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An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop
- d3Xt3r 3mo agoSince you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO. [1] https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
- maxwellito 3mo agoI'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop. Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.
- geenat 3mo agoPhotopea is only good for smaller edits/files otherwise it starts lagging like crazy. That said, Affinity is quite fair fast even on huge files. You can bring over like 80% of your Photoshop muscle memory. Honorable mentions depending on your needs: Figma, Penpot, Krita
- t1234s 3mo agoPhotoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.
- apkbobo1122 3mo ago[flagged]
- InsideOutSanta 3mo agoAfter ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.
- frollogaston 3mo agoI did an insane amount of pixel-perfect editing in Acorn 1.0 free trial when I was a kid in 2007, always with the shareware banner blocking part of the canvas
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- janfoeh 3mo agoAcorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread. I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
- dtagames 3mo agoAffinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
- SanjayMehta 3mo agoI paid for the entire Affinity suite in one shot, was worried when Canva took over, but glad to say everything's working together just fine.
- jkestner 3mo agoWhen you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.
- SanjayMehta 3mo agoThe legacy apps have been receiving minor updates along with the new Affinity app. "Everything is working" was meant to imply my legacy flow as well as the new flow haven't broken at all. I'm sure that in a year or so Canva will move to a subscription model. Then we'll see.
- _fzslm 3mo agoNot only this, but it's like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all mixed up into one super-app. This beats Adobe's cross-app functionality by miles.
- throw0101d 3mo ago> It's also entirely free with no gotchas. How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?
- medwards666 3mo ago
- DemocracyFTW2 3mo ago> Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file This has indeed things like "!!1! MALWARE !!!!" written all over it.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoone of the ways to run pirated Photoshop was to blackhole all of Adobe's license servers; so they probably learned from watching their competitors.
- DemocracyFTW2 3mo agoI'm not saying they didn't have a good or bad reason to do what they do, what I'm saying is this is akin to paying someone to paint the walls and suddenly you find out they're reconfiguring your smartphone. A tad too intrusive for my taste is what I say.
- harvie 3mo agoGIMP. How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoWorld would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it. If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
- DonHopkins 3mo agoHere, here. I wish Blender would just grow an image editor, with pie menus and visual programming nodes. It already has a video editor!
- dsego 3mo agoI share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.
- cmyk_student 3mo agoI think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :) GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
- pauldoerwald 3mo agoRemarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoPretty clear marketing killed PS when they went to a subscription model.
- pauldoerwald 3mo agoA subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.
- jfyi 3mo agoHeh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.
- graemep 3mo agoIt looks like they can take their customer base for granted: https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-results https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-r...
- XCSme 3mo agoWith subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.
- anonymars 3mo agoAdobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq/ https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)
- f4c39012 3mo agoOne hallmark of poor quality software is the existence of a separate cleanup tool in case the uninstall doesn't work
- DonHopkins 3mo agoThe installer skipped the in part, and is now just a staller.
- donaldihunter 3mo agoYeah, Adobe's annual paid monthly plan that auto-renews and locks you in is pure evil.
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoyou can get out of the lock in by switching your plan then theres a two week window you can cancel without a fee. Not that you should have to do that, I'm just letting you know that you can so they don't get a fee from you.
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoThis software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.
- wiederholen 3mo ago[dead]
- giwook 3mo agoThere have been some good alternatives mentioned in the comments here, like Affinity or Photopea. Does anyone happen to know if there is a similarly good alternative to Lightroom?
- Forgeties79 3mo agoBMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve
- Goofy_Coyote 3mo agoCapture One. Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2 V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
- mghackerlady 3mo agoEh, using resolve for photo editing seems a bit like using blender for video editing. It can be done, and it isn't that bad, but there are so many better options
- Goofy_Coyote 3mo agoYeah, I agreed, though I’m secretly hoping maybe Davinci enters this market too
- Pseudomanifold 3mo agoDarktable (https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/) has become very good and continues to be my go-to solution for digital photography.
- hbn 3mo agoThe delete button is labelled "delete (trash)" Never change, FOSS UIs
- iluvcommunism 3mo ago[dead]
- NietTim 3mo ago> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted. I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
- thunderfork 3mo agoThey'll send you to collections, probably.
