I was trying to get this to Front page multiple times but didn't work. We are going full force into subscription model without a monthly or yearly payment. And I imagine many other companies will follow the same path.
Yeah, and once you're there there is no getting out.
That is why open source products are important: they add a constantly growing baseline of quality which the likes of Adobe have to be above of if they want to be able to sustain themselves.
Creative cloud products which can now be replaced:
After Effects with Blender, which is even more powerful
Premiere with kdenlive, Openshot, Shotcut or Davinci Resolve (not open Source, but free and with a superior color engine)
Photoshop with Gimp, Krita (Photoshop is still superior tho)
Illustrator with Inkscape, Graphite or other SVG editors
InDesign with Scribus
Many of these tools are not there yet (I sorted roughly from best replacement to worst), but this is certainly a space to watch.
Professional motion designer here (15 years): Blender is awesome and I highly applaud their team (and have donated to the org!), but it is absolutely not a replacement for After Effects. The ecosystem around AE (plugins/tutorials/templates) is way too large and useful to disregard.
And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative.
I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.
I said that because it replaced AE in my own professional work, which includes motion graphics and VFX work for nearly a decade as well.
Maybe it depends on your specific niche, but the number of jobs where I had to use AE has been zero for the past 3 years. Blender is known as a modelling or 3D-VFX/Animation tool, but if you are good at it, with all its constraints, python support etc. it is truly worth trying for 2D as well. Tracker is better as well.
None of the examples the parent gave are even in the same plane of existence as actually replacing Adobe products in a professional context. (Blender has decent inroads in indie game development, and marginal inroads in other 3D contexts, e.g., as a C4D alternative, the rest are so irrelevant they might as well not exist.)
None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s
As I said, I ordered them by their ability to replace the prospect tools for me. I edited films for hours in Premiere, recently all I had was my linkux machine and kdenlive worked surprisingly well for a small project, not to speak of Davinci.
Blender supported my freelance career for at least the past 5 years and half of the projects would have been considered 2D.
"Wow, how did you achive that look?" is a question I heard more than once. So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. And as for AE: with Davinci and Blender the numer of times I had to reach for AE slowly aproached zero.
But again depends on your Blender skills and what you need done.
> None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s
Sorry, missed you included Resolve in there, although Resolve's actual market penetration in as an NLE (i.e., directly competing with Premiere) is hard to evaluate (it's obviously the market leader for color grading). Prosumers love it as an NLE though.
Your follow up comments put things in a different context and I wouldn't have replied the way I did if I had read them first. E.g., in the follow-ups you're stating you've managed to replace your workflow in these areas with these applications, which is great and useful information. But that's a different framing than the original comment I was responding to, e.g., "Creative Cloud products which can now be replaced:".
> So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough.
My metric would be if people are choosing it for reasons other than price conscious or for values (i.e., it's better than the closed-source version because it's a better product not just inherently better for being open source). Not the easiest to evaluate, but that's what I'm looking for for evidence of the quality of these applications.
I happen to teach in a university with time based media and film departments and I can assure you that among the next generation we have reached 50/50 Premiere/Davinci as NLE. I try to do one small editing project per year in Davinci and while Premiere is still better with material-intensive projects, davinci is is totally usable and comes with its own upsides. And thry have improved gradualy throughout the past years, so I expect them to catch up there.
As for Blender, I was a Maya user before and never really looked back. Blender is also gaining a lot of traction in the recent years, especially since they introduced the Eevee renderer and decent grease pencil/2D animation workflows.
I can't speak for all segments of the professional market, but Blender is good enough to earn a living with it, while not feeling you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa in paint, as of now. And more importantly: it is improving at a quicker pace than most other software and that includes commercial ones.
Desktop class, you can render AI stuff locally on a $1,500 computer. Phones and tablets are building in neural processors. That will change. But the licensing thing won't change back.
Glad Adobe waited for the founder to pass before doing all this junk, it'd probably kill him.
