I had adobe Photoshop pirated for a while, butsomehow it shadow updated and adobe took away my access to using Photoshop without paying for it. That was for the most recent version of Photoshop. I guess adobe found out how to stop people from cracking the .exe.
There are a lot of great replacements for Adobe programs. If you're going to spend money, maybe try them out and then donate to the ones you like!
GIMP or Kita for video editing are solid, DaVinci Resolve is an excellent video editor, and now browsers like Firefox can edit PDFs! Adobe should get bent with their insane fees.
*image editing (instead of the first instance of "video editing"), and you probably meant Krita not Kita
I've found the free editors, including Firefoxs, will often treat an Adobe/AutoCad made PDF as a flat single image. Everything has been merged together. Adobe was the only thing that would let me still treat every line and box and text as individual.
Any suggestions?
I use and love gimp, but Photoshop does have great selection tools for easily removing backgrounds and objects. I can manually do it on gimp, but making the process easier is always nice.
Photoshop alternatives have been making some headway lately:
First, the one everyone knows, GIMP. And yes, it's a steep learning curve, and yes, it's incredibly frustrating. But it's feature rich and (last I checked) the most comparable to Photoshop in what it can do. If you're patient and willing to learn it, it can become a permanent FOSS replacement for you. If you use Photoshop a lot, I'd say this is very much worth the effort.
There's also PhotoGIMP which is an addon that revamps the GIMP interface to make it more user friendly for people that only know Photoshop. Think of it like a translator.
Other options are Photopea: browser based, but is useful for the basic stuff.
Darktable: don't know much about it, seems like it might be more of a Lightroom alternative, but I've heard good things.
And there's the rising star Krita: it was mostly for artists but they're branching out into more photography-based features lately. It's pretty robust.
There's also Affinity Photo 2, which is a true Photoshop alternative in that it's paid software, but it's a one time payment for a permanent license, like Photoshop used to be.
Affinity just got bought by Canava. 1 time purchase license for now. But we will have to see !!!
Yeah, that purchase worries the hell outta me tbh.
Been using Affinity Designer and Photo for years, and happily paid for version 1 and the upgrade to version 2.
Now, I'm worried they'll go for a new sub-based tier and limit features to the sub-version over the perpetual license, or hold features back for a version or two of the perpetual license version.
Or the amount of AI-related bullshit they'll stuff the apps full of now, that will require a separate payment model for generation of images or fill-ins.
Eurgh.
I think GIMP is fantastic but when I bring it up I always get comments from people saying the UI "sucks", "makes no sense", is "backwards" etc. But they never say why. Is it the menu layout or something? I'm genuinely curious. I used Photoshop for many, many years before learning GIMP and I did find it confusing to begin with but it's a different piece of software. I had to learn Photoshop when I started using that too.
You answered your own question. That learning curve, that confusion, you got over it because you're likely more technically minded and appreciate that new software requires learning new skills. Other people find that more frustrating than you and cannot get over it. This is especially true for people that don't use photo editing software all the time
And to be fair to them, GIMP deliberately tries to differentiate itself from Photoshop. It is not at all concerned with helping people make that transition. Some people will make it, some people won't.
I hate Gimp with passion not only because it has a clunky interface that never got better, but because it's unreliable with big files. I lost many hours of work when trying to do the incredibly complex act of choosing a different font, only to see it crash and burn and lose all the changes.
I really like photogimp.Although I have been using standard gimp for so long I get a little confused on the ui here and there (I'm terrible at remembering keyboard shortcuts.) The biggest upside to Photoshop is that the tools really are top of the line and work more efficiently than gimp's tools.
I've been on the GenP "forum". They provide a lot of good resources and it worked for me.
Why bother? Adobe's pdf viewer is a bloated mess. It takes up a huge amount of space and processing power, and it constantly phones-home. It isn't something I'd want on my computer even if they were paying me to have it.
To all the windows users out there, just use Okular its free and available in the Microsoft Store. its a KDE application and still better than Adobe imo.
I love Okular on my Linux (EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma 6). Wasn't aware Okular was available on PC. Thanks for the info.
PDF is not a format designed for editing. It's an export format designed to be a middle ground between a word processor and a printer.
You can bastardise extra layers onto it, but that's about it.
But sometimes you need to edit it. Checking boxes. Signing things. Changing numbers so you can lie about things.
It was designed for that but not really marketed to be used that way so it's thought of as a lockable universally supported document format.
