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Wild. My old place we relied on this despite me urging us to use Figma/Sketch and Blender (amazing for 2D art). Naturally logistics factored into it as our clients relied on Adobe as well, but there were plenty of projects that didn’t need it.
We also had the dumbest guidelines to ensure no leaks. I would routinely get app requests refused despite the fact their source was right there on GitHub.
So now what are they gonna do? Because if they use Adobe, they can no longer ensure that a clients work won’t hit the net. May not seem like much for small indie projects but if we snagged the next GTA or Valorant, you bet that would attract some serious lookiloos.
Not sure if a client would find “it wasn’t us it was Adobe” all that comforting!
We use Figma for UI design at work. I really like it.
I’m not a designer, but I’m a developer that has to build the system. It has our internal UI library integrated into it, so the mockup looks practically identical to the actual implementation. When I click on a component, it shows the component name and a link to its documentation. Runs great in a browser without having to install an app. Really nice piece of software.
I’m glad the Adobe acquisition didn’t go though… I was scared Adobe would ruin it. I feel bad for all the Figma employees though… They were going to all receive a lot of money as a result of the acquisition, and everything was going well until it was blocked :/
Yeah totally agree. Figma removes a lot of the translation between design and implementation so design and dev are most always on the same page. Ps is an image program. It’s not meant for UI design. At all. Adobe tried to wedge in some UI design frameworks and flows but it’s Adobe. They could fuck up a cup of coffee. And no one uses Adobe XD. It’s too little too late. That’s when at my old employ I pushed for it. When I joined them, most of the designers were using Ai and Ps. Insane to me as Ai is even less suited for UI work. But they were like 20 and right out of school, which shocker, likely had a deal with Adobe so they pushed their software down their students throats.
I dreaded the sale of Figma. So glad it was stopped. Adobe already has such a monopoly on the design industry.
Figma
Did you even read what I wrote edgelord?
Yes and it was insightful.
Ok, time to notify our design team not to use any Adobe products anymore and notify the commercial team to stop paying for licences.
What can you replace Adobe with? Serious question. I despise Adobe, but every alternative I’ve tried throughout the years either cannot do the job or ends up disappearing.
While I’ve no idea of your exact needs, I’ve been a happy Affinity customer for almost 3 years now (freelance web dev/designer).
It has everything I need (vector work, photo editing), and no subscription.
This is good to hear. It’s been a few years since I last tried to quit Adobe. I will have another go with Affinity and Krita (someone else suggested Krita as well).
It seems our designer team doesn’t really use Photoshop. They switched to Figma from XD and most of their workflows don’t use Adobe software. They still use Illustrator occasionally, but they’re looking at Inkscape atm. If you have Photoshop in your workflow, you’re kinda fucked. https://www.photopea.com/ might be an option, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. If you need Lightroom, then Darktable is a good alternative. It’s a bit janky here and there, but fully functional and stable. If you’re using Premiere then for fox sake switch to DaVinci Resolve already, it’s so much better than everything else and is free for many workflows and even for commercial use.
Isn’t Photoshop by a lot of big corporations. Why would they sign up to that? Or do they get an exemption that isn’t available to private individuals?
Sufficiently large orgs probably will be eligible for exemptions under the theory that they are agreeing ahead of time.
But also? The Adobe suite are just leagues better than anything else in that space. Smaller companies with smaller contracts can get away with, frankly, lesser software. But at scale? You need stuff like the “Oh shit, we should stop calling it AI” plugins. And workflows matter a lot when the vast majority of your applicant pool have been using Adobe software for literally decades.
A decent number of the tech youtubers have done “We tried to not use Premier for one week” style videos. And they usually end up coming out with “I guess we could maybe make it work but it just isn’t worth it”
Much like with “this is the year of gaming for linux”, it is going to need massive amounts of grass roots effort to actually focus on UI/UX over “We don’t need that because we are smarter” bullshit. And, eventually, it will be good enough for influencers/taste-makers to give it a chance.
