10 ms·
The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
- bix6 6mo agoPaywall. I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee? I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.
- corndoge 6mo agoTry DxO Photolab if you have a mac
- bix6 6mo agoBetter than Darktable?
- corndoge 6mo agoOnly you can decide that for yourself, I use both
- j45 6mo agoacdsee is another one worth exploring.
- ArekDymalski 6mo agonow , that's a name I haven't heard in... decades.
- j45 6mo agoHaha, when I saw 30 years, I went to go read about it and its really impressive.
- Wistar 6mo agoacdsee, at least a few years ago when I was using it for large volume jpg commercial work, is fast and often good enough. The trickier stuff went for a spin in Photoshop.
- CyberDildonics 6mo agoLots of photo editing workflows could be done in something like digital fusion which is free. You just have to use roto instead of painting masks, but the procedural graph workflow is more precise. It would also handle anything in a numbered sequence automatically so batch processing is trivial.
- alsetmusic 6mo agoPaywall at the Verge? I have them in my RSS feeds and load articles most days and have never seen that. I definitely don't subscribe to their site. Either way, here's a link: https://archive.is/WCDgq https://archive.is/WCDgq
- Mixtape 6mo agoTheir articles seem to load fine in my reader (Fluent) if I fetch them as they're published. Beyond that though, if I try to fetch the full content or open the article in my browser, I hit the paywall. It seems like either their paywall takes a few minutes to apply to their new articles or they deliberately make them accessible to RSS users fee-free.
- j45 6mo agoIt's a good thing to reward RSS use.
- fluidcruft 6mo agoYeah, theverge is subscription now.
- tayo42 6mo agoAll of the software is to expensive for hobbyists. How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?
- Tanoc 6mo agoMost of us start off as pirates and then go legitimate once we're big enough to work with others. Everybody knows someone who has a cracked version of some ancient version of Corel Draw, but we all know getting contracted under a big company means they want us using the latest file type standards because they'll only have access to the newest version of the file's publishing program. I know some people who still animate in Flash MX and go through all of the trouble of porting it forward to Animator CC 2025. Thought with Adobe killing Animator last month maybe they'll end up with some even more convoluted upconversion chain to get it into Toonboom.
- egypturnash 6mo agoStudent discounts, piracy. Mostly piracy.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- varispeed 6mo agoThey keep adding bloat instead of focusing on usability. Still can't get Illustrator to remember my print settings.
- QuantumSeed 6mo agoSo many competitors are releasing free or low-cost alternatives, that shifting away from Adobe is becoming plausible for many folks.
- nehal3m 6mo agohttp://archive.today/WCDgq http://archive.today/WCDgq It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time. For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.
- vladvasiliu 6mo ago> For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. Meh. It depends on how you view your photography. I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc. I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose. I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year. I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR. Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal. All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end. Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.
- dmbche 6mo agoI think Resolve just released a lightroom equivalent didn't they? Edit0: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/photo https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/... Yeah and seems the only limitation you get is no GPU acceleration with the free tier. I'd give that a spin I like resolve much better than premiere for video and it has AI integration as well
- classified 6mo agoWhat took them so long? It's about time.
- diath 6mo agoIf you're a hobbyist needing photo editing software, just use https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
- Wistar 6mo agoPhotopea is very good. It is what I recommend to friends who just want an immediate solution.
- jart 6mo agoPhotopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop for so long. Thankfully I got all my money back and more by shorting Adobe's stock. After spending so many years drinking unicorn blood, no software company deserves to fall more. Everyone who invested in them, hoping to get rich off torturing artists and tax payers, deserves to lose their money too.
- breakfastduck 6mo agoI did exactly the same, for creating graphics / posters. Love Pixelmator... is PS better at some stuff? For sure, but it's not stuff I need. Thats adobes issue.
- tvshtr 6mo agoThe whole suite of Affinity apps is now free (after Canva bought them). For a hobbyist there was never a better time.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Holacc 6mo ago[dead]
- bensyverson 6mo agoFor a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free. But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite). Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year. I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.
- vrighter 6mo agodon't offend blender by comparing it to ai slop.
- bensyverson 6mo agoIf you think anything created with the help of agentic coding is slop, you're in for a rough (checks watch) rest of your life
- croes 6mo agoYou‘re free to share AI created polished examples
- rpastuszak 6mo agoFWIW it took me waaaaay less time to import 30k+ photos from a Lightroom catalog to Capture one than into a fresh Lightroom install. Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.
- Calavar 6mo ago> we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year Do you mind sharing a few examples?
- crackanimador 6mo ago[dead]
- Tanoc 6mo agoI bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 and $2,500 adjusted for inflation if you still trust the BLS' CPI calculations. If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations. We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.
