Shoutouts
Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!
- bruhduh
- Toes
Free Open Source Alternatives
[Visual/Graphical]
For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]
Relevent XKCD : https://xkcd.com/743/
Whoever bought into the whole cloud crap won’t care.
I care, but I don’t know how else to edit my photos on my phone and seamlessly back them up.
I use Lightroom on a Google Pixel. It costs $10/mo for a terabyte of storage and an editor that’s constantly being updated. I’m not arguing that it’s the best option, I just don’t know any solid alternatives.
If anyone else has a solution this use case, essentially the same as someone who wants to leave Google Photos’ storage/editing suite, I’d be happy to ditch Adobe.
Edit: a word
Use proton drive and use a separate editing software. Something like Photomator for example. There are tons of editors besides Lightroom.
I’ll look into proton drive. Thank you!
I’ve been using them for a few years and it’s been flawless. Zero downtime or crashes, the apps are great and sharing links is clean.
Photomator is iOS only. Afaik, there aren’t that many great alternatives on Android. There is snapseed, but that’s google and if they’re looking to get off Google/Google photos, snapseed isn’t any better than just sticking with Lightroom.
There are a few options available with a quick search: AirBrush, Bazaart, InShot Photo Editor Pro, LightX, Motionleap, PhotoDirector, Photo Editor, Photo Effects Pro, Photo Lab Picture Editor, PicsArt ,YouCam Perfect ,Pixlr ,TouchRetouch ,Vimage etc
Most phones have a built in editor as well. But honestly if you are getting serious with photo editing you’re better off getting a laptop with a bigger screen. Makes a huge difference editing.
Thanks, I’ll probably just go back to Snapseed, unless one of those is a standout for design, privacy, power and simplicity.
I actually really enjoy mobile editing in Lightroom, the only mark it misses now is privacy.
I have LR installed on my laptop, but never use it. Obviously, there are drawbacks. I wouldn’t want to draw paths in Photoshop on my phone, but for quick crops and color corrections, I work faster and more efficiently on my phone. I also can do it in my spare moments, rather than sitting down to dedicate an evening to editing.
I use digiKam as the replacement for Lightrooms photo management tools.
I used darktable as a replacement for Lightroom’s photo editing tools.
I use a hosted Photoprism install for making the photos available online, sharing with friends/family etc.
I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.
However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.
Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.
The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.
And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.
That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.
I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.
Workflow is big, but it isn’t the biggest issue with Gimp for serious work, the destructive editing is. Workflow you can get used to, destructive editing means you’re fucked if you need to edit something you’ve previously edited - something most if not all professionals do all the time.
This.
It is planned feature for Gimp 3 I believe, hopefully it will be implemented well.
But for now, people that aren’t professional graphic designers should really stop recommending Gimp as a viable replacement. It is a very capable piece of software, but too many professional-grade features are missing.
And it’s never only about Photoshop either. It is the integration that the suite has. Illustrator to Photoshop to Indesign is (mostly) seemless.
I’m currently trying to switch to foss alternatives, but it’s rough.
Totally agree. Gimp is really advanced and badass in many ways, but it’s like a nuclear reactor control panel’s worth of MS Paint. Hopefully the non destructive editing will change that. But yes like you said, Photoshop has the whole Adobe ecosystem, too. Hopefully things will change for the better with FOSS though, and I think it will. There should be a consortium formed of FOSS media software that aims to collectively work together to beat Adobe’s ass.
Not to mention that even if you personally managed to switch to something else, if you’re not doing some completely solo work, you will still receive files from others (or may be expected to send files to others) in Adobe format. So even if you wouldn’t be using it, you’d still have to pay for it to stay competitive. At which point you may as well use it because of what you said, that most of the alternatives are missing those expert features. So in professional setting, there’s unfortunately no escaping Adobe. Someone would have to come up with an alternative feature full package of apps covering all bases (because Adobe isn’t just Photoshop and not just graphic design but an entire interwoven ecosystem used in various related fields) and then work really, really hard to push the industry toward it. And it would still probably take a decade or two. So realistically, it would have to be or become some big corporation that would likely turn evil too as the time goes. Or some open source miracle like Blender that would have to attract enough big sponsors.
Not defending Adobe, just saying how it is. I have enough grievances about their software (how they managed to fuck up something as simple as Acrobat is beyond me) but you just have to deal with it or look for a job in another field. (I’m lucky enough that Adobe is only secondary software for me but even then I still can’t escape it.)
Not open source, but pro grade, often nicer to work with than adobe stuff. The Affinity suite. Pay once per major revision. Decent upgrade plans. No subscription. Designer, photo and publisher.
The business model could change very quickly and promises by companies aren’t worth the paper they are written on. The CEO might tomorrow decide to sell the company to a large tech company which more often than not leads to the destruction of the software the company developed. Only open source or, even better, free software can guarantee that your software wont be enshittified.