I guess that if they wanted to charge extra for the AI features then people wouldn't want to pay them for it. So instead of buying a perpetual licence with 3 years of updates included, and having to pay extra for AI features, they decided to just kill the software in 3 years.
I wonder how the justification for all this will go when people will have enough NPU processing power in their computers to do these operations and not need to have the work done on a server?
There won't be any justification. The on-device computations probably won't consume credits, but that's the only future change anyone could hope for. Adobe won't be letting go of their subscriptions unless something major happens.
Not a fan of ownership changing to rent, but it's almost inevitable that these kind of products will turn into AI cloud services now. All that server power is not cheap.
I'd still prefer a fixed perpetual license with a usage based fee for AI features though.
> Not a fan of ownership changing to rent, but it's almost inevitable that these kind of products will turn into AI cloud services now. All that server power is not cheap.
I don't agree at all. Just because you want to push a specific feature and charge a subscription for it, that doesn't mean the seller is entitled to defraud it's paying customers.
If their feature is so good, wouldn't you be seeing paying customers form a line for it?
I asked the question "what can we do to get off of Adobe" and was met with a resounding: "NOTHING" from the marketing team especially. So many of their assets are vendor locked to Adobe products, almost our entire asset library and not to mention the cost of retraining.
Adobe is fully aware they have the industry by the balls. I doubt that this inertia can be curbed no matter what they do, including it seems granting themselves a license to everything you open using their products; which while a direct violation of our partnerships: has been deemed acceptable by my CEO because it's "impossible that nobody else is having this problem" and "we are not the vanguard of defending IP law"...
... If I'm not willing to be the "someone" who stands up, then it's more likely that "no one" will be that "someone" either.
It's like the opposite of the disney perpetual copyright. Every few years, their copyright that is about to expire gets extended, so in effect it's actually perpetual (yes, i know some of it has recently managed to be expired...)
Affinity / Serif is now owned by Canva. And although they've pledged to keep perpetual licensing, I'd trust that about as far as their next profit calculation.
I have confidence as long as the current leadership stays on board, they'll honour the perpetual license.
However, I am also very confident next year they'll just release a V3 and we'll have to buy it again of course, but no worries we'll get a discount as previous owner!
I guess they have some data when all their other products became subscription-only to see how many people actually walk away. Perhaps it's not many. And I'm not sure how large a business that part actually is.
I got quite annoyed earlier this year that Lightroom 6 couldn't be installed anymore. Have been using it for many years but now it cannot be activated anymore and thus won't work. I'm not happy to pay a subscription for a hobby I only manage to do a few times a year anymore, though. Overall I guess they won't care, as they have a large part of the professional market willing to pay monthly.
Not many walking away short term I can believe, sadly. But there will be grumbling, and perhaps a greater inclination to try other options, even at the cost of a temporary productivity drop for training etc.
If GIMP and Krita would just offer really smooth user interfaces in addition to capable backends, maybe now could be the time...
My big problem with Krita is just the plugins. Photoshop aggregated plugins to export to a ton of incidental file formats, and the plugins were all platform agnostic. Krita however, there's no way of telling if you can export to a given format such as .exif, .dds, or .dpx, and if there is whether that export plugin is supported by your operating system. I've had an issue before where a plugin only worked with Windows 10 prior to a certain update and didn't work in Linux because there was an issue where the AppImage was trying to load something via WINE outside of the container and failing because AppImages can't load Windows native libraries without some setup. It's just small things like that which prevent less dedicated people from leaving the abusive grasp of Adobe.
I just today moved from windows and lightroom to debian and darktable for photography. To be fair I’ve been using linux for programming for years and have tried darktable for a few days now.
There are many challenges but its so worth it for me.
I moved to Ansel after the author's blog post on Dark table's development and project management issues was on here and while it's still v0.0.0 it works fine for the most part and does a number of things better than LR. But it still takes a while to figure out what to fiddle with since many things are (as typical of open source projects) just algorithms implemented from papers with expressive parameters names like k and sigma without much thought towards a product and what the end user wants to use. But changing a workflow you're used to for almost a decade is never fun.
Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. Or as one of the (former) devs put it, darktable is:
a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard
shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them
One of the stated goals for his fork (Ansel) is:
to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer
science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography.
The catch is, of course, Aurélien ripped a bunch of stuff out in Ansel that you may actually want like styles/presets or macos support. If Aurélien can keep up the momentum I think Ansel could be quite promising for photo processing on Linux.
OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.
In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar.
I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
There's an interesting parallel to Blender of 10 years ago, which was absolutely hostile to user onboarding. Could only be operated by memorising lists of keyboard shortcuts, and the forums were just a wall of "git gud"...
Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
Yeah. But the Blender folks were willing to own up to their interface being not good. The darktable folks? Not so much. If/when that changes then yeah darktable stands a chance at being a reasonable replacement for Lightroom.
> Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography.
You nailed it.
Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.
Large organizations can get Lightroom with a perpetual license. For me though, Adobe's and C1's rent seeking and the pathetic state of open source alternatives really sucked the fun out of photography.
With some effort you can get Lightroom running if you've still got an activated installation somewhere. It's not just activation, but apparently a time-limited license on the facial recognition software Adobe used. On MacOS the remaining 32-bit code sprinkled about (beyond just the installer) means it won't run on 64-bit only operating systems.
The map view also tended to break after two years or so due to a Google maps API key lapsing. It was noticeable for a whole that the subscription variant got a lot more love and effort (but maybe that languished similarly).
I was trying to get this to Front page multiple times but didn't work. We are going full force into subscription model without a monthly or yearly payment. And I imagine many other companies will follow the same path.
My take on this is that FOSS is the only effective protection against subscription enshittification.
GIMP 3 RC 1 is soon here and it actually looks like it can finally replace Photoshop for me. Nondestructive editing is there.
The learning curve was steep, but I managed to replace Lightroom with darktable a couple of years ago.
Try Krita
Yeah, and once you're there there is no getting out.
That is why open source products are important: they add a constantly growing baseline of quality which the likes of Adobe have to be above of if they want to be able to sustain themselves.
Creative cloud products which can now be replaced:
After Effects with Blender, which is even more powerful
Premiere with kdenlive, Openshot, Shotcut or Davinci Resolve (not open Source, but free and with a superior color engine)
Photoshop with Gimp, Krita (Photoshop is still superior tho)
Illustrator with Inkscape, Graphite or other SVG editors
InDesign with Scribus
Many of these tools are not there yet (I sorted roughly from best replacement to worst), but this is certainly a space to watch.
Professional motion designer here (15 years): Blender is awesome and I highly applaud their team (and have donated to the org!), but it is absolutely not a replacement for After Effects. The ecosystem around AE (plugins/tutorials/templates) is way too large and useful to disregard.
And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative.
I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.
I said that because it replaced AE in my own professional work, which includes motion graphics and VFX work for nearly a decade as well.
Maybe it depends on your specific niche, but the number of jobs where I had to use AE has been zero for the past 3 years. Blender is known as a modelling or 3D-VFX/Animation tool, but if you are good at it, with all its constraints, python support etc. it is truly worth trying for 2D as well. Tracker is better as well.
None of the examples the parent gave are even in the same plane of existence as actually replacing Adobe products in a professional context. (Blender has decent inroads in indie game development, and marginal inroads in other 3D contexts, e.g., as a C4D alternative, the rest are so irrelevant they might as well not exist.)
None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s
As I said, I ordered them by their ability to replace the prospect tools for me. I edited films for hours in Premiere, recently all I had was my linkux machine and kdenlive worked surprisingly well for a small project, not to speak of Davinci.
Blender supported my freelance career for at least the past 5 years and half of the projects would have been considered 2D.
"Wow, how did you achive that look?" is a question I heard more than once. So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. And as for AE: with Davinci and Blender the numer of times I had to reach for AE slowly aproached zero.
