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Alternatives to Adobe

untested.sonnet.io

68 pointsrpastuszak60 comments

I've been using a spread of Adobe alternatives the past several years, including Pixelmator, the Affinity apps, and Sketch and while they're all solid I'm still not as dexterous with any of them as I used to be in Photoshop.

It would make me very happy if Adobe were to release a one time purchase version of PS that in terms of features mirrors a version somewhere between 7.x and CS2 — very few of the features added past that point have any value for me and I'd prefer to have the comparative light weight and higher nativeness (the UI toolkit they switched to in I think CS3 or CS4 just feels bad) of CS1. That'll never happen unfortunately.

If it weren't for potential legal trouble (Adobe can say old licenses are no longer valid) I'd even consider setting up an old Mac for using CS1/CS2 on.

CS2 was free to download from Adobe in 2013. Technically they made it available for people who bought it but they shutdown the activation servers so basically it was a backup option with universal serial numbers.

Archive.org and many other sites have it. Both the Windows and Mac version (well that needs a G4 or G5 PPC Mac)

https://archive.org/details/Adobe-CS2

Woah, the full version without the need for a license?

You have to check a box in the installer to pinky swear you do have a license, but it isn't validated in any way.

You would technically need a license

https://www.photopea.com/ is a drop-in replacment for photoshop CS

> I'd even consider setting up an old Mac for using CS1/CS2

Buy an old Mac online second hand with CS2 already installed on it from someone that originally bought CS2 and installed it on the machine.

As noted in my comment, that's potentially problematic legally if Adobe finds out I'm using that CS2 license for commercial purposes since they have the right to invalidate licenses at any point.

I don’t understand how buying a machine with a legally already installed copy of the program on it could ever get you into trouble.

Also, with an old machine like that it’s better to keep the machine offline anyways.

A great replacement for Photoshop, which basically mimics CS2 (the last version that was good) is PhotoPea[1]. Free, ad-supported but with a "no ads" subscription option, and works amazingly well for a web app.

[1] https://www.photopea.com

Does anyone else still use CS2 when Adobe released it for "free" in 2013? They shutdown the activation servers and for a couple of months it was free to download as an offline version. Everyone mirrored it though, and it's on Archive.org as well. Works perfectly fine under Linux with Wine

My would make my girlfriend so happy, she never got the hang of Inkscape and Scribus. Where can I read more about this?

https://archive.org/details/Adobe-CS2

The Mac versions needs an old G4 or G5 PPC Mac, but the Windows ones should work perfectly fine

I switched to Affinity Photo and Designer a while back, and have been happy. I wish Designer had image trace, but it's not a deal killer. I used Illustrator way, way back when such a luxury was unheard of, so it's not particularly painful.

Highly recommend both.

You might consider checking out Linearity Curve (Vectornator) if you need vector tracing. It's in their free tier. The app itself is decent (if you're on Mac or iOS), but the UI does take some getting used to. Seems like a decent complement to Affinity Designer for certain things.

https://www.linearity.io/

Thanks!

I cut my teeth on Illustrator back on a Mac II, so going back to ye olden wayes isn't horrifying, but the trace function saves a lot of time.

Sure thing! For me, it was a choice between learning obscure codes for an ancient phototypesetting machine or Illustrator 88 on an SE. Vector trace function is great for mockups or if you’re going for that mid-90s Taco Bell promo vibe. Too much post-processing to get clean lines, IMO.

Affinity Photo is terrible. The jagged edges for lasso tool without anti-aliasing makes it useless to me.

Photopea is 10,000x better and free.

Never found anything better than Fireworks for the user who only rarely needs to make basic edits to images

I'm surprised to not see anything by Corel in there, though admittedly this isn't my area.

Corel was the only real alternative back in AD 2000 when I was playing with photoshop, and I do have their recent lightroom version which I paid for and --downloaded--.

That's a good point. I actually got Linux partially because I wanted to install Corel.

There was a distro called "Corel Linux" at the time IIRC. I started installing it on my Win 95 machine thinking it had sth to do with Corel Draw.

Strange layout. The header line stretches across the width of the window, but I can only scroll down the page if the cursor is hovering over that column. Restricting your text to a narrow column is fine, but restricting scrolling is just odd

I switched to Capture One a few years ago after the Lightroom subscription-only rug pull, and while it does import Lightroom catalogs... it's really only useful for catalogs of exported images.

RAW engines are as much art as they are science, and I quickly learned that it is not reasonable to expect one engine to simply read settings created in another engine and have the result be anywhere close to a drop-in replacement. I ended up migrating my Lightroom library over as JPEGs, starting fresh as I imported and developed new RAWs in Capture One.

I would recommend DxO PhotoLab as an alternative to Lightroom:

https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/

It's a perpetual license as opposed to a subscription. So far I have paid twice -- once for PhotoLab 1, and then once more to upgrade to PhotoLab 4 for some new features. I am still quite happy with how it's working.

Any good alternatives to Adobe Acrobat? It feels like its the only software that can edit pdf:s.

Others are very limited. The only one that comes close is macbooks built-in pdf editor.

https://simplePDF.eu if you want to annotate (add fields, checkboxes, signatures) and manipulate the PDF files (merge, delete, rotate...).