They’ve actually been acquired a few months ago, they promised no changes to their business model but I’m not hopeful
They will boil that frog slowly. Soon there will be an alternative subscription with a discount for previous license holders. Then they hide the option to buy a perpetual license so only people who spent time to search for it can find it; and finally they will remove the option completely and claim that they did that because “Nobody was buying it”.
No, as with Microsoft, Users will just suck it up.
Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.
If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.
Until it gets bought by some big corp and suddenly has spyware integrated and goes into subscription anyway Happened to a lot of good proprietary software, and this is a reason why open source is superior.
FOSS is always a better option, as of today I don’t think anything compares. And since they aren’t a big company doing shady things, the licensed version is permanent, no big company buyout is going to impact anything other than upgrades.
Reaper is great, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to get my VSTs properly working on linux, especially ones with a full GUI like a lot of drum vsts do. It’s literally the only reason I still dual-boot windows on that machine.
I get that, there is a list of Linux friendly vsts out there that work well. I think they have a link to the list, but I don’t really use drums in my workflow so couldn’t give you any examples unfortunately. I did have to go into windows for some work stuff where I needed a specific vst though, definitely understand the issue.
WinRAR style
So we basically never have to pay?
No, just a nag. If you’re recording/editing a few times a year, it won’t be a bother. If you’re in there often, it’s worth the few bucks.
Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.
Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.
Anti-libre software, Adobe anything, bans us from removing malicous source code and service as a software substitute is even worse, so else did we expect?
Man thanks for not suggesting GIMP I hate that thing so unintuitive, like bro you’re no blender, you’re not allowed to be unintuitive
^me as I’m in the middle of editing and just about to add Gimp to the post when I see your comment😅
Krita can’t do the same things Gimp can though + I already know where all the buttons are from years of using it. I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much. I’ve never run into an image editing task that I couldn’t do in gimp.
Because, like they said, the UI is unintuitive
The UI and shortcut keys are unintuitive. Simple tasks that would take me seconds in Photoshop take me 5 minutes in gimp. I’ll never understand that there is always one person replying like you are here.
My advice: Don’t do hotkeys. Just use the toolbars for literally everything. Can’t find the paths window? Check under the Windows dropdown. Real simple. Don’t like the organization? Click and drag the boxes to reorganize, stack em where you want.
I think for several versions it’s come as Single Window mode by default which is nice, imo.
So here’s the thing. Just about anyone in a creative field learned Photoshop inside and out. We learned the shortcut keys and relied on them to be much much faster at our jobs. So not using them feels like a huge handicap and having to relearn them would be bad enough, but there are common things in gimp that I found have no shortcut keys at all. And the ones that do exist largely don’t make sense, even when ignoring the Photoshop conventions. When I’m struggling to zoom without clicking several times, the app is the issue, not me.
I’m sorry all of you put your eggs into one basket which enshitified into an interface for babies. BTW, I’m an artist both digital and traditional. When I got my degree in science I was able to get arts degrees at the same time fulfilling electives requirements. My favorite programs are Clip Studio Paint, Gimp, Blender, and Autodesk Fusion 360, but I don’t use hotkeys for any of them, except occasionally rigging in blender, or I would be memorizing like 300+ different hotkeys.
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If paying all that money to use photoshop is worth not learning a different ui to you, then you are their intended customer. I’m glad you found something you like.
Dualism everywhere. Jfc
I hate adobe and it’s precisely because they fucked me. I’ll never give them another penny. I want gimp to be good but it absolutely isn’t. I would be quite happy if it were
Draw a circle in gimp is sort of uninuitive.
I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much.
Because they’ve spent years learning Photoshop’s unintuitive interface rather than GIMP’s unintuitive interface. I learned them both more or less in parallel and found them both equally awful. (So who does have an intuitive interface? Paint Shop Pro, back in the days that JASC owned it, came the closest of any piece of raster image editing software I’ve ever used.)
In all fairness, there are a few features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn’t, but the ones I’m aware of are professional level stuff (spot colour support and some complex editing constructs), and there’s usually a way to do without them or compensate with some other program.
OpenShot is another useful video editor.
Internet friendly media encoder is also helpful.
thanks for the recommendations!
I added openshot and left out IFME (it doesn’t seem like the devs understand software licensing unfortunately, the project’s also a bit of a copyright landmine😅)
They state it’s under gpl2 they do have ffmpeg but the tool doesn’t include its own codecs outside of that if I understand it correctly. It does use any codecs provided by the OS though.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=ZI1wFN8pbXM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Shotcut for video editing
thanks for the comment I’ll add it to the post!
Also lmms https://lmms.io/ for music, you’re doing some great post, word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
added this as well!
you’re doing some great post
no worries🤗
word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
hell yea!✊
🤗 You’re doing great
We need an open source renaissance within those big tech industries. It can’t be that everyone is completely dependent on Adobe, Microsoft, Google and other bad actors that force this shit onto everyone.
