I've been using a spread of Adobe alternatives the past several years, including Pixelmator, the Affinity apps, and Sketch and while they're all solid I'm still not as dexterous with any of them as I used to be in Photoshop.
It would make me very happy if Adobe were to release a one time purchase version of PS that in terms of features mirrors a version somewhere between 7.x and CS2 — very few of the features added past that point have any value for me and I'd prefer to have the comparative light weight and higher nativeness (the UI toolkit they switched to in I think CS3 or CS4 just feels bad) of CS1. That'll never happen unfortunately.
If it weren't for potential legal trouble (Adobe can say old licenses are no longer valid) I'd even consider setting up an old Mac for using CS1/CS2 on.
CS2 was free to download from Adobe in 2013. Technically they made it available for people who bought it but they shutdown the activation servers so basically it was a backup option with universal serial numbers.
Archive.org and many other sites have it. Both the Windows and Mac version (well that needs a G4 or G5 PPC Mac)
As noted in my comment, that's potentially problematic legally if Adobe finds out I'm using that CS2 license for commercial purposes since they have the right to invalidate licenses at any point.
A great replacement for Photoshop, which basically mimics CS2 (the last version that was good) is PhotoPea[1]. Free, ad-supported but with a "no ads" subscription option, and works amazingly well for a web app.
Does anyone else still use CS2 when Adobe released it for "free" in 2013? They shutdown the activation servers and for a couple of months it was free to download as an offline version. Everyone mirrored it though, and it's on Archive.org as well. Works perfectly fine under Linux with Wine
I switched to Affinity Photo and Designer a while back, and have been happy. I wish Designer had image trace, but it's not a deal killer. I used Illustrator way, way back when such a luxury was unheard of, so it's not particularly painful.
You might consider checking out Linearity Curve (Vectornator) if you need vector tracing. It's in their free tier. The app itself is decent (if you're on Mac or iOS), but the UI does take some getting used to. Seems like a decent complement to Affinity Designer for certain things.
Sure thing! For me, it was a choice between learning obscure codes for an ancient phototypesetting machine or Illustrator 88 on an SE. Vector trace function is great for mockups or if you’re going for that mid-90s Taco Bell promo vibe. Too much post-processing to get clean lines, IMO.
I'm surprised to not see anything by Corel in there, though admittedly this isn't my area.
Corel was the only real alternative back in AD 2000 when I was playing with photoshop, and I do have their recent lightroom version which I paid for and --downloaded--.
Strange layout. The header line stretches across the width of the window, but I can only scroll down the page if the cursor is hovering over that column. Restricting your text to a narrow column is fine, but restricting scrolling is just odd
I switched to Capture One a few years ago after the Lightroom subscription-only rug pull, and while it does import Lightroom catalogs... it's really only useful for catalogs of exported images.
RAW engines are as much art as they are science, and I quickly learned that it is not reasonable to expect one engine to simply read settings created in another engine and have the result be anywhere close to a drop-in replacement. I ended up migrating my Lightroom library over as JPEGs, starting fresh as I imported and developed new RAWs in Capture One.
It's a perpetual license as opposed to a subscription. So far I have paid twice -- once for PhotoLab 1, and then once more to upgrade to PhotoLab 4 for some new features. I am still quite happy with how it's working.
> Any plans on adding other features that Acrobat offers like censoring texts?
There's a "white-out" feature [1] however I don't recommend you to use it for redacting sensitive information as it can easily be circumvented by using other specialised tools to inspect and remove layers.
Black is not _yet_ supported, to keep it in the spirit of "simple", I plan on detecting the background automatically (based on the most prominent pixel colour in the background), but in my TODO (pretty far down).
The problem is that most (I have not tried all) of these are just not capable of doing everything the Adobe alternative does. I think if the author added a caveat that these were alternatives for non-professionals or non-power users, which I think is the intent, then I could take it more seriously.
I would also encourage the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program for raster style image editing. It's not as shiny or clean as AffinityPhoto, but it seems more powerful and has scripting as an option. Just a helpful suggestion of a middle-ground between automating through ffmpeg and AffinityPhoto.
At this point everyone should be looking at Krita instead of GIMP. Krita has a much slicker UI, more features, and similar keyboard shortcuts to photo$hop.
I wish somebody could implement a Photoshop UI for GIMP. I am using GIMP as my main photo editor but there is a lot of UI pain. A lot of it. Many things are counterintuitive.
I vaguely remember a fork that at least turned it into a more traditional modal app instead of dozen small windows floating on the desktop. That certainly helped.
It has had a single window mode since Gimp 2.8 was released in 2002. Unfortunately it's not the upstream default, but a lot of Linux distros set it that way anyway.
Aside from the common complaint of its odd UI decisions, the thing that got me about GIMP last I tried it was how rough around the edges it is on macOS. It seemed very confused about my dual monitor setup for example with modals doggedly showing up in the top left corner of one of the two monitors no matter which monitor the main window was placed on.
What kept me using Mac over Linux as my main OS was Adobe CC + Sketch. You could get _some_ stuff working with wine, but it required too much tinkering for me to be a distraction.
Now the software is less of an issue, but the battery life on my M1 is just so much better than anything else.
Yeah, these are not general recommendations, rather the stuff I ended up using.
Thanks, I'm actually going to give Inkscape another try. I think the last time I used it was 5-10 years ago.
I don't remember why I stopped using Darktable. I remember researching it and trying it out for a bit before buying CO. Does it have decent camera profiles? How do you find working with it (raw editing + culling/managing catalogues)? I use fuji mirrorless cameras.
In my experience, as compared to the current AI alternatives, the quality of the Firefly AI products output is really hampered by Adobe's understandable decision to only train on licensed images.
On the Mac there is ff·Works. It is a terrific GUI for ffmpeg. The way it works fits my brain better than the command line interface. I can stack up a bunch of jobs with any of the parameters I need and it munches right through. Works on a single file or 60 files with different setup for each one. Cheap and actively maintained.
I use bluebeam, on old 11.7 license, but they deactivated license server so I will need to change to their now subscription only or perhaps PDF-XChange Editor Pro.
Like all the other alternatives, something that offers a comparable set of features. On MacOS the Preview app can handle some aspects but for example it cannot copy and paste visible parts of a page.
It would make me very happy if Adobe were to release a one time purchase version of PS that in terms of features mirrors a version somewhere between 7.x and CS2 — very few of the features added past that point have any value for me and I'd prefer to have the comparative light weight and higher nativeness (the UI toolkit they switched to in I think CS3 or CS4 just feels bad) of CS1. That'll never happen unfortunately.
If it weren't for potential legal trouble (Adobe can say old licenses are no longer valid) I'd even consider setting up an old Mac for using CS1/CS2 on.