What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it.

(I switched to Affinity Photo for editing but never found anything I liked for organization/library management. I just copy files around now. It ends up being OK because about 50% of my photos are from my phone, 25% are from a DSLR, and 25% are from film scans. Lightroom never helped me with phone or scanned photos, really, so I didn't give much up. Would still like some central self-hosted photo collector, though. Maybe Perkeep is what I want.)

Don't they try to get you to make a year commitment? I remember spending about 30 minutes with someone at Adobe getting them to cancel it when Lightroom was too slow to use on my Mac at the time (which had been more than fast enough for Aperture). After the second or third time that I told them I wasn't going to buy a new computer just for the privilege of running their software, they agreed not to charge a hefty early termination fee.

Be careful though, some card issues will forward the new card details on to (some?) services you have a payment agreement with.

Adjustment and FX layers don't translate, as well as some compositing and blending options.

I really, really wish that was the case, but there's no competition for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Even after years of destroying their software with cloud crap, useless home screens, changing 30 years of muscle memory just because, all while adding a WebKit and Node.js instance for every new dialog box…

…nothing comes even close to any of those tools.

Pro software is hard.

I'd be fine with cloud subscription software if the TCO ended up being lower than buying a boxed product, but it's seemingly more expensive than it ever was. $10USD/mo doesn't seem bad, but if you're comparing to a two-year, $200 upgrade price, then you're spending $40 more and can't opt to skip the latest menu reshuffle.

Photoshop puts like 5 folders in Utilities folder for no reason in macOS and runs bunch of daemons (which apparently can be a cause of bad vulnerabilities) and is dog slow in performance compared to a modern alternative like Affinity Photo.

Market dominance surely puts customer satisfaction to the end of the line.

If you assume the answers to these questions are "no", what is your response to GP?

It was a small thing. With Photoshop I can open a .PNG or .JPG file, edit, and pick Save (cmd-s/ctrl-s) and it saves back to the .PNG/.JPG. If I added layers or something I can press Ctrl/Cmd-Shfit-E to merge it all down then Cmd/Ctrl-S. This means the workflow is fast.

Affinity has no such workflow. You can open a .JPG but you have to follow the export workflow to save back to .JPG which is tedious.

I had say 150 files to edit. I reasoned my time was worth more than $120 to pay for a current version of Photoshop than to put up with a slow workflow.

I also recently tried to use Affinity's batch processing features but they aren't ask good as Photoshop's. I think they are trying to be helpful in that they scan all the photos before you start so you can see what they are going to operate on before you pick "Go". Unfortunately that's not actually a good flow if you're going to process 100s or 1000s of files. Instead of getting stuff done you have to wait for Affinity for several minutes while it goes and makes a thumbnail of all 100 or 1000+ images just so you can then click "Ok, do it!"

For anyone who tries these programs, many of their developers and users hang out at https://discuss.pixls.us/

From memory, in addition to sticking some pseudo-randomly named files in /System/Library, /Library, and -/Library, it would place a file in the root directory of all hfs+ volumes with xattrs set to hide and write-protect the file. Installers would then look for these files to check licensing status.

At the time, this was a fairly common trick with pro/prosumer proprietary software.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher#Issues_with_...

That is 9 background processes for an app I haven't used in a week.

It's pretty much spyware behavior at this point. Like with certain video games DRM, Adobe software is one of those cases where the pirated version is actually better than the paid one.

Qubes OS says hello.

https://www.qubes-os.org/

This seems totally unsuited to desktop non-enterprise use.

I’ve been meaning to get out of the adobe photo software ecosystem, maybe this weekend is the time to find the right alternatives. Save a few bucks per month too.

1. The CC app itself gets updates. If you're a purely Illustrator user you might not notice (or use! which is ok!) the features we've added, but it now has the ability to add custom fonts to your Adobe account, we've added new tutorials, and community features, support for CC Libraries, and a new unified search. One of these new features is notifications, which is #2.

2. Our notifications can be a little noisy, especially if you're not a frequent user. In the Creative Cloud app, you should see under Preferences > Notifications, the ability to select which notifications you want. So, if you want to disable App update notifications, you can.

3. On top of the features, there are some update/sync processes that go on in the background that won't function. Our current messaging just says "pending installations" which doesn't cover it all and we've heard a lot of feedback from users internally and externally about it. We're going to make that message more tailored to anything that's actively going on, and if there's nothing, allow you to close the app silently. To double check that nothing is actively installing, you can check the cloud icon in the top right to confirm. If there's nothing there, you can close it with confidence that it isn't installing an update.

