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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alternative Take: There’s some pretty damn good alternative software. Nothing is a drop in 1:1 replacement, but damn good options. You can easily edit a PDF with LibreOffice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think, because Corp. In Corp, they want someone to be in charge, and take reponsible when something mess up. It is easy for IT to proposed to buy a solution, because the vendor take responsible for mess up, rather than use open-source and have to fix bug themselves.
There are also case where developer push malware into open-source.
This is another example, corp pay to use open source (tidelift.com). They are paying to have someone to cover them if something mess up, like a reliable mantainer.
So i think that why corp still pay for pdf solution, e-signing and stuff like that rather than implement from open source solution.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Add comment