Big corporations probably think that since they don’t engage in things that would get moderated it doesn’t matter to them.
Corpos are too big and stupid to react in time for this
Can Adobe be used on a machine that’s sandboxed / offline? That way you can do your projects while disconnected from their servers, once the project is complete, just move your files onto an external drive and away from Adobe access?
Yes, with a virtual machine. But the experience will not be the best because the VM will lack a GPU. I’m sure there is ways to share some resources of the GPU with the VM to have a smoother experience but I have never done that on Windows
Hm… I wouldn’t think you’d need a VM, rather just disable your ethernet card, disable/disconnect wifi, or unplug ethernet cable.
VMware workstation supports using a GPU. You can even use it in “pass-through” mode to give the VM full, exclusive access to the GPU.
This is 100% because they are rolling out more AI features and they want the government to ban all open source competition because they aren’t “safe”.
Terrorists use GIMP so we gotta ban it!
stirling-pdf it is then
Tell me you don’t want money from NSFW artists without telling me.
I mean… they ARE telling you?
Expect a LOT more companies to do stuff like this. Because “deep fake” porn is a plague and nobody (reputable) wants their software to be the go to for violating people.
Photoshop != deepfake porn. Although it might get used to touch up some images for realism.
Which isn’t where the money is in NSFW digital art.
Yes. Photoshop is not currently equal to deepfake porn. It is a few popular plugins away from being it though. Hence getting out ahead of things with content policies.
And… NSFW digital art is not as good money as you think it is. At least, not at the corporate/software level.
What do you mean by “at the corporate/software level”? What corporations are drawing furry porn?
I mean, have you seen Gadget?
But also… that is kind of the point. Adobe and basically every company that isn’t a porn company doesn’t care about the revenue from porn. And the companies that DO care about the revenue are constantly fighting piracy.
There are some patreon-like artists who make bank for getting their Source Film Maker on. But they are a handful of licenses, at best.
That’s what I was thinking. Apart from the porn locked up in the Disney vault, big companies aren’t in the business of making porn. And the companies that do aren’t going to be interested in deep fakes. The people who are using Photoshop to create porn are small fries to Adobe. Deep fake porn has been around as long as photo manipulation has, and Adobe hasn’t cared before.
Bearing that in mind, I don’t think this policy has anything to do with AI deep fakes or porn. I think it’s more likely to be some new revenue source, like farming data for LLM training or something. They could go the Tumblr route and use AI to censor content, but considering Tumblr couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs, I think that’s one fuck up with a major company away from being litigation hell. The only reason that I think would make sense for Adobe to do this because of deep fakes is if they believe that governments are going to start holding them liable for the content people make with their products.
I know AI is the big bogeyman right now (and it is especially pertinent to Adobe because the stuff that makes Photoshop and Premier and the like so good are the “AI” tools they have had… for the better part of a decade), but I think there is almost a zero chance that is a factor in this*
Because… the big companies care about that. If using Illustrator means that all of their content is being used to train models for their competitors? You can bet that MASSIVE amounts of money would be pumped into Inkscape and the like overnight. Almost as much money as they pump into the lawyers who will own Adobe by the end of the month. Same with Premier and Photoshop and all the other ones.
I DO expect Adobe to release something akin to a RAG based tool so that Company A can “save money” by feeding in all of their personal IP as training data to make a semi-personalized model. But there is zero chance that adobe is going ot risk aggregating that themselves.
*: Unless the secret is that Adobe wants to develop a service to detect the probability that art was used in the training of a model or even to implement some form of DRM to identify stolen art. Similar to what those god awful NFT models failed to do.
Artists for furry porn aren’t generally paying for 100+ enterprise licenses. But then, people doing more questionable stuff probably aren’t paying at all so it still doesn’t make sense.
That’s what I was thinking. Deep fakes have existed since photo manipulation was invented, and Adobe hasn’t cared one iota about it before. The only reason I can see for them to care now is if they think they can get in legal trouble for what people create with their products.
