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Comment by BurnerBotje | Hacker News Reader

I've just canceled my subscription this morning after i've received a reminder that it would be renewed.

I don't know where you use CC for, but if it is just for photoshop, you might give https://www.photopea.com/ a try.

I switched to Affinity Photo as an alternative [1] and quite happy with it. It's similar enough to Photoshop that I'm not lost, more polished than Gimp, and only a fraction of the price. Their forum is also quite good for support.

1: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

I'll second this.

Affinity Photo and Designer are great tools, they are cross-platform (although you have to purchase them separately), and regularly go on sale (I bought both for 70$ total).

I have yet to find a task I used to use Photoshop or Illustrator for that I can't do with these. I am not a hardcore or super advanced user, but that's why it works for me.

Nikon have just published a complete free and quite sophisticated photo software suite, most useful summary of which here :

https://bythom.com/newsviews/nikon-launches-new-software.htm...

Ed; "Everything is there: stills, video, image browsing, NEF processing, Lightroom-like capabilities, cloud integration, image ingest,and much more."

nice trying this out. i have a nikon camera :)

(They aren't cross-platform if they don't run on Linux)

Tomato, tomato

edit: we are talking about replacements for Adobe products here, so context matters. Adobe products _also_ don't run on Linux.

I wouldn't call Adobe products "cross-platform" either, though.

With linux desktop use at ~1.5% and dropping, at some point it becomes bad business to support it. It's not adobe's job to pick OS's for their users, it's their job to support the OS's that their users use. And their users are about 99% Windows/Mac it seems.

When you cover about 98-99% of your users platforms, I think you're cross platform.

Otherwise, we could define a cross-platform slippery slope such that no software has ever achieved it. There's always another platform you didn't support.

Then "cross-platform" now means "Windows and MacOS" and Linux stops making the "platform" list?

In the commercial desktop software realm, that's what cross-platform has always meant.

I always thought cross-platform meant "more than one platform", but I guess I don't really know if that's how it's typically used.

I almost exclusively use Linux, and I would call any Windows + Mac app cross-platform.

Does it run on more than one platform? If yes, it's cross platform.

Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Linux? BSD? Haiku? Minix?

If it doesn't run on BeOS, it's not cross platform!

I mean, yes. Functional cross-platform doesn't mean "every single platform ever", and hitting 98% is a fantastic target.

Listen, I love linux, and it's not MY fault that the year of the Linux Desktop never came and that its marketshare has continued to fall against its competitors.

Pretty sure there are lots of valid definitions of "cross-platform", and I will say again that context matters.

If I'm talking about a mobile app and I say "cross-platform" I probably meant iOS and Android. It would be strange to say "what about Linux??" in that context.

So here we are talking about competitors to Adobe products, where "cross-platform" means Windows and Mac, so when I say "cross-platform" in this context, I am also referring to that same set of platforms.

It is cross platform if they run aCross multiple platforms. Be that 2 or 3 or 15.

These arguments really needs to be in the context of the real world. No one values an academic/technical point.

The intersection of artists, who are heavy users of the Adobe suite of products, and linux aficionados is essentially zero.

You do realize this, do you not?

I cancelled my subscription a few days ago. It was the most painfull procedure ever. Help article points to a cancellation button, which does not exist. Contact page leads to nowhere. Chat bot points you to the useless help section. Finally a real human behind the chatbot answers, but takes extra long time to make you lose any remaining patience or hope. Finally after 1 hour of various counter offers and discounts, they accept the cancellation request. I have never witnessed a subscription cancellation process this obstructive. It should be illegal.

I’m amazed that a large corporation gets away with it. It’s super scammy.

Every single cable company tries the same scam. The only difference being that it's slightly easier to get to a human in the first place.

Cancelling the payment from the bank side would probably speed up their response.

This is why I have gone to using virtual cards online.

When you want to cancel, you go to one central repository with all your virtual cards and turn off the card for the service you want to cancel. When your next payment comes up, the card will decline, the service will close your account for you. Easy cancellation.

