this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Some brilliant people invented photoshop
It was a good product but expensive
Some asshole coke head CEO decided to make it more expensive and worse.
Fuck adobe.
GIMP 3 FTW
And they bought Macromedia’s suite and destroyed it.
I miss macromedia flash so bad, actionscript for life
I once built a website preloader that was so large that I made a pre-preloader for it. Good times indeed.
A flash preloader was my first real tech job! As I recall, they stiffed my last paycheck and went under later.
But it was incredibly fun and I made connections that steered my career to a new direction for the next decade.
Good I hated working in actionscript so much.
Fireworks for me. I miss that whole suite though.
Now there's a name I haven't seen in a while and that makes me a little bit sad.
RIP Fireworks...
Fireworks had so much potential as a web design app and they threw it away.
Illustrator and InDesign were too focused on print media and Photoshop could barely comprehend anything unless it was rasterized.
That's what big tech companies do, they buy small and promissing companies they think that once can become a competitor and then.... destroy it. The young startups just take the money and can retire early.
And they bought Cool Edit and destroyed it.
And they bought Paintshop pro and destroyed it
Corel bought Paint Shop Pro and destroyed it, not Adobe, though it was an Adobe-style move to be sure.
I think he is old, like me and means aldus photostyler. Which was light years ahead of adobe in background separation.
GIMP 3, Krita, Darktable, Inkscape, Kdenlive
Blender
The people editing their images in Blender are the same people who edit their videos in Blender lol.
You say that like it’s a bad thing lol
Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn't. It's amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I'd use it for CAD too.
FreeCAD for CAD as others mentioned.
FreeCAD (for less-organic modeling)
I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that's a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.
It doesn't have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn't - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!
Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That's all I need as a professional
I have some artist friends who saw the writing on the wall after Adobe told Apple to fuck off with the iPad and Affinity said hold my beer. One owns her own publishing company and as of a few years ago all new projects were Adobe-free workflows. She still has Adobe but will only use it for older shit that might still need something later. Going forward, she (and therefore her entire operation) are fucking done with Adobe. Another friend learned both so he could adapt to whatever the market has in store for him and since the market sucks for artists he’s going freelance too and has said absolutely no to Adobe.
Adobe is officially legacy software. Vendor lock in won’t save it as the creatives don’t need industry titans to survive.
Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I've heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.
Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don't agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.
Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I'm pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe's .abr)
I don't like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I'm so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They're great, I might donate to them again actually)
I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn't exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.
Adobe isn't selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.
GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven't been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.
Krita is awesome with a drawing pad
And I'm not like even good at doing anything
Yeah, I got my son a draw-on monitor explicitly for use with Krita. It's a normal PC too, but it makes Krita much easier to use well.
Big GIMP fan. That being said, Adobe needs to start promoting some of their actually good stuff, like their investment in the open C2PA spec for proving content authenticity, vs constant AI crap that is the exact opposite.
Photopea represent
Affinity Photo for me!
I'd prefer FOSS but...GIMP ain't it.
Have used Photopea in* a bind in the past, it's also pretty good especially the clone GUI.
Bought out by Canva, I also currently love it, but I don't expect that to last.
I moved to Affinity early this year, and it has been amazing!! I was expecting a long adjustment period after decades with Photoshop, but it's so similar that I picked it up super quick!
I have been using it for the past 5+ years. It is good enough, and its perpetual license.
Another vote for Affinity. Excellent Adobe alternatives 1-time reasonable price. Such a breath of fresh air after so many subs.
Just an FYI that you might want to get some practice in with some Affinity alternatives, because they've been purchased by Canva, and so enshittification might set in any time.
Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).
I still remember when they bought Macromedia Flash and all my animator friends and I simply couldn't stand Adobe Flash CS3 or whatever it was called. It used more resources, crashed more often and didn't exactly bring anything revolutionary to the table in terms of new functions.
I feel like I should have switched to GIMP a decade ago.
The best time to switch was 10 years ago. The second best time to switch is right now.