Comment by DizzyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DizzyDoo | Hacker News Reader

I've been working at detangling myself from the Adobe lineup of products. I really like (or liked) Adobe AfterEffects, it's been very helpful for me in compositing trailers for my computer game business, but it's totally been replaced by the free version of Davinci Resolve. Which I've also found is an excellent replacement for Adobe Audition, which I was using for editing the Voice Over and raw Sound Effects for, again, my video games.

But I can't see myself escaping from Photoshop anytime in the next couple of years. I have a lot of special export scripts in 'Adobescript' (yuck) that carve up my high res art assets, slice them this way and that, crop, hide/display different groups and export in particular ways. Nothing unusual, it's just a lot of grunt work, but I have it set up so that clicking a button in Photoshop will just Do It All and have it work. It'll take some time to set that all up again in a Photoshop alternative.

The nasty payments stuff detailed in the twitter thread is just the usual Adobe nastiness, some product manager somewhere is trying to juice the numbers.

My own billing experience with Adobe recently was needing to change my account's country from UK to Canada, as I've moved, and the VAT number and sales tax stuff is of course all different. The poor support person I spoke to couldn't fix it for me, they had to have a backend engineer manually change alter a field in a database somewhere - it all sounds like a terrible mess.

That's the problem. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects have almost no competition and they know it.

Even if there were, companies can't just jump to different tools because they would lose ability to open all their past work files. The migration will be slow.

AutoDesk (CAD/BIM/etc) is also getting like this. Maybe not totally Adobe yet, but they too also basically have a lock on their industry. Just like with Adobe, some alternatives exist and a few might be good enough, but AutoDesk bought so many competitors and/or companies that most of the time they are the only game in town.

Bentley (not cars) is another company I loathe, but I've already gotten off topic.

The professional software industry is a cesspool across all industries.

Yes, AutoDesk is a very good comparison.

The problem is these companies aren't evil but they are under considerably less pressure to be good. Perhaps the saddest thing about Adobe is that the subscription model has almost completely eliminated their support staff's ability to allow things like discretionary late free upgrades (which I've benefited from in the past, before I made the jump to Affinity Photo in 2015, after a year of Photoshop CC).

I agree there's no pressure on these companies as a whole. Ideally, they should be heavily investing in R&D while the moat is still wide.

I manage a product design team. We've long moved away from from using Adobe products. It's not that we detest subscription model or Adobe as a company; their products were no longer meeting our needs.

Only After Effects doesn't have an all-in-one competitor, really.

Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, as a linked suite, has a very, very able competitor in Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher. Given the complexity of these products, expecting more than one fully-integrated competing suite might be too much.

You might find this video useful, to see the extent to which it is a competitor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVqJIaMlB6E

Not a 100% drop-in replacement, mind you, but almost nothing ever is. Very close, though, and capable of some remarkable things.

(I still don't have Publisher but I love Photo and Designer.)

Last I looked for a replacement for Lightroom I didn't really find anything that worked well for me. Maybe the open source tools have matured in the interim? I've been sticking with my old copy of Lightroom 5 and until I buy a new camera that it doesn't support processing raw files for.

I don't really like Darktable for that job to be honest -- nothing against what it is capable of, because it is clearly capable, it just rubs me up the wrong way GUI-wise. Haven't tried RawTherapee in a long time but maybe?

Because I don't really like working in "sessions" and prefer folders, what I do is use DxO PhotoLab (which now comes in an "Essentials" version when you get it with their Nik tools, which might appeal to you). It's fast enough to cull in, though for really fast culls I use Fileloupe on the Mac.

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