Gee, yet another reason why mine is a Corel shop and we don’t use Adobe for anything.
I recieved today an email from Affinity saying that their whole suite of softwares is 50% off.
I’m assuming more people will be migrating to either Affinity or FOSS.
I currently use FOSS but I also really love Affinity. Especially since it’s a perpetual/lifetime license.
Until its not. Better pick foss. Request the features you want and make a donation. Simple as.
Yeah, Affinity was recently acquired by Canva.
We’ll see how that goes. For now, I’m using FOSS.
Canceled my Adobe account in 2018 and they just keep on making my decision a better and better one. Thanks, Adobe!
What do you use now?
I bought the Affinity Suite which has been great for me. Sadly they don’t have a Linux version, which is what I’m moving to. Krita covers some other of Photoshop’s features as well. And people who say Gimp is a Photoshop alternative are crazy. Gimp uses destructive editing which is clown level in image editing and makes it completely useless imo. But supposedly non-destructive editing is coming.
It is destructive in what sense? I’ve been using gimp to do various edits non professionally for many years and I am feeling comfortable with many advanced things, but now I am curious about maybe trying Krita or something.
I thought using layers and so on in gimp was also considered non destructive… Maybe I am missing out on something.
I have also used photoshop in like 20 years ago, can’t remember much.
Destructive in that many edits are lossy. Change the transform of an object, then go do a bunch of other edits, and then go back and edit that same transform again. What you’ll be editing now is the edited image, not the original one (as in Photoshop), so there’s massive data loss and it looks absolute crap. If you want to edit with the original image as origin you have to undo all edits back to before you edited the transform the first time.
Non-destructive editing should be coming in the future, and they might have implemented some non-destructive things since I last used it.
I tried to read up on it, i understand it in theory, but in practical terms I don’t get what’s the difference to just working with layers…
I guess I might have to play around a bit with it to get it? I dunno…
Layers aren’t edits, they’re layers. Edits you make to layers or parts of layers. That image whose transform was being edited in my previous example would be on its own layer.
Also, it’s been a while since I used Gimp so I’m going off of very vague memories that I have tried to erase with copious amounts of alcohol.
On second thought, maybe it’s the way I work with layers as well. I tend to keep duplicates of the base image as layers to work with effects and mask them so that I have flexibility with applying them and editing them as needed. Perhaps the benefit of non-desteuctive editing is the same thing as I end up with, but more automated…?
So wait, if you’re editing the original image, wouldn’t the result just be wrong? I’m genuinely confused. You edit something, you want to change that, you should be changing what to you edited it to, right? Isn’t that the only thing that makes any sense, because if you were editing what you had before, the change you make wouldn’t be right in the context of the new edit?
And if you want to keep something, this is why we have layers. Which Gimp has and just works. That’s the real way to do “non-destructive editing”.
Maybe just not understanding how things work in PS because I’ve never used it extensively, but common sense tells me that if you edit something, you want it to look like that and any further edits would be on what you edited it to, not some unknown echo of the past that would interfere with how the image currently looks, which is what you should be editing, right?
You’re right, but you’re missing a key point. Every edit changes the way the image looks. With destructive editing those changes are “baked” into the object you’re changing, and that is data loss. If you want to make a change to that edit you want it to still have the information from the original image so it can be included and changed into the new result you want. Destructive editing doesn’t allow for that. It’s like if you bend a metal wire, you just crumple it up, and then you want to straighten it again - you won’t be able to get it perfectly straight. Non destructive editing does allow for that because it still has the original information, it just doesn’t display it in its original form, it displays it with the edit you’ve made to it, and the edit is “live” so you can change it. It has nothing to do with layers per se, but using layers can be a way to do certain edits in a non destructive way.