Hope to get these enhancements out to our user base soon. Thanks for your feedback! Please note, we do actively track anything we see on our User Voice (http://creativecloud.uservoice.com) and try to engage on social media, in case you'd like to keep giving us more feedback outside of HN. Thank you!

2) See above

3) Again, see above. I don't want anything to work in the background.

While you're at it, please ask the user whether he wants to sync at all during installation. By default it should not sync.

I only have Creative Cloud installed because I am a Lightroom and Photoshop user. I use the sync feature in Lightroom but do not need another generic file system cloud sync.

Photoshop - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Illustrator - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/

InDesign - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/

50% off each product (one-time purchase with updates, no subscription) too during the COVID pandemic.

Won't take you long to adjust at all as they're very similar and the apps are more lightweight and faster than Adobe's products have ever been. Also iPad versions if you want to edit on a tablet.

Been using Affinity Photo for a while now as an alternative to Photoshop and wouldn't look back.

If you think about it, much of the original point of desktop-publishing software, back when OSes could only natively use bitmap fonts, was that desktop-publishing software could do WYSIWYG layout and preview-rendering for vector-font "instructions" (e.g. PostScript.) Fonts were indeed a lot like VSTs!

I imagine it's not so simple in the graphic design world, and without such a simple interface that everyone can agree on, it's much harder to create standardized plugins that everyone can use.

For windows I'm done with adobe. I'm not looking for an alternative to photoshop to stick with the company that made me leave photoshop.

Pathetic. I tried to get a refund, oops buying through Apple's App Store makes that impossible.

RAW files are more a lightroom thing from what I've heard

For example if I was selling lemonade, you bought some and when you tried to drink it, you discovered sand instead of lemonade, would you come back to my lemonade stand and report a bug in my lemonade making abilities?

By the way, no refunds, you keep the sand. Legit lemonade business right?

We have to run an older (years older) Premiere Pro on our Macbook that somehow can edit them without any issues at all, with a newer up-to-date version on our much faster PC for recent videos. We've tried transcoding and various things like using an older version on Windows, but nothing else seems to work.

Then the other day I had to stay up until 3am because a video being edited just stopped saving with an uncaught exception and no useful information on both versions. I finally figured out that some effects like loudness and reverb control applied to the sound channel had become corrupted (after noticing it would save with sound off, then fiddling with the clips for another 2 hours having no idea what I'm doing).

Ever since the Flash days I've been wary of their software quality. Paying over $800 per year is fair if you're earning money and the stuff just works, but they don't seem to be holding up their end of the bargain.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

For transcoding your footage nothing but the best, FFmpeg:

https://ffmpeg.org/

However, if you don't need the absolutely full array of switches available in FFmpeg, Ive used the fork FFmbc to get into standard broadcast formats with easy presets:

https://github.com/bcoudurier/FFmbc

I've got ffmpeg and Handbrake for transcoding but for some reason they both caused issues in Premiere Pro still (audio sync, choppy/repeating footage, etc) on those files. I'm not very experienced, so that might be on me, but it didn't seem to happen outside of Premiere Pro.

my Fujifilm XT2 was stolen during a trip to Europe last year and i've switched back to Nikon since the battery life of the mirrorless was disappointing (due to the EVF).

now i have some Fujinon macro glass collecting dust as rather expensive paperweights :(

It's a mature product at this point and have had a good experience for years now.

1: https://pdfexpert.com/

The app offered to convert the PDFs if I would email them to PDF Expert, and suggested Adobe products as an alternative. Nice try, but Foxit displayed the PDFs and allowed me to fill in the fields.

I agonized about installing Acrobat Reader, but Suspicious Package says it wants to run 88 install scripts. I don't feel like tracking down that much malware when I uninstall it after filling out a form.

Go Foxit!

Readdle just needs to add exact phrase searching/finding; then it'll be wholly better than Preview imo.

You can read more about Preview's struggles with annotations here https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/07/how-preview-mangles-anno...

At least the PDF reader in Firefox is a Javascript App that runs in a Browser sandbox and doesn't support 99% of the crap a PDF can do.

0: https://okular.kde.org/

Hopefully I can move to the KDE video editor for NLE, and Pixelmator is already better than Photoshop IMO. The only other two I need to replace are Lightroom and After Effects. I think the latter will be hard/impossible.

No freaking app should ever be given this much or any control over a user computer. Every app (except system maintenance tools and other apps which genuinely need full access to fulfill their very purpose) should be constrained within a directory meant right for it + the files the user wants them to open.

1. https://www.qubes-os.org/

    Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

I really like these kinds of projects. NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are a couple others.