This was very much me, and for a rather stupid reason: My resume was in InDesign.
It would have served me well to realize InDesign resumes are a bad idea to get past ATS years ago, but I eventually came around.
I can still fire up CS6 in a VM; for my needs, CC never made sense. Like, seriously, for ID, layers and transparency and trapping and anything else I might need for offset or digital is taken care of. Illustrator has a competent Live Trace feature. Photoshop has the magnetic lasso, which is about as advanced as I need to get past cropping and toning. Audition lets me make really bad mashups.
The only subscription I have that is not a utility or insurance is Mullvad. I don’t want to rent anything on my computer, thank you very much. Yarr!
cygnus@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Unfortunately this is not really true.
frog@beehaw.org 3 months ago
I have to agree. I’ve used a great many software packages over the years, but having been given an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription by my university, as several of Adobe’s programs are required for the degree I’m doing, I’ve been very annoyed to discover that the alternatives really aren’t on the same level. They work, sure. You can get the job done with them. But I am genuinely finding Photoshop to be significantly more powerful than everything else I’ve used. And it’s really annoying because I’ve never liked Adobe as a company.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
The only apps I’ve used that come even remotely close are those by Serif/Affinity, but even they don’t have feature parity. They were also just bought out by Canva and will likely become fully enshittified soon.
frog@beehaw.org 3 months ago
The one thing I’ve been dissatisfied with Photoshop for, in comparison to another app, is its traditional media analogues do not come even close to Painter’s, and I’ve not been able to get any brushes set up in a way that replicates them. There’s professionals that use Painter in addition to Photoshop because of that, and I expect I will as well - but I really notice the features missing that I use a lot in Photoshop.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
This is just even more justification to use alternatives. If a mass migration to alternatives occurs, those apps will flourish and more dev time can be arranged via new devs interested in volunteering or outright being employed to meet demand.
Adobe is only so big because of their userbase. Migrate that userbase to a less cancerous set of applications and the userbase stands to benefit greatly.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
How often does “a bunch of non-devs flock to a half-baked community FOSS project and suddenly gain a bunch of devs” actually play out?
The one reasonable possibility is that they might pick up a designer or two, but how many community FOSS projects seriously consider non-code or non-art contributions? Because based on the FOSS software I’ve used, it’s a vanishingly small number.
Coders over-value code, and under-value everything else.
frog@beehaw.org 3 months ago
That would probably work for hobbyists, but I have my doubts that professionals, who rely on Adobe products for their livelihood, could use unsuitable software for years in the hopes that volunteer devs will eventually add the features they need. In the other post about this topic, someone commented that GIMP’s devs are refusing to fix problems that are repelling new users, which is not going to encourage Adobe users to make the switch. GIMP still doesn’t have fully functioning, reliable non-destructive editing, which is 100% essential for anyone beholden to a boss or client who is going to change their minds a couple of times between now and next month.
Adobe is big because of their userbase, but their userbase is big because they make genuinely powerful software that fits the needs of professionals. The free options (and the cheap proprietary options) are not there yet, and probably never will be. Professionals aren’t going to switch until the features they need are there (because seriously, why would anyone use a tool for their job that doesn’t actually allow them to do their job properly?), but the features aren’t going to be added until the professionals switch over. Catch22.
eveninghere@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Adobe has probably employed dozens of top-level PhDs to implement and train AI models, optimized their code.
Hobby projects will never reach that level regardless of the number of users.
Even proprietary developers would have to close the gap made for 10+ years, with far less resources. Just look at the state of Affinity…
I don’t think it’s realistic.
TheMonkeyLord@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I feel like Linux alternatives often falter by trying to offer as extensive of a feature set as the proprietary options. GIMP would be better if it simplified it’s menu’s and focused on offering a strong central feature set, then expand on that core over time to offer a powerful workflow of it’s own.
I noticed this especially with FreeCAD, which is trying to do like 12 things for some reason? Just offer intuitive parametric cad and focus on it. We don’t need OpenSCAD inside FreeCAD because OpenSCAD is already it’s own thing for example.
klangcola@reddthat.com 3 months ago
This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.
In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.
TheMonkeyLord@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
That makes a lot of sense when you put it that way. For some reason I never factored that individuals were extending apps for their own use cases lmao
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Pirate
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 months ago
What I’m hearing is Scribus would be suitable if I’m deliriously tired and thinking in Quark shortcuts.
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 3 months ago
I’m curious about what you think is missing from Inkscape. I use it and illustrator for design work all the time, and I’ve never run into issues with something missing from Illustrator.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
In my case it’s mostly text formatting. For example you can’t adjust spacing between paragraphs at all. I think that’s because it’s unsupported in the SVG spec rather than an Inkscape issue, but still.
I will say however that Inkscape vs. Illustrator is the closest matchup of the three Adobe design apps.
hedge@beehaw.org 3 months ago
cygnus@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
If you just want to crop and adjust levels, GIMP is fine. If you want to clone stamp or replace backgrounds etc (or of course work with motion graphics) then there’s no comparison. Nondestructive editing has been a HUGE drawback for GIMP since its inception but they are finally adding that, which is good. I’m not even sure if they’ve added CMYK support. Text editing is also godawful. I could go on, but for real work, it just isn’t the same at all. It’s like saying an e-bike is the same as a pickup truck.
algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
Photoshop select tools are awesome back to like CS4. Magnetic Lasso and Quick Select are super powerful and let you chain other tools together, and I remember something about Photoshop having good feather select features as well. Not having that base in other software severely limits what you can do.
Photoshop’s healing and clone stamp tools are also good at predicting what I want to fix patch. If GIMP or other OSS editors have those features, they’d be in my toolbox for sure.
Disclaimer, my old copy of photoshop was “gifted from a friend” so I’m not trying to shill them. I haven’t used GIMP in a few years, so maybe (hopefully) it’s better than it was back then