lost in settings.

Just saw this, not in the habit of checking back on comments (whoops). Casey Faris has been a huge help to me over the years: https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyFaris

For Photoshop:

1) Photopea (quite brilliant for most of the things photoshop can do)

2) paint.net for not too advanced edits

3) Krita

For After Effects:

1) Natron

2) BlackMagic Fusion

For Premiere Pro:

1) DaVinci Resolve

2) KdenLive

For Illustrator:

1) Inkscape

2) Graphite

Please note that most of these are not feature for feature replacements, but for the most part and most common tasks, they are very good offerings.

Is PaintShop Pro still a competitive product?

https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/

What about Corel products?

https://www.coreldraw.com/en/all-products/

I actually prefer Photopea over Affinity Photo, it’s a shameless clone right down to the keyboard shortcuts which at this point are muscle memory.

Photopea is fantastic. I've paid Adobe thousands over the years because my spouse uses Photoshop and can't stop (I use Sketch when I need something).

I had enough with Adobe mostly due to cost. It's robbery to pay those prices for a tool she uses 3 times a year. I tried installing Krita for her and she struggled with everything. Couldn't find anything and just complained all the time. It occurred to me to try something else and Photopea is absolutely amazing. Wish I knew about it sooner.

Adobe only supports Windows/Mac and they want a subscription fee license, so they can shove their software.

Illustrator (used since 1990s) -> Inkscape, Krita

Photoshop (used since v3.0) -> Gimp, imagemagick, rembg

If I were doing loads of design work I would still prefer Adobe. However, I can use the above with a Wacom tablet on Linux and feel very productive. Linux largely allows scripting so I open Gimp a lot less then I used to use Photoshop, eg. due to imagemagick convert/mogrify, rembg, etc. Haven't used PS in a decade maybe. Haven't used Illustrator in a year or more. Hope that helps.

My free stack, 2024 edition: Fedora Linux Sway spin, Inkscape, GNU Image Manipulation Program, KdenLive, Natron, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, OpenSCAD, Orca slicer, IceCat, Zulip, LibreOffice, and a flock of CLI tools

2024 and Gimp remains horrible (as it has always been). It’s cool it brings value to you and others but Photoshop replacement it is not.

IMO many of its most glaring issues could be fixed by “simply” (I know it’s probably more involved in reality) swapping out bespoke widgets for standard GTK counterparts with more standard/commonly familiar behaviors.

The poster child for this is easily the layers palette. It looks like a scrolling list widget like you’d find on any major desktop OS released in the past 30 years but doesn’t behave like one, with oddities like inability to multi-select. Instead, the user is expected to learn GIMP-specific behaviors that aren’t useful in any other program. There’s not really a good reason for this, aside for familiarity for existing users and while that’s an important thing to consider I’m not sure it’s worth impeding retention of new users.

IMHO the problems in the usability of the software go far deeper than simply switching the widgets.

This is not to shit on Gimp! It's a completely adequate package of various image processing algorithms.

However, this does not make it a replacement for Photoshop for a large segment of users.

I've been using Photoshop for 30 years and tried to use gimp for 25 years :D

Roughly the same amount of years here, same conclusion.

I'd love to ditch Adobe for an open stack. I've day-dreamed about creating an open alternative to Photoshop many times. It's a daunting task, it would take many years of dedication for reaching even a mediocre competitor to the 90s Photoshop.

Adobe monopoly needs to be taken down one day. It's paradox, that in creative, free world, you are tight to one piece software that dictate a way how to make digital visual production. If you want to make living in this industry, you really don't have other options.

With enough disgruntled ex-Adobe users looking for something new, you'd think GIMP would be improved or replaced by better free software.

I feel that people switching to another proprietary thing will just run into problems again in the future. It makes more sense to come up with a permanent solution.

Gimp is painful to use for even once off small stuff. If you at all do anything commercially, the benefits of photoshop would have paid for itself over gimp.

Depends what you need it for. I don't think it's bad but my use-cases are very simple.

Unfortunately, Adobe tools were already on its own league before the recent AI revolution. They are now even more untouchable.

I say that with deep regret not only because of the update to the terms of service, but because they are terrible OS citizens, downright user hostile in many situations and a monopoly.

> they are terrible OS citizens

I used to feel this way. And then I discovered their Spectrum design and React libraries. I use them in production. And I am a huge fan. I don't think anything like this exists. Opensource or commercial.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of UI libraries. But nothing has the breadth of coverage that Spectrum does, including design guidelines.

https://spectrum.adobe.com/ https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum

And Spectrum 2 is expected later this year.

By OS, I meant Operating Systems, not Open Source :)

Their apps are such foreigners in their ecosystem that they make Electron apps look good by comparison. Also, Creative Cloud spreads itself over every folder it can touch, keeps nagging me to use cloud-whatever, fights me for auto launching and updating, etc.

That's what I meant as a bad platform citizen.

Figma for all UX design.

Affinity Photo for bitmap editing (which is vanishingly rare these days).

Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma.

Affinity Publisher for print design (aka when I need to update my resume...).

Instead of Adobe Stock, I use Pexels, or just generate a sufficiently generic image on ChatGPT.

Instead of Adobe Fonts, I just stopped being a web developer, ha ha. Google Fonts, of course, is one alternative.

I got rid of all Adobe products in 2019. Or so I thought. Last year, my laptop fan started going crazy, and the whole machine was heating up. When I looked at my processes, I saw that some little remnant of Creative Cloud had refused to be uninstalled through the regular process, had survived on my computer for years, and just at that moment decided to attack. Maybe it was trying to remind me why I hate Adobe.

> Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma

Can you elaborate? I like Figma for its interface design capabilities, but feel like Illustrator has more complex vector design. Would you consider Affinity Designer as more similar to Illustrator feature-wise?

Illustrator definitely has more sophisticated tools than Figma. Figma's basically got the pen tool, point manipuation, and a couple of boolean operations, and that's it. It's perfectly fine for making simple icons and so on, but you would suffer if you tried to make a complex illustration in Figma. Affinity Designer has a lot more than Figma, but less than Illustrator.

A practical example would be the "Divide" operation. This is the boolean operation that creates new shapes out of overlapping sections, for example if you had two partially overlapping circles and you used Divide on them, the result would be two pac-man shapes and a leaf shape.

Though it has Boolean operations like Union, Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude, Figma doesn't have Divide at all. Both Affinity and Illustrator do.

Divide is a really, really powerful step in building complex shapes out of simple ones, so when I need to use it, sometimes it's easier to just open up Affinity Designer, even if the rest of the design is in Figma.

Beyond this, Illustrator has a host of neat ways of working with vectors that neither AD nor Figma do. All kinds of warp actions, meshes, and a really nice system for recoloring shapes quickly. It's been 5 years since I opened it up, so I am probably forgetting a lot of important differences.

I love Figma but I agree that proper vector tools are lacking. Illustrator is complex but very powerful.

Would you say that AD is enough for your needs regarding vector design? (I'm looking at ending my Adobe sub this year, would like AD to be a suitable replacement).

I used to do a lot more illustration (character illustrations for marketing and so on), and if that were still the case, I'd probably still be using Illustrator. I think Affinity Designer is up to doing everything I'd need, but it's probably a step down in terms of functionality, while requiring me to learn an entire new application's shortcuts and conventions. In other words, a lot of work just to get back to being almost as productive as I was before. Fortunately, these days, the most I am asked to do is make an occasional icon, so a combination of Figma and AD is more than I need.

Don't forget about self-hosted web fonts! People forget this is even an option

I’m not much of an artist, so for my limited photo manipulation needs Acorn is cheap, subscriptionless, and way more than enough for me:

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

I have been using Acorn since...wow, 2009!

After the first $49 purchase, I spent another $15 and then $19 on upgrades over the years.

It's very effective. The interface is extremely familiar if you're used to Photoshop, and it's wonderfully Mac-native.

I highly recommend it!

For photo editing and manipulation

1) https://www.gimp.org/

2) https://www.digikam.org/

3) https://www.darktable.org/

Vector based editing tool

1) https://inkscape.org/

UI/UX

1). https://www.sketch.com/

Desktop publishing

https://www.scribus.net/

But I haven't found a tool that is as good as Adobe Indesign for desktop publishing.

Left Adobe long ago. I Use Gimp instead of Photoshop.

Fair thing to say is that I don't do that much image/video editing these days.

When I was a 3D artist I found very hard to migrate from 3Ds Max, Vray and Photoshop, especially in ArchViz.

I got a mac app called Graphic off the app store a few years ago and it does everything I need in a vector graphics tool. Illustrator can go get fucked.

I really wish I could get behind inkscape but the UI has never improved enough for me to tolerate it. Graphic just feels much better.

Use Pixelmator Pro for photoshop stuff. I don't do a lot of work in it anymore but it's great for making youtube thumbs and other basic stuff. The photo retouching stuff is nice, stills from my gopro are kinda dark and it does a great job making them look better for web use.

I didn't switch for ethical reasons, but Photopea is such brilliant editor that for most of my Photoshop needs I use that now. Photoshop is way more powerful and Photopea probably wouldn't be suitable for power users, but as a techy that occasionally needs to do a bit of cropping or a some basic photo editing it's a great tool and does everything I used to use Photoshop for.

The bulk of my UI graphics and mockup work has been in Sketch for around a decade at this point, with the odd excursion into Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo for work more suited for raster graphics. For vector work I’ll occasionally use Affinity Designer when Sketch isn’t working quite the way I’d like for some reason or another.

Have tried Figma and it’s ok I guess, but leans too far into prototyping and collab for my own personal use, plus I don’t like how they keep your full fidelity original documents locked away in an proprietary document format (Sketch’s file format is open and publicly documented).