But again depends on your Blender skills and what you need done.
> None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s
Sorry, missed you included Resolve in there, although Resolve's actual market penetration in as an NLE (i.e., directly competing with Premiere) is hard to evaluate (it's obviously the market leader for color grading). Prosumers love it as an NLE though.
Your follow up comments put things in a different context and I wouldn't have replied the way I did if I had read them first. E.g., in the follow-ups you're stating you've managed to replace your workflow in these areas with these applications, which is great and useful information. But that's a different framing than the original comment I was responding to, e.g., "Creative Cloud products which can now be replaced:".
> So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough.
My metric would be if people are choosing it for reasons other than price conscious or for values (i.e., it's better than the closed-source version because it's a better product not just inherently better for being open source). Not the easiest to evaluate, but that's what I'm looking for for evidence of the quality of these applications.
I happen to teach in a university with time based media and film departments and I can assure you that among the next generation we have reached 50/50 Premiere/Davinci as NLE. I try to do one small editing project per year in Davinci and while Premiere is still better with material-intensive projects, davinci is is totally usable and comes with its own upsides. And thry have improved gradualy throughout the past years, so I expect them to catch up there.
As for Blender, I was a Maya user before and never really looked back. Blender is also gaining a lot of traction in the recent years, especially since they introduced the Eevee renderer and decent grease pencil/2D animation workflows.
I can't speak for all segments of the professional market, but Blender is good enough to earn a living with it, while not feeling you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa in paint, as of now. And more importantly: it is improving at a quicker pace than most other software and that includes commercial ones.
Adobe is the Boeing of software suites.
Desktop class, you can render AI stuff locally on a $1,500 computer. Phones and tablets are building in neural processors. That will change. But the licensing thing won't change back.
Glad Adobe waited for the founder to pass before doing all this junk, it'd probably kill him.
I guess that if they wanted to charge extra for the AI features then people wouldn't want to pay them for it. So instead of buying a perpetual licence with 3 years of updates included, and having to pay extra for AI features, they decided to just kill the software in 3 years.
I wonder how the justification for all this will go when people will have enough NPU processing power in their computers to do these operations and not need to have the work done on a server?
There won't be any justification. The on-device computations probably won't consume credits, but that's the only future change anyone could hope for. Adobe won't be letting go of their subscriptions unless something major happens.
The same as all businesses which sell software to other businesses. It's subscriptions all the way down.
> I wonder how the justification for all this will go
“You need to pay to do it on our servers for safety issues and so we can pay the Adobe Stock creators”
This is why local models are so important, only chance we have to be freed from this cycle.
Not a fan of ownership changing to rent, but it's almost inevitable that these kind of products will turn into AI cloud services now. All that server power is not cheap.
I'd still prefer a fixed perpetual license with a usage based fee for AI features though.
> Not a fan of ownership changing to rent, but it's almost inevitable that these kind of products will turn into AI cloud services now. All that server power is not cheap.
I don't agree at all. Just because you want to push a specific feature and charge a subscription for it, that doesn't mean the seller is entitled to defraud it's paying customers.
If their feature is so good, wouldn't you be seeing paying customers form a line for it?
> If their feature is so good, wouldn't you be seeing paying customers form a line for it?
We are going to see permutations of this question over and over in the coming years concerning AI.
I asked the question "what can we do to get off of Adobe" and was met with a resounding: "NOTHING" from the marketing team especially. So many of their assets are vendor locked to Adobe products, almost our entire asset library and not to mention the cost of retraining.
Adobe is fully aware they have the industry by the balls. I doubt that this inertia can be curbed no matter what they do, including it seems granting themselves a license to everything you open using their products; which while a direct violation of our partnerships: has been deemed acceptable by my CEO because it's "impossible that nobody else is having this problem" and "we are not the vanguard of defending IP law"...
... If I'm not willing to be the "someone" who stands up, then it's more likely that "no one" will be that "someone" either.
