What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

https://affinity.serif.com is quite good. It's not the same, but I switched (95% personal use) when Adobe forced everyone onto subscriptions and it's been more than sufficient for that.

I canceled my Adobe Premiere Pro subscription a while back, not because of AI terms but because other dark patterns in how they bill gave me a bad taste. I switched to DaVinci Resolve, which has a pretty capable free version. (I haven't used it extensively enough to comment on whether I will miss Premiere in the long run)

For Photoshop:

1) Photopea (quite brilliant for most of the things photoshop can do)

2) paint.net for not too advanced edits

3) Krita

For After Effects:

1) Natron

2) BlackMagic Fusion

For Premiere Pro:

1) DaVinci Resolve

2) KdenLive

For Illustrator:

1) Inkscape

2) Graphite

Please note that most of these are not feature for feature replacements, but for the most part and most common tasks, they are very good offerings.

Adobe only supports Windows/Mac and they want a subscription fee license, so they can shove their software.

Illustrator (used since 1990s) -> Inkscape, Krita

Photoshop (used since v3.0) -> Gimp, imagemagick, rembg

If I were doing loads of design work I would still prefer Adobe. However, I can use the above with a Wacom tablet on Linux and feel very productive. Linux largely allows scripting so I open Gimp a lot less then I used to use Photoshop, eg. due to imagemagick convert/mogrify, rembg, etc. Haven't used PS in a decade maybe. Haven't used Illustrator in a year or more. Hope that helps.

My free stack, 2024 edition: Fedora Linux Sway spin, Inkscape, GNU Image Manipulation Program, KdenLive, Natron, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, OpenSCAD, Orca slicer, IceCat, Zulip, LibreOffice, and a flock of CLI tools

Unfortunately, Adobe tools were already on its own league before the recent AI revolution. They are now even more untouchable.

I say that with deep regret not only because of the update to the terms of service, but because they are terrible OS citizens, downright user hostile in many situations and a monopoly.

Figma for all UX design.

Affinity Photo for bitmap editing (which is vanishingly rare these days).

Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma.

Affinity Publisher for print design (aka when I need to update my resume...).

Instead of Adobe Stock, I use Pexels, or just generate a sufficiently generic image on ChatGPT.

Instead of Adobe Fonts, I just stopped being a web developer, ha ha. Google Fonts, of course, is one alternative.

I got rid of all Adobe products in 2019. Or so I thought. Last year, my laptop fan started going crazy, and the whole machine was heating up. When I looked at my processes, I saw that some little remnant of Creative Cloud had refused to be uninstalled through the regular process, had survived on my computer for years, and just at that moment decided to attack. Maybe it was trying to remind me why I hate Adobe.

I’m not much of an artist, so for my limited photo manipulation needs Acorn is cheap, subscriptionless, and way more than enough for me:

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

For photo editing and manipulation

1) https://www.gimp.org/

2) https://www.digikam.org/

3) https://www.darktable.org/

Vector based editing tool

1) https://inkscape.org/

UI/UX

1). https://www.sketch.com/

Desktop publishing

https://www.scribus.net/

But I haven't found a tool that is as good as Adobe Indesign for desktop publishing.

Left Adobe long ago. I Use Gimp instead of Photoshop.

Fair thing to say is that I don't do that much image/video editing these days.

When I was a 3D artist I found very hard to migrate from 3Ds Max, Vray and Photoshop, especially in ArchViz.

I got a mac app called Graphic off the app store a few years ago and it does everything I need in a vector graphics tool. Illustrator can go get fucked.

I really wish I could get behind inkscape but the UI has never improved enough for me to tolerate it. Graphic just feels much better.

Use Pixelmator Pro for photoshop stuff. I don't do a lot of work in it anymore but it's great for making youtube thumbs and other basic stuff. The photo retouching stuff is nice, stills from my gopro are kinda dark and it does a great job making them look better for web use.

I didn't switch for ethical reasons, but Photopea is such brilliant editor that for most of my Photoshop needs I use that now. Photoshop is way more powerful and Photopea probably wouldn't be suitable for power users, but as a techy that occasionally needs to do a bit of cropping or a some basic photo editing it's a great tool and does everything I used to use Photoshop for.

The bulk of my UI graphics and mockup work has been in Sketch for around a decade at this point, with the odd excursion into Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo for work more suited for raster graphics. For vector work I’ll occasionally use Affinity Designer when Sketch isn’t working quite the way I’d like for some reason or another.