If you don’t grasp the difference just open Gimp and do the transform test. Paste an image into a new layer, change the transform and squish it to the extreme (non uniformly), make it a few pixels wide only. Apply the transform. Change the transform again and pull the image out to its original aspect ratio. You’ll have a blurry image because of all the data that was lost in the first edit. Non destructive editing has been like the most requested feature for Gimp for the past forever for a reason.
I really wish I didn’t hate gimp but I very much do.
Same. I want to love it, I really, really do, but it makes me want to blow my brains out when I use it.
Yeah it’s truly painful
I tried to curve text once, to match the curvature of a mug. Pro tip: don’t even try.
There’s GIMP and Krita as Photoshop alternatives
Dark Table as a Lightroom alternative
DaVinci Resolve as a video editor
Personally giving up Lightroom is the hardest IMO, the others were easy choices.
Edit: Will add links when I get to my next break at work, no time right now.
I love Gimp but I would never suggest it as a Photoshop alternative for professional users.
Holy Shitballs:
Also, hilarious that I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.
I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you fucking kidding me??
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
Can someone there give me an email for someone who can cancel my subscription without having to sign in and agree to these new terms first?
I think at that point I’d mail a certified letter and cancel whatever card it’s on.
That probably wouldn’t work but one can dream.
What about sending a certified letter to the company in question stating they better reverse the idiotic decision or be prepared to face a lengthy prison sentence for it?
I mean it probably would. Their only recourse would be to sue you.
And if you have a decent credit card, and a record of your attempts to contact them and cancel your subscription, they’ll likely take your side if you back charge then block them from your card.
This is why vendors should send us a public address to pay, instead of us sending them a private address to charge.
Realising I also need to agree to the terms if I want to sign in and cancel my subscription
I’m pretty sure this is not legal in EU
Wipe your system. Then it’s uninstalled.
Cancel your recurring payment. Then that’s done too.
If any large organizations want to make a large donation to Inkscape, GIMP, Krita and Blender that would be great.
I love FOSS alternatives, but let’s not pretend that GIMP is anywhere near being a viable alternative for professionals, unlike Blender who has got their shit together. I wish GIMP figured out actual decent UX.
I’ll upload a shitton of nudes to adobe cloud and report them so a poor bloke has to review those
That’s like punching your food delivery person in the face because you got the wrong order, they’re not the problem.
So you think Adobe is too big and should be split up?
People complain now, but they’ll renew their subscription. It’s the same unhealthy relationship people have with Windows.
People are subscribed to Adobe products?
Adobe basically invented the SaaS model. It’s not really practical to bootleg most Adobe products anymore either so most people break down and just pay the million dollar a year subscription fee so they can keep using it.
It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.
To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.
GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use
It hurts to say but you’re right. I was like “can’t you remap the right mouse button to another tool? Everything in the context menu is in the Menu bar regardless” and they responded with “nope, design philosophy”
GIMP literally sucks on purpose. Anyone waiting around for GIMP to do what Blender did and suddenly become usable has missed the point.
But for what purpose?
making Adobe roll in money, i guess
But Adobe don’t make gimp afaik
Martin Owens is working on CMYK support for Inkscape as we speak, and Gimp releases v3 during the summer if all goes well. Still, they’re small projects with very limited funding. Help them !
yep. I feel like FOSS projects are always made by code monkeys who have no design sensibilities and designers do not touch any of these. a lot of them are not only unusable but uninstallable by the majority of the intended user base. whenever i find something i want to use it’s like:
—cool software. can i double click on an icon and have it ready to use?
—umm, don’t be ridiculous, normie. you gotta self host it and use the command line to enter some arcane incantations obviously. alternatively you can use these other methods you’ve never heard of. if you need any help you can refer to their respective indecipherable documentation.
—ok I’ll keep what i have until i find something that’s made for regular human beings, thanks.Many FOSS projects have asked that Designers get involved.
The only project with serious designers I know of are Gnome and Krita.
Install error. Exit code 0
Good luck fucker!
A lot of open source graphics software is made by programmers who also need to edit images sometimes. Both the lack of UI polish and featureset choices make more sense when looked at from that angle.