It's like the opposite of the disney perpetual copyright. Every few years, their copyright that is about to expire gets extended, so in effect it's actually perpetual (yes, i know some of it has recently managed to be expired...)
No more Adobe, happy with 'Affinity photo' already 6 years for now: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
Affinity / Serif is now owned by Canva. And although they've pledged to keep perpetual licensing, I'd trust that about as far as their next profit calculation.
I have confidence as long as the current leadership stays on board, they'll honour the perpetual license.
However, I am also very confident next year they'll just release a V3 and we'll have to buy it again of course, but no worries we'll get a discount as previous owner!
I'm also an Affinity user, very happy with it.
I am sure they made their calculations, but I think that this will cut into Adobe's business.
I guess they have some data when all their other products became subscription-only to see how many people actually walk away. Perhaps it's not many. And I'm not sure how large a business that part actually is.
I got quite annoyed earlier this year that Lightroom 6 couldn't be installed anymore. Have been using it for many years but now it cannot be activated anymore and thus won't work. I'm not happy to pay a subscription for a hobby I only manage to do a few times a year anymore, though. Overall I guess they won't care, as they have a large part of the professional market willing to pay monthly.
Not many walking away short term I can believe, sadly. But there will be grumbling, and perhaps a greater inclination to try other options, even at the cost of a temporary productivity drop for training etc.
If GIMP and Krita would just offer really smooth user interfaces in addition to capable backends, maybe now could be the time...
My big problem with Krita is just the plugins. Photoshop aggregated plugins to export to a ton of incidental file formats, and the plugins were all platform agnostic. Krita however, there's no way of telling if you can export to a given format such as .exif, .dds, or .dpx, and if there is whether that export plugin is supported by your operating system. I've had an issue before where a plugin only worked with Windows 10 prior to a certain update and didn't work in Linux because there was an issue where the AppImage was trying to load something via WINE outside of the container and failing because AppImages can't load Windows native libraries without some setup. It's just small things like that which prevent less dedicated people from leaving the abusive grasp of Adobe.
I just today moved from windows and lightroom to debian and darktable for photography. To be fair I’ve been using linux for programming for years and have tried darktable for a few days now. There are many challenges but its so worth it for me.
I moved to Ansel after the author's blog post on Dark table's development and project management issues was on here and while it's still v0.0.0 it works fine for the most part and does a number of things better than LR. But it still takes a while to figure out what to fiddle with since many things are (as typical of open source projects) just algorithms implemented from papers with expressive parameters names like k and sigma without much thought towards a product and what the end user wants to use. But changing a workflow you're used to for almost a decade is never fun.
Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. Or as one of the (former) devs put it, darktable is:
One of the stated goals for his fork (Ansel) is: The catch is, of course, Aurélien ripped a bunch of stuff out in Ansel that you may actually want like styles/presets or macos support. If Aurélien can keep up the momentum I think Ansel could be quite promising for photo processing on Linux.OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.
To illustrate this:
In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar.
I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
There's an interesting parallel to Blender of 10 years ago, which was absolutely hostile to user onboarding. Could only be operated by memorising lists of keyboard shortcuts, and the forums were just a wall of "git gud"...
Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
Yeah. But the Blender folks were willing to own up to their interface being not good. The darktable folks? Not so much. If/when that changes then yeah darktable stands a chance at being a reasonable replacement for Lightroom.
The technical issues though. Ugh.
> Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography.
You nailed it.
Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.
Large organizations can get Lightroom with a perpetual license. For me though, Adobe's and C1's rent seeking and the pathetic state of open source alternatives really sucked the fun out of photography.
With some effort you can get Lightroom running if you've still got an activated installation somewhere. It's not just activation, but apparently a time-limited license on the facial recognition software Adobe used. On MacOS the remaining 32-bit code sprinkled about (beyond just the installer) means it won't run on 64-bit only operating systems.
The map view also tended to break after two years or so due to a Google maps API key lapsing. It was noticeable for a whole that the subscription variant got a lot more love and effort (but maybe that languished similarly).