Have tried Figma and it’s ok I guess, but leans too far into prototyping and collab for my own personal use, plus I don’t like how they keep your full fidelity original documents locked away in an proprietary document format (Sketch’s file format is open and publicly documented).

I have a Photoshop license but it’s used only for following art instruction videos (drawing, painting, etc) just to reduce friction, since that’s what the bulk of instructors are using and I don’t want to fuss with remapping keys and hunting down equivalent functionality mid-lesson. All “serious” work is done with other software.

I switched to pdfexpert and Final Cut pro and saved so much money and no longer limited to just two machines. Never look back

I was a comic artist. In the past decade virtually everyone I know switched from Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint. It was cheaper, more lightweight and had features comic artists needed like streamlined flatting tools and manga asset integration.

I paid for the full Creative Cloud for years… Recently I switched to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, which have both been fantastic replacements for Illustrator and InDesign respectively.

However, I kept a $10/month subscription to Lightroom & Photoshop, because I have an enormous Lightroom catalog. They have me over a barrel on Lightroom.

There is also no replacement for Adobe After Effects if it's part of your workflow. There's Fusion in the DaVinci Resolve suite, but it's much different.

Some old, cracked version of Photoshop

I just cancelled my Adobe subscription after trying to cancel for more than 6 months, so many dark patterns that caused my wife to sign in for a renew when she didn't want. To actually cancel you have to say you want to actually cancel in 3-4 different screens, where there's always an option to renew instead for a whole year that you cannot cancel.

I am never going to pay for Adobe while this practices continue.

Here’s the full list of Adobe Creative Cloud products for which it would be great to identify alternatives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Desktop,_...

I think the big ones are:

Acrobat

Audition

Illustrator

InDesign

Lightroom

Photoshop

Premiere

I think a lot of people also use Fonts and Stock just because it’s convenient but they aren’t the same type of desktop product as the other ones.

I wasn't an Adobe user before but I started learning video editing and DaVinci Resolve has been great. It's free for my needs, and the paid version is a reasonable one time cost and not a subscription.

It's not even a matter of settling for an alternative because of Adobe, from the advice I've seen Resolve is what you'd go with today anyway.

I'm currently only using Premiere Pro and InDesign from the Adobe Creative Suite and Inkscape and Gimp from old habit. Never god around to use Photoshop and Illustrator to be honest. I'm planning to end up with this suite:

Premiere Pro -> Davinci Resolve

InDesign -> Affinity Publisher

Illustrator -> Inkscape

Photoshop -> Gimp

Photoshop -> Pixelmator Pro

Illustrator -> Affinity Designer

InDesign -> Affinity Publisher

Premiere/AfterEffects -> DaVinci Resolve

All one-time payment licenses. I cancelled my Adobe subscription a couple years ago. It was such a mess of dark patterns to get out of it. Good riddance.

https://www.photopea.com/ is a good free alternative to Photoshop. It is a 90100 product - 90% of the features 100% free.

I switched a long time ago. I use Affinity Photo and Corel PaintShop Pro. Only features I feel I'm missing out on are the generative ai features in latest Photoshop versions.

gave up on Adobe years ago. (abhor subscriptions)

Photoimpact was my fave for a long time, now mainly using affinity designer / photo, photopea and for quick fixes there are dozens of online ai-like things to do most of what needs getting done.

recently found a powertoys addon that lets me resize image using windows context menu / right click -> resize pictures.. no program to load / open.

Corel videostudio and davinci resolve, own it - no subscription needed.

I switched to pdfgear as an alternative to acrobat/dc for all my pdf needs. Free and better than acrobat.

https://www.tldraw.com/

If anyone can comment on good alternatives for After Effect, I'd be interested to know.

https://penpot.app

Capture One instead of Lightroom

For my very limited photoshop-ish needs, Pixelmator Pro has been great.

I still don’t think there’s an alternative for After Effects. People always say DaVinci Resolve, which seems like a good replacement for Premiere Pro, but not After Effects. I’ve looked into a lot of entrants in this area but one has nearly as rich a library of effects. Please prove me wrong, I’d love to stop paying Adobe $600/yr.

Macro.com for PDF (better than Acrobat)

PDFgear is free and works great.

For personal use, cracked Adobe products.

I myself have switched from Illustrator to Affinity Designer several years ago, but Photoshop is somehow irreplaceable for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PDFgear

Photopea