However, a lot of the criticism that gets thrown at these programs is also a bit unfounded. I regularly see people dunking on GIMP for not being a pixel-perfect clone of Photoshop for free. There is more than one way to design an image editor, and inability of some to learn another is really a user issue. GIMP could be better, but it still can and should be GIMP.
GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.
Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.
The last time I used pjotoshop was on a relatively new Mac II. I’ve also never had issues with Gimp for some reason.
I use these tools everyday. Yes there are limitations, but for what MOST people need there are solutions. It just depends on what is important to you. Also, you can use the ellipse assistant.
Because we, the individuals, do not have the power to change it with an individual boycott and need to keep our livelihood intact. Go try to break you unhealthy relationship with petroleum.
This is actually an excellent comparison. I don’t own a car, and I advocate for the car free lifestyle. I also don’t recommend people using Adobe if possible.
A car is far from the only consumer of petroleum. Many electrical grids directly use hydrocarbons, construction uses petroleum, public transportation uses petroleum, local shipping uses petroleum, overseas shipping uses petroleum, manufacturing uses petroleum, plastic is made from petroleum, farms run on petroleum… Sure, most of those industries are trying to convert energy sources, but in no way can an individual avoid petroleum consumption and still live. Avoiding windows and Adobe is less insurmountable, but still a powerful stressor for people just trying to make a living.
This also matches my comparison.
Maybe someone who makes the GIMP uses photoshop. I actively don’t, and I recommend that others stop using it.
Maybe someone who delivers my food uses petroleum. I actively don’t, and I recommend that others stop using it.All these elements influence my decisions. If you want to continue promoting Adobe and Big Oil, that’s on you.
How’d you computer get to your home? Did it walk?
My desktop was given to me by my job. My laptop, I rode a bicycle to my friends house and paid him cash. What does that have to do with my promotion of being Adobe free?
You really are hands-off on this petroleum situation. You’ve got no part in it. It’s official. Everything in your life is a bike ride away and therefore didn’t use petroleum to get to your locality and didn’t take any to be manufactured. You won
I need it for work. It’s the industry standard and when I share files between myself and other designers I could potentially bung up a whole project if I’m using GIMP or Affinity by Serif.
The question I’d like to ask them is WHY they want to get involved in Content Moderation. They make a toolset, nothing more, so why do they care what someone is using the tools for? What could they possibly get out of this that makes it worth the time or expense?
I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.
It is always the stuff that they mumble and handwave that you have to watch out for. The Moderation part is just to get everyone all talking about that. The scary part is the “other stuff”. They probably want access to everyone’s data so they can train their AI on it.
Yep, and with access to the work files they not only can use final images for AI training but they have access to the complete background information like the different layers of an image.
Not just the layers, but a full history of every alteration they made from the first pixel to the last.
As someone who’s used their tooling and the generative tooling… I have to admit trying to push its limits for giggles. It is VERY conservative already so I don’t see why they’d need additional moderation privileges.
This is an awful change.
I tried using their generative tools a while back and they were pretty terrible. Curious what your experience has been.
The illustrator tools are terrible. But removing and replacing backgrounds in Photoshop has been spectacular with one caveat - they are less great if you give it any instruction. If you use the generative fills with prompts the results are not at all great. However, if you leave the prompt blank it does a bang-up job matching the existing background set / scene.
Equally impressive has been generating parts of photos that are missing when extending the canvas size.
It tends to work best with photos that are “inside” (interiors) with strong geometric cues - but it has expertly matched lighting, backgrounds and their level of focus (or lack thereof).
Thanks for the insight, I was using it to create something new from a prompt, so my bad experience seems to align with yours.
The content is being uploaded to Adobe’s servers, they likely have the right and may even be legally required to moderate it to some degree.
This yet another reminder that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. Somebody who might want to impose some degree of control with what is done with their computer, for whatever reason.
Feeding some other crappy AI