I mean, you can pretty much completely edit a pdf with Acrobat. Delete elements, move them around, edit text. It may not be designed for it, but it's very much possible.
I gotta admit I've done it a few times because I was to lazy to recreate old, lost templates, so instead I just copied the pdf and edited it with new text and data.
And it's pretty good - you can add text and images but you can't yet move pages around or manipulate existing elements.
Also, macOS has some built in PDF editing tools in Preview. You can add text, signatures, draw lines and shapes, highlight, add notes, and split or combine PDFs.
Money aside, Adobe tools for PDF have gotten worse. Ten years ago Adobe was much easier and robust.
All my opinion, of course.
I definitely agree that it's getting harder to use. Working in print, I use it every day and every time they update the ui they find ways to slow down my work flow. My favourite is when they change or even remove keyboard shotcuts that have worked forever or hide certain tools because they've added a newer, worse way to do the same thing.
Haven't used any Adobe programs for over a decade but I believe you. Almost everything's getting worse, smaller (except when that's desirable), less robust and more error prone while simultaneously getting much more expensive.
Shrinkshittififlation is the new bullshit norm.
There is at least 1 issue a day with Adobe at my office. Its not 100% adobe's fault but I side-eye those millions of services they install for their app suite.
Public service announcement: Open a PDF using Word and you can edit it, though sometimes the formatting gets weird.
The latest update from Firefox also lets you edit PDFs in the browser, and without any formatting weirdness
Inkscape, which is free and open source, does a very competent job of taking part .pdfs and allowing you to modify them these days.
I still think it's crazy that, as a researcher who has to read a lot of PDFs, I can barely find any usable alternatives to Acrobat that have basic annotation features. This is especially true for Android platforms, where I do most of my reading.
*opens issue on opensource bugtracker demanding propietary features for free*
"I can't believe the devs haven't implemented this yet!"
*doesn't donate a cent*
There are alternatives, fortunately. If you need to do a lot of editing, Nitro is pretty good. You can pay about $15 a month for it, or pay a one time cost of like $180 and have a lifetime license. If you don't like Nitro, there's plenty of others.
What pisses me off is that Adobe marketing has people locked in with that "Pro Tools" mindset. So many gullible dumbasses think if you don't use Adobe (or Pro Tools) you just can't be taken seriously, and you don't have a "real, professional tool". I think that is less true today than it used to be, but it's still out there.
(Meanwhile if you need a Pro Tools alternative, Reaper is the fucking bomb.)
The software is entrenched. If you’re a graphic designer who exchanges project files with others, you have to use Adobe CC because everyone else is. There’s really no way around that unfortunately.
You have more options if you’re a freelancer who doesn’t need to collaborate however.
That's definitely true. I am mostly complaining about the attitude of contempt some people show for anyone trying to change the landscape. It's like learned helplessness that morphed into smugness (with some people). I totally get it if that's what the boss makes you use. It's not your job to fix that problem.
Wish Reaper was intuitive like Garageband. I need to take like a weekend crash course to understand the basics.
They're not inheritly bad. The idea is no matter what you open the PDF with, it will always look the same.
That doesn't explain why they're so annoying to edit, though
Who really pay for Adobe pdf suite ?
Really I can find many open source solution that can edit PDF, even OCR the PDF for free (you might need to run OCR engine with your CPU, or pay for OCR service)
I legitimately do not know why my work pays for adobe acrobat for all employees. Apple Preview is good enough for all the engineers with macbooks
An example of how this manifests:
I’ve started enjoying to use Final Cut for personal video projects. I’m now wishing I could use it at my day job. But we have momentum with Premiere. We need old projects to work. We need to collaborate across the team. Etc.
Momentum keeps Adobe running. This is part of why totally new Adobe apps take off slow. And why Adobe has had success buying out the momentum other companies have built. See Substance, and many other acquisitions.
Autodesk runs on this momentum too.
I’m really happy to watch Blender grow and turn into something that has this sort of Momentum. It’s a wonderful counter example.
This is only one dimension to the whole situation. But I think it’s a strong one.
We just had this discussion at my office. Our newsletter editor is using an Adobe subscription. Even for a nonprofit, the price is going up to $650/year.
The problem is that she has been using Adobe products since the mid 1980s. So to switch, she would have to relearn alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and a couple of other things that she has been using for more than 30 years.
We would have to inventory all the features she uses, and then make sure that whatever replacements she uses have the same capabilities. It just doesn't seem to be worth the time and frustration.