Since you mentioned Preview (the Mac alternative to Adobe Acrobat), I assume that's what you're after.

Disclosure: I'm the developer behind it

I'm definitely bookmarking the site, thanks!

Any plans on adding other features that Acrobat offers like censoring texts?

> I'm definitely bookmarking the site, thanks!

You're welcome!

> Any plans on adding other features that Acrobat offers like censoring texts?

There's a "white-out" feature [1] however I don't recommend you to use it for redacting sensitive information as it can easily be circumvented by using other specialised tools to inspect and remove layers.

Black is not _yet_ supported, to keep it in the spirit of "simple", I plan on detecting the background automatically (based on the most prominent pixel colour in the background), but in my TODO (pretty far down).

[1] https://simplepdf.eu/help/faq/how-to-add-background

Firefox has limited PDF editing capacity if you just want to add text and sign a document

The problem is that most (I have not tried all) of these are just not capable of doing everything the Adobe alternative does. I think if the author added a caveat that these were alternatives for non-professionals or non-power users, which I think is the intent, then I could take it more seriously.

I would also encourage the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program for raster style image editing. It's not as shiny or clean as AffinityPhoto, but it seems more powerful and has scripting as an option. Just a helpful suggestion of a middle-ground between automating through ffmpeg and AffinityPhoto.

At this point everyone should be looking at Krita instead of GIMP. Krita has a much slicker UI, more features, and similar keyboard shortcuts to photo$hop.

I wish somebody could implement a Photoshop UI for GIMP. I am using GIMP as my main photo editor but there is a lot of UI pain. A lot of it. Many things are counterintuitive.

I vaguely remember a fork that at least turned it into a more traditional modal app instead of dozen small windows floating on the desktop. That certainly helped.

Edit: Aha! Found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop Abandoned in 2007 though.

It has had a single window mode since Gimp 2.8 was released in 2002. Unfortunately it's not the upstream default, but a lot of Linux distros set it that way anyway.

https://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-concepts-main-windows.html

There is this project that might help you:

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

Aside from the common complaint of its odd UI decisions, the thing that got me about GIMP last I tried it was how rough around the edges it is on macOS. It seemed very confused about my dual monitor setup for example with modals doggedly showing up in the top left corner of one of the two monitors no matter which monitor the main window was placed on.

It's sad that most of the mentioned stand-alone (desktop) alternatives do not have a Linux option.

What kept me using Mac over Linux as my main OS was Adobe CC + Sketch. You could get _some_ stuff working with wine, but it required too much tinkering for me to be a distraction.

Now the software is less of an issue, but the battery life on my M1 is just so much better than anything else.

Well I was surprised not to see Inkscape or Darktable listed.

Yeah, these are not general recommendations, rather the stuff I ended up using.

Thanks, I'm actually going to give Inkscape another try. I think the last time I used it was 5-10 years ago.

I don't remember why I stopped using Darktable. I remember researching it and trying it out for a bit before buying CO. Does it have decent camera profiles? How do you find working with it (raw editing + culling/managing catalogues)? I use fuji mirrorless cameras.

>> Does it have decent camera profiles? How do you find working with it (raw editing + culling/managing catalogues)? I use fuji mirrorless cameras.

I only tried it a little. My Fuji X-T1 is supported and I plan to get back to it real soon - I've got about 500 pictures on the camera to go through.

Photopea is the best free photoshop alternative I have found. It runs entirely in the browser.

Ah with the latest firefly AI stuff it is really hard to beat PS

In my experience, as compared to the current AI alternatives, the quality of the Firefly AI products output is really hampered by Adobe's understandable decision to only train on licensed images.

Yeah good point. I just got to lazy to import from midjourney into Gimp. And switched back to PS. I hope the quality gets better with an update of PS.

Would love to see some competition to take on After Effects

Davinci Fusion or Blender?

>>> I wish there was a nicer, contextual UI for ffmpeg.

There was one on HN a while back with a graph based UI with nodes and stuff.

Had a brief look but can't find it now.

Handbrake works pretty well for many use cases too, although it doesn't expose nearly everything you can do with ffmpeg.

On the Mac there is ff·Works. It is a terrific GUI for ffmpeg. The way it works fits my brain better than the command line interface. I can stack up a bunch of jobs with any of the parameters I need and it munches right through. Works on a single file or 60 files with different setup for each one. Cheap and actively maintained.

Thanks, this looks really good.

Also, as someone trying to sell my own apps, I appreciate the no-bullshit pricing and the structure of their product page.

How about alternatives for Acrobat?

I use bluebeam, on old 11.7 license, but they deactivated license server so I will need to change to their now subscription only or perhaps PDF-XChange Editor Pro.

Which features?

Like all the other alternatives, something that offers a comparable set of features. On MacOS the Preview app can handle some aspects but for example it cannot copy and paste visible parts of a page.

What if I told you the better alternative to Figma is... not doing the stuff you do in Figma at all?

Care to elaborate? I actually agree with you, but I feel like my reasoning may be different, and I'm interested in how you came to your opinion.

Fair enough, I do most of my prototyping in the browser, but I like putting together 1-2 sketches in Figma before coding.

Depends on the project.

Designing software? Sharing designs with team members? I'm not sure I see the value in that.

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