- NietTim 3mo agoOh, duh, of course. One of those "how did I not think of that" moments
- amelius 3mo ago> A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes. Holy moly.
- 3form 3mo agoI don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).
- stronglikedan 3mo agoIt does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).
- lossyalgo 3mo agoOP is using Apple so maybe that's why? I use PS weekly and I've never seen it (or anything else) touch my hosts file on Windows. I just verified - nothing beyond my own entries.
- GavinAnderegg 3mo agoAuthor here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar. The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.
- mft_ 3mo agoA tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1]. Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin. [0] https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ [1] https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner
- dylan604 3mo agoIt was all of the Adobe app's caches that kill me. I kept a copy of DiskInventoryX around for a long time for the specific purpose of showing how large those folders could get.
- paradox460 3mo agoHazel, the folder watch automation tool, also supports this
- yardie 3mo ago> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it. Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files. So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
- fragmede 3mo agoYeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
- donatj 3mo agoMy biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again. Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds. The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
- PaulHoule 3mo agoIt’s better than a lot of modern software. One reason I stick with it is I have a hobby of printing smaller formats like 4x6 cards and Photoshop and Epson Print Layout are the only programs that I have 100% control of all the printer and color management settings and exactly where the image winds up on the printer (e.g. managing the mechanical uncertainty). I don’t send work out to people who have better printers because I don’t trust them to get it right.
- noman-land 3mo agoNobody has mentioned Krita which is quite good.
- nextaccountic 3mo agoKrita is excellent for painting (specially its brush engine). The problem is Photoshop is also used for other things Krita could refocus into a more general photo editing software, but I think they want to focus into being the best painting software instead
- pier25 3mo agoI've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that). Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013. Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now. The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
- bombcar 3mo agoAll the various "cloud" apps suck in various ways (one drive, I've a pitchfork for you; Box Drive, you're maybe the best behaved of a horrible lot) - but Creative Cloud was always the worst.
- card_zero 3mo agoThey're weirdly sticky clouds.
- robocat 3mo ago> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support). Churn is such a measurable figure.
- JanTurnherr 3mo agowords cannot describe how much i hate the new adobe
- firecall 3mo agoRember when Adobe tried to stop people saying images had been “Photoshopped”? Well, be careful what you wish for Adobe! Now everyone just says an image is AI, and something being Photoshopped is a distant memory. RIP Photoshopped Images.
- bananaboy 3mo agoI cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking. I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).
- hn_acker 3mo agoWhat a dreadful memory to resurface. I had the exact same errors when I tried running the Creative Cloud uninstaller program, so I hunted through all of my /library and ~/library subfolders for anything containing "adobe", "photoshop", "creative cloud", or "CC". I'm very confident that I didn't delete anything unrelated to Adobe, and I'm equally unconfident that I deleted every single file related to Adobe.
- NoSalt 3mo agoI have a cure-all for difficult-to-cancel services ... cancel the credit card. I have done it before, and I will do it again if need be. And, I absolutely refuse to give any, ANY company my debit card number or bank account number. I want to be in charge of when my money leaves, and to whom it goes.
- QuantumGood 3mo agoJust opened it and Bridge updates are unavailable due to incompatibility: Windows 11 only. Of course my hardware is Windows 11 incompatible.
- opengrass 3mo agoYou don't need anything newer than CS6.
- ksec 3mo ago>I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one..... >It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old. I thought the Creative Cloud was a fairly recent thing. May be 2018? I mean 2018 is still 8 years which is a fairly long time. Turns out it started 13 years ago. I had to double check on Office 365 which is even further back to 2010. Which I got another question in my mind. Has Photoshop really improved that much? There were still lots of improvement from CS1 ( 8.0 ) to CS6. Has there been that many new features since then?
- squidbeak 3mo ago>> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, > I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old. Don't worry, while 13 years seems long enough to make you feel old, you're not old. You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent.
- brycewray 3mo ago> You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent. Arggh...
- kazinator 3mo agoI've been using Gimp since the mid-late 1990's. The first time I used it, I got it running was on a Sun SPARCStation 20 --- which was running Red Hat 2.0 Linux! I still reach for that on the rare occasion I have to do some image editing. There are some alternatives in the FOSS image editing landscape now worth checking out.