Same here but in my case I did find the cancel subscription button, it just gave an "error" when I tried to use it. Required me to talk to support before cancelling.

That is in addition to their scammy practice of displaying a monthly price, but locking you into a yearly contract. You pay monthly, but if you cancel within the year they charge you a cancellation fee that is essentially equal to the entire remaining subscription. Not sure if they do that anymore, but that was the case with my sub 2 years ago.

I have been happy with Pixelmator Pro.

I use it for work.

One time fee, I can’t justify Photoshop CC for once per quarter usage.

I may use it intensively for a few days then not touch it for months.

This is really something I've been thinking for quite some time, canceling my CC subscription (which is monthly) but there are couple of things that kept from executing this decision; first of course loong years of habit (almost 20), hard to leave. After switching to Figma for UI design, my main use of CC for branding, print design is left to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and photography editing for Lightroom. I can ditch the others in CC apps in an instant, but I can't Photoshop and Illustrator, because the branding design works need mockups, brushes, textures, stuff and web resources mostly made for PS, also I've a huge offline archive I like using, also there is print work, which I use Illustrator mainly. Adobe products really make me mad, they work in weird ways, crash, lost work and data, plus couple of times in a year something happens to make me connect to client support, these are the times that I really want to cut my all connection with the company and their products.

At some point I'll manage to figure this out and take a bold step further to leave Adobe all behind. I know there are options, tried most of them (Affinity etc), but I make my living through these apps and I need reliable software with resources and community, just like Figma did in a great way for UX/product design, I wish they create side products like CC apps, for print design, even audio design, that would be awesome.

I have gotten pretty decent results from Pixelmator Pro and Inkscape.

I grew up with Photoshop 4 and CorelDRAW!, so I would totally be happy with those as well.

YMMV

PSA: Be aware of Adobe's "Yearly contract billed monthly" subscription thingy.

Thank you, we want to try this. I despise subscription model software. I wish I could find my Adobe Photoshop 6.0 disk, it did everything I need just fine.

Eh, why not rate it 3.14159 ? After all you paid for it?

I just tried this and while I appreciate the attempt to make it relatively the same UI as Photoshop most of the things I tried didn't work like they would in Photoshop.

I couldn't apply a filter to a shape layer, which I can do in Photoshop. It didn't blur out the option, I had to click it to find out I couldn't do it.

I did try to gaussian blur a layer and it did nothing until I hit 50px then at 51px it basically blurred everything out of existence. I tried this in Photoshop and it behaved in a more linear way, as I'd expect.

This would actually be less of a problem if every Photoshop alternative didn't try to be a pixel perfect clone of Photoshop. Take some risks, evaluate some choices and see if you can do things better than Photoshop. Otherwise the comparisons will be too stark.

I understand a lot of the vitriol towards Adobe for a number of reasons, but for some reason they just do photo/image editing better than anyone else. I keep waiting for the day a FOSS alternative pops up that actually competes.

Thanks for that link. I've often found myself wanting to do minimal image work, and this is the first time i see something really usable.

Photopea is made by a single developer.

https://blog.photopea.com/creating-photopea.html

A single developer who put in 7000 hours before he made a cent. It was a hobby project he was passionate about.

He thankfully now makes a comfortable living from it.

It's one of my favourite indie-hacker-style stories, as the hacker was motivated by his intrinsic joy of making something.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...

> A single developer who put in 7000 hours before he made a cent.

I think this is less uncommon for bootstrapped companies than a lot of people assume. E.g. Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell has a similar story.

Ironically that this is also how Photoshop started.

I have many customers who are stuck with CC for Acrobat. It seems to be the only full featured PDF editing program.

For those on a Mac I highly recommend PDF pen pro for most editing needs. If it has the features you’re looking for it’s a great alternative

That said Acrobat is really fully fleshed so I understand why people still only use it professionally

I switched to "PDF Expert" (developer is Readdle I think) on the mac and its equivalent on mobile. Its easier to use than Acrobat ever was and costs less per year.

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