- wongarsu 6mo agoFor regular, undiscounted prices the subscription prices were somewhat fair. Regular Photoshop CS5 was $700, or $1000 for the extended version. And $200 to upgrade. Now it's a $300/year subscription. But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student
- CWuestefeld 6mo agoWe all love to hate on Adobe. But as a photographer my primary software tool is Lightroom. And I continue to use it despite its $120/year price and less-than-stellar cataloging subsystem because its photo editing features (it's primary mission) still exceed the capabilities of its competitors. I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally. If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.
- righthand 6mo agoYou’ll never try a different product anyways so who cares about Adobe die hards? This might as well be a thread about using Linux and all the Apple die hards come here to tell us they just can’t use anything besides Apple for “reasons”. Great! Enjoy your setup.
- vladvasiliu 6mo agoNot GP, but as a LR user, I actually did try alternatives and wasn't impressed. They're usually just as expensive, except if you expect to use the software for multiple years without upgrading, which, to GP's point, would have had you miss out on quite substantial improvements. I'm a hobbyist, and the new "AI" masking has saved me a lot of time during my edits. Is it as good as a professional path tool wielder? Probably not, but that's not relevant to my use case.
- piva00 6mo agoI abandoned LR a long time ago due to an issue with my Adobe subscription, and stuck with Capture One since then. To be honest I much prefer Capture One's workflow and tools, never felt I missed LR even though I had used it for 10 years prior.
- chromacity 6mo agoEvery time I see one of these HN threads, I am actually amazed with what Adobe was able to pull off. I'm not surprised that they could do this to pros who were used to a particular workflow. In fact, for some businesses, a subscription may have some benefits. You were probably upgrading regularly anyway, and the only downside is that it's an expense you can't cut back on in a lean year. But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once options (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years. Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...
- j45 6mo agoHobbyists and professionals have discovered tools like Affinity. Well, the non-subscription version of it anyways.'
- teamonkey 6mo agoI don’t think it’s that surprising. People will pay for software that has better usability and better functionality.
- croes 6mo agoMostly people stick to what they know even if better alternatives exist
- Arcanum-XIII 6mo agoI've tried the alternative for Photoshop and came out unimpressed. It's even worse for Illustrator, and I hate this software. They're not perfect. I don't like the pricing either or their attitude. Still, After Effect, Illustrator, Indesign are very good. I'm not ripped off with the suite at the end... I have the same issue with Maxon and Zbrush: nothing is close, but it's still the best at what it does. We have an even worse company around: Autodesk. And they have competition in the CAD, 3D creation world (that they tried to destroy, but Blender changed the game and Houdini is another world)... but not so much around Revit. Architect would destroy them if they could. But no alternative works. So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
- int32_64 6mo agoAre there any projects focused on getting 'creative' software to work well on Linux? Valve solved Linux gaming but it seems tools like DAWs and video/photo editing is still terrible on Linux.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- irasigman 6mo agoMeanwhile revenue is up 12% YoY to 6.4B in latest earnings. Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoThese threads remind me of the MS threads. Just like MS doesn't care about home users, Adobe doesnt care about hobbyists. Unless you're a professional graphic designer, you're probably using less than 1% of its capabilities and frankly have a pretty worthless opinion on it. "Well I'm a software dev and I use Lightroom so I kinda know what I'm talking about". No, you don't.
- crote 6mo agoYou're forgetting about the pipeline. People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option. Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive. Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.
- callamdelaney 6mo agoAdobe is genuinely one of the shittiest companies on the planet.
- smetannik 6mo agoThat list is quite long
- lousken 6mo agoIt will take a generation, but once students at school will be using something else than Adobe, it is over for them. Same with Microsoft
- mixmastamyk 6mo agoOh they are present in schools all right, along with google. Giving away free samples to get them hooked.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo agoAdobe does fine despite there being plenty of alternatives to their products and the relative ease of switching to them. Microsoft does fine because they have a captive audience to abuse.
- ur-whale 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/WCDgq https://archive.ph/WCDgq
- nike-17 6mo agoThe pushback has felt inevitable for a while now. Adobe's transition to a pure subscription model frustrated a lot of casual/freelance users, but it was really their recent terms-of-service shifts and aggressive cloud integrations that alienated the power users. It's exciting to see viable competitors finally taking market share.
- Balvarez 6mo agolol adobe has fought off these tool for years, sadly it's just better and i hate it. Adobe's real threat is generative AI. While it's not there yet it will be. I should mention I'm a creative professional. * anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoThere was a memo floating around Adobe a couple years ago speculating that their AI features may well make many of their customers redundant. An interesting way to cannibalise your own business.
