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Not necessarily. I've read from several who have successfully replaced Photoshop with The GIMP. (I've done this, though I still do photo work in LR). Inkscape h

by tomc1985 10y ago

Not necessarily. I've read from several who have successfully replaced Photoshop with The GIMP. (I've done this, though I still do photo work in LR). Inkscape has come a long way, and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work. I don't know how fleshed out the DTP side of things are but as a amateur photographer and graphic designer I've been able to get away without having Adobe anything (except Lightroom) installed for the past few years at home and at work. You will have to learn a new UI though, but I find this is easier to do than it sounds because most of the open-source software doesn't try so hard to map things to their equivalent real world process. (I found that the hardest thing about Photoshop was its terminology and workflow, which was built to be familiar to film photographers and print media people)

andrei_says_ 10y ago
My workflow is heavy on both Lightroom and Photoshop. Both are industry-standard tools and I have invested thousands of hours between them. I don't really see myself migrating toward a tool like GIMP, hoping that after investing many hours I'll discover a feature set will match my needs. Linkscape is good, but I don't use Illustrator that much. For DTP, Photoshop + InDesign are hard to beat and again, an industry standard. Maybe I'll run Windows in a VM but I don't really see myself going without these tools which I rely on daily.
Veratyr 10y ago
> and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom is fantastic at it.
- btschaegg 10y ago
  Interesting. To me, those features are the ones I struggle most with in Lightroom. The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. I use LR in a VM (since it doesn't run on Linux) and in such an environment, there's always a shortage of disk space. LR gives me exactly 0 possibilities to work around that - the only option is to create a new DB for each project, which negates all upsides to the system.
  - Veratyr 10y ago
    > The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. You mean in a file system at all or you mean that it wants things stored in a particular folder structure? If the latter, Lightroom doesn't enforce any particular structure. If the former, I'm not aware of another solution that works with images that aren't on disk. Darktable, RawTherapee, Capture One Pro etc. all work with stuff on a filesystem.
    - btschaegg 10y ago
      I don't really care about the folder structure, I'd just like to be able to move parts of my library around without losing all the work I've done. Darktable for example saves its settings in a file alongside the RAW image. Done. I can move those around without being afraid of anything. LR however enforces Adobe's own, opaque solution that I'm not aware of any possibilities to efficiently manage without going through LR itself. Don't get me wrong, tagging etc. is nice. I'd just rather do it on my own in a system that I can manage myself (e.g. BeFS if need be).
ptrincr 10y ago
There is also Blender for video editing/model rending plus a whole bunch of other stuff.
adrienne 10y ago
Anyone whose workflow is InDesign-heavy or Illustrator-heavy is shit out of luck, though; there is no reasonable replacement for either, and especially not for InDesign.
- omnimus 10y ago
  this is so true. If you are photographer then you are ok onn linux. If you want to make books profesionaly there is no replacement for indesign. Scribus doesnt have multiline paragraph composing. So technicaly if you want to set something to the block, you will get always better result in indesign. 3D and photography are interesting to programmers but books... they make them with TeX. But with tex its hard to do columns and more complicated composition. One way could be scribus latex render windows but its somehow shitty. Its too niche thing i guess. Same goes for After Effects - node based composing is fine on linux but layer based for animation (motion graphics). AE only thing on the planet. Its getting frustrating especialy with recent decline of mac os and mac hw. Again - hackintosh to the rescue but try to find hackintosh laptop.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I did a hackintosh on an older thinkpad, but the experience was less than great, and had to use a usb wireless, as I didn't want to replace the wifi at the time. I went to linux shortly after, and that experience was slightly better, until an intel graphics regression made the system unusable, then back to windows.

andrei_says_ 10y ago

My workflow is heavy on both Lightroom and Photoshop. Both are industry-standard tools and I have invested thousands of hours between them. I don't really see myself migrating toward a tool like GIMP, hoping that after investing many hours I'll discover a feature set will match my needs. Linkscape is good, but I don't use Illustrator that much. For DTP, Photoshop + InDesign are hard to beat and again, an industry standard. Maybe I'll run Windows in a VM but I don't really see myself going without these tools which I rely on daily.

Veratyr 10y ago

> and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom is fantastic at it.

btschaegg 10y ago
Interesting. To me, those features are the ones I struggle most with in Lightroom. The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. I use LR in a VM (since it doesn't run on Linux) and in such an environment, there's always a shortage of disk space. LR gives me exactly 0 possibilities to work around that - the only option is to create a new DB for each project, which negates all upsides to the system.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. You mean in a file system at all or you mean that it wants things stored in a particular folder structure? If the latter, Lightroom doesn't enforce any particular structure. If the former, I'm not aware of another solution that works with images that aren't on disk. Darktable, RawTherapee, Capture One Pro etc. all work with stuff on a filesystem.
  - btschaegg 10y ago
    I don't really care about the folder structure, I'd just like to be able to move parts of my library around without losing all the work I've done. Darktable for example saves its settings in a file alongside the RAW image. Done. I can move those around without being afraid of anything. LR however enforces Adobe's own, opaque solution that I'm not aware of any possibilities to efficiently manage without going through LR itself. Don't get me wrong, tagging etc. is nice. I'd just rather do it on my own in a system that I can manage myself (e.g. BeFS if need be).

ptrincr 10y ago

There is also Blender for video editing/model rending plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

adrienne 10y ago

Anyone whose workflow is InDesign-heavy or Illustrator-heavy is shit out of luck, though; there is no reasonable replacement for either, and especially not for InDesign.

omnimus 10y ago
this is so true. If you are photographer then you are ok onn linux. If you want to make books profesionaly there is no replacement for indesign. Scribus doesnt have multiline paragraph composing. So technicaly if you want to set something to the block, you will get always better result in indesign. 3D and photography are interesting to programmers but books... they make them with TeX. But with tex its hard to do columns and more complicated composition. One way could be scribus latex render windows but its somehow shitty. Its too niche thing i guess. Same goes for After Effects - node based composing is fine on linux but layer based for animation (motion graphics). AE only thing on the planet. Its getting frustrating especialy with recent decline of mac os and mac hw. Again - hackintosh to the rescue but try to find hackintosh laptop.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I did a hackintosh on an older thinkpad, but the experience was less than great, and had to use a usb wireless, as I didn't want to replace the wifi at the time. I went to linux shortly after, and that experience was slightly better, until an intel graphics regression made the system unusable, then back to windows.