The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student

Were you able to get the DRM-free “offline” CS3 installers during the time they were offered? I will cherish mine forever lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865636

Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.

What bothers me is that the school doesn't allow students using open source software. They're all locked in the closed ecosystem and keep their students in software jail too.

I've never really understood why people insist that there can be only one or two products per software category, particularly when the category has a large enough customer base to support multiple products from multiple vendors.

In open source the closest tool for my usage is digikam but the interface is incredibly clunky and last time I tested the tools were subpar compared to Lightroom.

I'm having hope that immich could fit the bill but If the fact it's web based has a lot of advantages, I'm afraid the ergonomics and performance will not be enough

Try this out, free too

As a hobbyist photographer who sometimes does a lot with photography and sometimes very little I despise subscriptions, I'm putting the effort into learning Darktable and look forward to canceling my Adobe subscription.

They want the shortcuts exactly the same, the screens exactly the same, the outputs exactly the same.

They simply dont accept anything else, it basically needs to be a carbon clone copy to keep them happy, and in that case, why bother writing software, you dont win those users, and there is MANY of them.

I want: RAW input, light/tone controls, colour grading, detail controls, lens corrections, basic masking, nondestructive adjustments, library management, and a tone curve that doesn't look like dog shit.

I do NOT want: complex layered editing, paintbrushes, preset styling junk, complex geometric transformations, a million menus, video editing, etc.

The more features you add, the more you detract from the core workflow. And all these other editors have watered down their core workflow too much for me, sadly. Lightroom might be corporate junk but at least it does the basics well and mostly gets out of my way.

Capture One is a new name for though, I might give that a try. It looks pretty promising.

As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.

Now that software development is apparently solved, can someone please build a GPU-accelerated version of After Effects? Every motion designer in the world would make the switch over night.

I despise Adobe’s pricing and the many things they are known for. But let’s not pretend that “competitor gives their product away for free” is a positive for the industry. Media work was already being stolen, copied, trained upon; all the companies making free creativity tools gotta profit off this somehow. It’s bait-and-switch as well.

If anything, it seems that the buy-once-and-keep-it model is what people liked. Adobe’s subscriptions and the competitors’ “you and your data are the product” are both a shitty replacement for software ownership.

Meh. It depends on how you view your photography.

I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc.

I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose.

I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year.

I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR.

Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal.

All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end.

Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.

In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.

I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.

Do you mind sharing a few examples?

Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.

The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising.

And oh by the way the developer is 18 years old.

People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.

Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.

Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.

https://archive.is/WCDgq

How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?