Adobe Cuts Perpetual License for Elements Down to Just Three Years
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
GIMP 3 RC 1 is soon here and it actually looks like it can finally replace Photoshop for me. Nondestructive editing is there.
The learning curve was steep, but I managed to replace Lightroom with darktable a couple of years ago.
That is why open source products are important: they add a constantly growing baseline of quality which the likes of Adobe have to be above of if they want to be able to sustain themselves.
Creative cloud products which can now be replaced:
After Effects with Blender, which is even more powerful
Premiere with kdenlive, Openshot, Shotcut or Davinci Resolve (not open Source, but free and with a superior color engine)
Photoshop with Gimp, Krita (Photoshop is still superior tho)
Illustrator with Inkscape, Graphite or other SVG editors
InDesign with Scribus
Many of these tools are not there yet (I sorted roughly from best replacement to worst), but this is certainly a space to watch.
And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative.
I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.
Maybe it depends on your specific niche, but the number of jobs where I had to use AE has been zero for the past 3 years. Blender is known as a modelling or 3D-VFX/Animation tool, but if you are good at it, with all its constraints, python support etc. it is truly worth trying for 2D as well. Tracker is better as well.
As I said, I ordered them by their ability to replace the prospect tools for me. I edited films for hours in Premiere, recently all I had was my linkux machine and kdenlive worked surprisingly well for a small project, not to speak of Davinci.
Blender supported my freelance career for at least the past 5 years and half of the projects would have been considered 2D.
"Wow, how did you achive that look?" is a question I heard more than once. So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. And as for AE: with Davinci and Blender the numer of times I had to reach for AE slowly aproached zero.
But again depends on your Blender skills and what you need done.
Sorry, missed you included Resolve in there, although Resolve's actual market penetration in as an NLE (i.e., directly competing with Premiere) is hard to evaluate (it's obviously the market leader for color grading). Prosumers love it as an NLE though.
Your follow up comments put things in a different context and I wouldn't have replied the way I did if I had read them first. E.g., in the follow-ups you're stating you've managed to replace your workflow in these areas with these applications, which is great and useful information. But that's a different framing than the original comment I was responding to, e.g., "Creative Cloud products which can now be replaced:".
> So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough.
My metric would be if people are choosing it for reasons other than price conscious or for values (i.e., it's better than the closed-source version because it's a better product not just inherently better for being open source). Not the easiest to evaluate, but that's what I'm looking for for evidence of the quality of these applications.
As for Blender, I was a Maya user before and never really looked back. Blender is also gaining a lot of traction in the recent years, especially since they introduced the Eevee renderer and decent grease pencil/2D animation workflows.
I can't speak for all segments of the professional market, but Blender is good enough to earn a living with it, while not feeling you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa in paint, as of now. And more importantly: it is improving at a quicker pace than most other software and that includes commercial ones.
Desktop class, you can render AI stuff locally on a $1,500 computer. Phones and tablets are building in neural processors. That will change. But the licensing thing won't change back.
Glad Adobe waited for the founder to pass before doing all this junk, it'd probably kill him.
I wonder how the justification for all this will go when people will have enough NPU processing power in their computers to do these operations and not need to have the work done on a server?
“You need to pay to do it on our servers for safety issues and so we can pay the Adobe Stock creators”
This is why local models are so important, only chance we have to be freed from this cycle.
I'd still prefer a fixed perpetual license with a usage based fee for AI features though.
I don't agree at all. Just because you want to push a specific feature and charge a subscription for it, that doesn't mean the seller is entitled to defraud it's paying customers.
If their feature is so good, wouldn't you be seeing paying customers form a line for it?
We are going to see permutations of this question over and over in the coming years concerning AI.
Adobe is fully aware they have the industry by the balls. I doubt that this inertia can be curbed no matter what they do, including it seems granting themselves a license to everything you open using their products; which while a direct violation of our partnerships: has been deemed acceptable by my CEO because it's "impossible that nobody else is having this problem" and "we are not the vanguard of defending IP law"...
... If I'm not willing to be the "someone" who stands up, then it's more likely that "no one" will be that "someone" either.
However, I am also very confident next year they'll just release a V3 and we'll have to buy it again of course, but no worries we'll get a discount as previous owner!
I got quite annoyed earlier this year that Lightroom 6 couldn't be installed anymore. Have been using it for many years but now it cannot be activated anymore and thus won't work. I'm not happy to pay a subscription for a hobby I only manage to do a few times a year anymore, though. Overall I guess they won't care, as they have a large part of the professional market willing to pay monthly.
If GIMP and Krita would just offer really smooth user interfaces in addition to capable backends, maybe now could be the time...
a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard
shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them
to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer
science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography.
OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.
In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar.
I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
The technical issues though. Ugh.
You nailed it.
Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.
With some effort you can get Lightroom running if you've still got an activated installation somewhere. It's not just activation, but apparently a time-limited license on the facial recognition software Adobe used. On MacOS the remaining 32-bit code sprinkled about (beyond just the installer) means it won't run on 64-bit only operating systems.