Adobe; if ever there was a company deserving of a love/hate relationship with photographers….
We love Adobe for Lightroom. It is elegant, powerful and compact; the perfect companion for managing and processing photographs. For what you get, and you get a lot, it’s competitively priced and I could not function photographically without it.
We hate Adobe for Photoshop. We appreciate that Photoshop is an industry standard for graphics; but we like to use just little bits of it for doing things that we just can’t manage in Lightroom. To use Photoshop we need to spend many months working through endless tutorials to get a grasp of what we might want to use to process our photos. By the time we have finished the last tutorial, we have forgotten the first one; and so must spend the rest of our life re-learning the product (although I will concede not everyone is as dumb as me). Oh, and Photoshop is a big fat application that hogs your disk drive.
While we are busy trying to learn it, we will also be busy paying off the bank loan we needed to buy the software; Adobe’s Creative Suite (which includes Photoshop) was eye-wateringly expensive.
I say “was”, because now the cost has changed dramatically, it is now only 1,600 baht.
That’s the good news. The bad news, and it is very bad news, is that the cost is 1,600 baht a month; and you don’t even own the damn thing.
Announced to a chorus of disapproval, Adobe have moved Photoshop and the rest of their Creative Suite to the Creative Cloud. In practice this means you can still run their applications off-line, but will need to connect to the internet monthly to validate your software. For your money you get most of the Creative Suite, with free updates when they are available and storage space in the Adobe cloud.
If you are professional graphics artist who utilises many of of the Creative Suite products on a daily basis; this is probably a good deal and will work out cheaper over the years compared to buying the products. Adobe already have sold more than half a million licences, so presumably it has been well-received by the industry. But if you are an occasional user who fires up Photoshop occasionally; a monthly rental is not a very appealing proposition. What to do?
Well, you could just stick with that increasingly outdated version of Photoshop that sits on your hard drive (goodness know how it got there….), or you could start looking for alternatives; there are plenty.
Personally, I would love to get Photoshop off my computer. It’s a tangled monster of a thing, so different from Lightroom and its associated plug-ins. In the on-line explosion that erupted on-line when the subscription version of Photoshop was announced, I kept seeing references to a piece of software called Pixelmator. Apparently it can do most of what Photoshop can do, and the price is a much more acceptable $14.99; and that’s a one-off payment.
Pixelmator looks similar to Photoshop in many ways…
..but with an overall look and feel that is much more colourful and friendly; it looks like it might be easier to learn. There is an emphasis on effects and shapes which is a little worrying, but all the basic Photoshop tools seem to be available.
It has also been successful, with the latest version attracting half a million downloads in the first week, one of which was probably me.
I need some time to play with it; but it may be worth checking out if you are looking for an alternative to Photoshop.
The bad news is that it is Mac only. If you are foolish enough to have a PC then maybe GIMP will serve your purpose; have fun working out how to use it.
Comments 🔗
2013-05-28| robin saysI feel this pain. There are a great many alternatives to Photoshop but none of them are as powerful, with limitations you don’t notice until you come to work with professionals. A good example is support for separations and CMYK colour. Another is proper support for 16-bit images. Very few image editors have those features, even though they are rather basic for my purposes.
I have found one product that no-one else seems to talk about: Xara. It had been around for yonks and does even many things Photoshop can’t. Plus it is cheap. I will have to find the time/money to check it out more thoroughly, but maybe it will suit you?
2013-05-29| Wally saysMany, many years ago I purchased a photography magazine which had a free CD attached, it was a full version of Paint Shop Pro v 4. Fairly basic at that stage but also fairly easy to learn. I have upgraded occasionally over the the years and although it is not as good as Photo Shop, a few well chosen plug-ins compensate. Does anyone have any opinions on PSPro ?
2013-05-29| Jack saysI have Pixelmator and like it. I use it to prep photos for the web. It’s not a full replacement for Photoshop some of the reasons mentioned here. But for me the big problem is that it lacks IPTC support. No captions. Makes it unusable for my needs.
2013-05-29| Clive saysLike you, I discovered PSP early on, and stuck with it as far as Version 9. Then Corel bought it, and version 10 came out with a hugely unsightly interface tacked on the front. I have stayed with V9 and still use it today on Windows 7, though it does not support the extended colour palette that first came along with Vista.
I am the same type of “occasional” user as Spike, and similarly disenfranchised by this latest move from Adobe. My chosen approach is to stick with my copy of CS5 and Lightroom 4. As and when I buy a camera that uses a raw file format recognised by what will be this ageing software, I shall reluctantly install the camera’s own upload software, and then convert the raw files to TIFF in order to be able to get them in to CS5. Microsoft have already stated that Win 7 will be supported until 2020, and it took them 10 years longer than expected to kill of WinXP, so I figure I’ve got roughly another 7 years before I need to decide on a solution.
And I notice that the GIMP gets significantly better with every release…
Adobe have lost my business. I’m sure they’re worried…. ;)
2013-05-29| Ron saysI don’t know how it compares to other programs. I’ve been using Graphic Workshop Professional 4 from Alchemy Mindworks. Free to try. Free version is not restricted just an annoying opening and closing message. Has raw support plugins available. My needs are pretty minor so can’t evaluate for others.
2013-05-30| Wolfgang Lonien saysI’m on Linux. But I boot a small virtual Win7 environment just to run the Olympus Viewer 2 (or now -3) software to convert those .orf to 16 bit .tif files. The rest is done in RawTherapee, and occasionally in The Gimp, which indeed gets better by the minute. Oh, and did I mention that everything except Windows and OV is free and open source software? And that OV2 (or now OV3) is at least free as in beer?