Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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> Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software.

I'm afraid I don't buy this unfounded muck-slinging.

I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.

However I think its only fair and reasonable to admit that it is possible to make high quality closed-source software.

Specifically, in terms of Adobe, I think it is deeply unfair and unfounded to call it "inferior". There is, for example, high-levels of integration between Adobe tools that is simply not present in open-source.

Ultimately money talks. December 2021 there were 26 million Adobe Creative Suite subscribers and growing. If Adobe was that shit, do you really think people would continue paying them ?

I know some people running companies in the design sector (larger companies, not one-man band freelancers), Adobe is a necessary business expense, they pay it because they want it, because time is money, and if their designers get the job done better, quicker and more efficiently in Adobe then they will pay the subscription. (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).

1) > (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).

Yes, most of the time when you know your tools you will not spend much time going through training material, but if you needed to there are plenty of options and not just from Adobe. If you want to learn and get started there are plenty more options.

2) > I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.

I don't recall stating that OSS = better, but in many cases it is. RawTherapee may not be as easy to use compared to Lightroom of Capture One but if used properly you can achieve superior results. One closed source RAW processor I can think of that lacks much training material but achieves great results in Raw Photo Processor (better than LR of RT in many ways). GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop. IMO PhotoLine is much better than Photoshop in many ways, but also lack much training material or a large budget (being developed by two brothers in Germany). I can keep going.

I should add to my original comment that the amount of training and getting a product out for users to use is major for a company to succeed. Adobe and Microsoft have done a great job at getting their products in front of students and making sure they are comfortable with their products before going into the working world.

> GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop.

GIMP is not great until it has adjustment layers.

In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of important ways).

Affinity is great but there is also not as much training as PS, but for the price it is worth having. One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab. I am sure there are plenty of other things XYZ apps do better than PS, but I will say this again, PS has so much training and tutorials out there which save you time.

To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing. The work that team does is amazing and I give them props (though I still would love to see adjustment layers).

> One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab.

Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.

> To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing.

So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've refused to prioritise something that IMO is transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-destructive editing.

I look into what it going on from time to time, they are in the process of moving from GTK v2 to v3. Apparently it is not a easy transition but when it is done (GIMP v3) implementing adjustment layers and other new features should not take as much effort. I am going off memory so don't quote this as fact.

I will also add that, for photographers, there is bundle from Adobe that I consider to be a tremendous value. For about $10/month (where I live, it's easy to spend more than that on a single drink in a bar), I get access to both LightRoom and Photoshop. I've tried open source alternatives, and they are good, but none of them are necessarily better than the Adobe product.

I hate the fact that I am paying for yet another subscription, but in this case, over the course of 5 years, I am just barely paying the retail price of the old CD-based product. So (a) I don't feel like I'm being fleeced, and (b) I get to spread the payments out without really paying more.

Every time I've tried moving into the world of FOSS photography, I've wasted dozens of hours trying to figure out how to do relatively simple things, modifying and tweaking configurations, or completely removing and reinstalling because an update broke something that should have never broken. I work in software, so I'm not exactly a dummy on this stuff; and I know that sometimes that's just part of the deal - especially in a world where you get what you pay for.

In the end, I had to decide whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software. And that is why I happily pay.

> whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software.

Exactly.

I aggressively delete most images as-soon-as they are on the file system. (Is this image worth my time?) So less of an image management problem.

I use ~5% of what RawTherapee provides, because I no longer struggle to make OK pictures from flawed images. Instead I make pictures I like from OK images.

I've tried open source photo editing before, and honestly, the editing experience is pretty good. I've always struggled to match Lightroom for library management however, even if Lightroom doesn't deal with my network drive properly (it always thinks it's out of sync). And so, like you, I've always ended up going back to Adobe's photography plan.

I would really love to use open source tools instead, the network drive bug is very annoying and not being able to run on Linux is pretty unfortunate. The overall process just ends up being quicker with Lightroom than Darktable or RawTherapee though :(

On the photography forums it's hilarious to see people spend $5k-$10k on camera gear and whine about spending $10/mo because it's too expensive. Time is money like everything else and I'm sure a ton of time was spent getting this all together to save how much?

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