- shrubble 6mo agoAdobe lost me when I got a deal on Lightroom, installed it, and edited an image. Then I went to look at the image on my drive, and it wasn't there. LR had uploaded it and deleted it from my hard drive! They broke faith with me with that action, I deleted LR and have never touched it since. If you use Sony cameras, you should check out Capture One, which (last I tested) has a deft touch with Sony files.
- lylo 6mo agoThere's a setting to keep them on your hard drive as well as in the cloud
- simianwords 6mo agoThere should be a way where I can use these tools using MCP so that I don't have to learn the particulars of how the tool behaves and what options they expose. There are whole certficiations and tutorials for Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc. If I know what I want to achieve, I should be able to interact with an LLM and figure it out. Massive boost for me tbh.
- tucnak 6mo agoYeah, Adobe should be afraid because... checks notes... had the government not intervened, the "creative software industry" would willingly have sold out to Adobe completely years ago, and so there would be no "war" on them. Rally the troops.
- danilocesar 6mo agoI'm a Darktable user and Affinity mobile user. I was pretty happy with both. I was using Affinity for quick edits. I happily paid for their software as it's worth what they were charging for and not subscription based. Then it was bought and Canvas decided to release it for free. What sounds like good news, for me it's concerning: Companies need to make money. If users are not paying, well, they might actually be the product the company sells: either with ads or intelligence. I hate ads as much as I hate my data being harvested, so I'm out now. A couple of weeks ago I found what seems to work for me now: I bought a tablet capable of running Fedora and Darktable, and that's what am using now.
- mvdtnz 6mo agoCanva, not Canvas. It's free with optional paid add ons, mostly around AI features. Canva does not sell user data.
- ryandrake 6mo agoSubscription pricing just sucks. I want to rewind back to the past where you bought software one time, and that was it. You had no further relationship with the vendor. You aren't paying them periodically to "keep it working." You don't need them to keep a server running. You aren't tethered to them providing them "metrics" and "telemetry." You don't have to worry that the software is suddenly going to change out from under you or get silently "updated." Updates suck--don't justify subscriptions "because you have to keep paying your engineers to keep fiddling with the software." I don't want them fiddling. I buy a hammer once. I use it until I die or it breaks.
- JohnTHaller 6mo agoFor reference, the Creative Cloud Pro Suite (formerly All Apps) is US$1,259.88 per year at $104.99 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a non-refundable, non-cancellable 1 year contract. Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $659.88 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz) Photoshop is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock Lightroom is $215.88 / year or $143.88 / year if you lock PS + LR is $359.88 / year or $239.88 / year if you lock After Effects is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock in Acrobat is $419.88 / year or $299.88 / year if you lock in
- JohnTHaller 6mo ago* EDIT (pasted in the wrong monthly price): Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $82.49 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
- LocalH 6mo agom0nkrus
- sir_brickalot 6mo agoSo, no one here is a professional creative? In the print industry you can't avoid Adobe for one tool: Acrobat. You need professional PDF creation with profiles, preflight tools, editing capabilities abd form creator tools. Oh and there is InDesign which is an industry standard. You need compatibility with your clients' pipeline. So until there is a real competitor for Acrobat and a change in the whole industry, Adobe is unavoidable.
- adi_kurian 6mo agoCould you clarify profiles and preflight tools?
- pilgrim0 6mo agoAdobe won’t be hurt by this in the professional market because they have inter-app compatibility and a somewhat consistent language, plus you need their software to work with legacy files. Adobe is cheap, you can get the full suite for a very reasonable price. Competing software is always niche and you need to learn each one individually as they don’t share UX principles nor ontologies. They might be free now, but imagine managing individual subscriptions for each one later on; a nightmare for individuals and companies alike. Just needing to sign-up for multiple apps individually is a headache, all the emails and updates, etc. Unless someone makes a comparable and comprehensive suite, they won’t be actually competing with Adobe.
- anotherevan 6mo ago> People love free. I worry about the longevity of some of these. Are they going to be free with little further development and just languish? If I was a graphics shop, I don't think I'd be jumping off Creative Cloud and re-gearing staff to Cavalry and Affinity in too much of a hurry.
- sarbanharble 6mo agoSince 2005, I’ve owned or subscribed to Adobe Photoshop suite of products in some fashion. 6 months ago I canceled everything, worrying that I’d miss Illustrator the most. I don’t.
- HackerThemAll 6mo agoAlso the Reader has become so bloated and ugly that I abandoned it for the tiny SumatraPDF that starts faster than a blink of an eye and displays PDFs for reading very nicely. I don't need all that features which Adobe stuffed within Reader, only sometimes I miss the digital signature panel. I do hope, however, that Sumatra will add digital signature verification at some point. Fingers crossed.
- icar 6mo agoI wish Adobe adopted Jetbrain's model. You pay for a version of the software. You then keep it forever. Then offer additional stuff like using their AI or some cloud save stuff.