I have a Photoshop license but it’s used only for following art instruction videos (drawing, painting, etc) just to reduce friction, since that’s what the bulk of instructors are using and I don’t want to fuss with remapping keys and hunting down equivalent functionality mid-lesson. All “serious” work is done with other software.

I switched to pdfexpert and Final Cut pro and saved so much money and no longer limited to just two machines. Never look back

I was a comic artist. In the past decade virtually everyone I know switched from Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint. It was cheaper, more lightweight and had features comic artists needed like streamlined flatting tools and manga asset integration.

I paid for the full Creative Cloud for years… Recently I switched to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, which have both been fantastic replacements for Illustrator and InDesign respectively.

However, I kept a $10/month subscription to Lightroom & Photoshop, because I have an enormous Lightroom catalog. They have me over a barrel on Lightroom.

There is also no replacement for Adobe After Effects if it's part of your workflow. There's Fusion in the DaVinci Resolve suite, but it's much different.

Some old, cracked version of Photoshop

I just cancelled my Adobe subscription after trying to cancel for more than 6 months, so many dark patterns that caused my wife to sign in for a renew when she didn't want. To actually cancel you have to say you want to actually cancel in 3-4 different screens, where there's always an option to renew instead for a whole year that you cannot cancel.

I am never going to pay for Adobe while this practices continue.

Here’s the full list of Adobe Creative Cloud products for which it would be great to identify alternatives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Desktop,_...

I think the big ones are:

Acrobat

Audition

Illustrator

InDesign

Lightroom

Photoshop

Premiere

I think a lot of people also use Fonts and Stock just because it’s convenient but they aren’t the same type of desktop product as the other ones.

I wasn't an Adobe user before but I started learning video editing and DaVinci Resolve has been great. It's free for my needs, and the paid version is a reasonable one time cost and not a subscription.

It's not even a matter of settling for an alternative because of Adobe, from the advice I've seen Resolve is what you'd go with today anyway.

I'm currently only using Premiere Pro and InDesign from the Adobe Creative Suite and Inkscape and Gimp from old habit. Never god around to use Photoshop and Illustrator to be honest. I'm planning to end up with this suite:

Premiere Pro -> Davinci Resolve

InDesign -> Affinity Publisher

Illustrator -> Inkscape

Photoshop -> Gimp

Photoshop -> Pixelmator Pro

Illustrator -> Affinity Designer

InDesign -> Affinity Publisher

Premiere/AfterEffects -> DaVinci Resolve

All one-time payment licenses. I cancelled my Adobe subscription a couple years ago. It was such a mess of dark patterns to get out of it. Good riddance.

https://www.photopea.com/ is a good free alternative to Photoshop. It is a 90100 product - 90% of the features 100% free.

I switched a long time ago. I use Affinity Photo and Corel PaintShop Pro. Only features I feel I'm missing out on are the generative ai features in latest Photoshop versions.

I used to use PaintShop Pro a lot... After the second Corel release I dropped it because I didn't like the direction it took. I do wish that Affinity had at least good WINE support for being able to run in Linux.

I just hate GIMP myself, never liked it and it feels extra clunky. For quick edits, I can usually get away with Pinta (Paint.Net fork), but would like something more. I've thought about digging out an old copy of JASC PSP, which IIRC ran fine under WINE.

gave up on Adobe years ago. (abhor subscriptions)

Photoimpact was my fave for a long time, now mainly using affinity designer / photo, photopea and for quick fixes there are dozens of online ai-like things to do most of what needs getting done.

recently found a powertoys addon that lets me resize image using windows context menu / right click -> resize pictures.. no program to load / open.

Corel videostudio and davinci resolve, own it - no subscription needed.

I switched to pdfgear as an alternative to acrobat/dc for all my pdf needs. Free and better than acrobat.

If anyone can comment on good alternatives for After Effect, I'd be interested to know.

Apple Motion?

https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/motion/

for SVG and Lottie animation Glaxnimate: https://glaxnimate.mattbas.org

for simple pixel-based image animation/distortion Anime Effects: https://animeeffectsdevs.github.io

Capture One instead of Lightroom

Their business model (licence prices) are even worse then for LR+PS. But its solid piece of software.

For my very limited photoshop-ish needs, Pixelmator Pro has been great.

I still don’t think there’s an alternative for After Effects. People always say DaVinci Resolve, which seems like a good replacement for Premiere Pro, but not After Effects. I’ve looked into a lot of entrants in this area but one has nearly as rich a library of effects. Please prove me wrong, I’d love to stop paying Adobe $600/yr.

Macro.com for PDF (better than Acrobat)

PDFgear is free and works great.

For personal use, cracked Adobe products.

I myself have switched from Illustrator to Affinity Designer several years ago, but Photoshop is somehow irreplaceable for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I drag around a 60MB portable version of CS3 that does 99% of anything I'd need to do.

I've found myself missing out on the generative AI fill train but recently discovered Krita AI diffusion, not too difficult to set up and use from a PS diehard, and pretty magical.

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

PDFgear

Photopea