Seriously, Adobe's subscription plans are ridiculously expensive.

Remember kids, pirating adobe product is always morally correct 👍

Years ago I paid about $500 for a license for Adobe’s web suite. I mainly just bought it for Photoshop. A couple of years later randomly one day my software stopped working and said it was an invalid license and that I needed to buy their subscription to continue using the product. After that happened I didn’t care about “doing it the right way” to support the company anymore so I just pirated software so I could continue using what I had already paid for.

The termination fee part is absolutely disgusting on their part. I use adobe with a student discount that they require me to renew every year. My discount ran out and they started charging me the regular subscription without notification. When i went to renew the subscription after noticing that i was charged full price, i found out i couldnt simply renew it. I had to cancel my subscription to renew my student discount. Lo and behold, there was the termination fee, a whopping 160€. Yes, 160 god damn euros. I skipped the phone thing entirely and was lucky that their twitter support employee was really generous in canceling my subscription for free given i was gonna restart it instantly but with a student discount. I was lucky. But a termination fee for a subscription? What? Why?

Why does a software program have a termination fee?!? That's actually insane lol.

The mindset of "Adobe is getting my creative things done" was the main barrier for me. But once I get out of my comfort zone and invest only 1 week, stopped taking projects for 2 weeks... I replaced - premiere pro with Davinchi Resolve (Free) - Illustrator with Affinity Designer 2 (One time fee) - Photoshop with Affinity Photo 2 (One time fee) - and switched to Figma (free) from Adobe XD long time ago. Yeah, it was hard to replace the Adobe suite but to break the monopoly, I better choose the best alternatives. Now, I am fully Interagated with the new workflow.

I was a loyal Adobe customer for over 20-years. Now I use DaVinci Resolve...and Adobe can take a long walk off a short pier!!!

I saw Adobe's pattern of behavior way back before they shifted over to a subscription model and abandoned them. I've never regretted my decision.

I think the fact that nearly every college graphic design/art class only teaches with Adobe products' UI and interface in mind is also a contributing factor in why most people can't easily quit Adobe. Trying to follow along with lessons with an alternative program just isn't very simple to do.

You asked "why does Adobe have such a disparity between happy employees and angry customers?" To me it seems obvious. I worked at both a monopoly and a consultancy with competitors. The difference in stress level is so apparent. Being an employee of a monopoly is great - there's no competition and no pressure to improve your product and to provide great customer service. There is no disparity, it's a direct relationship: the customers are angry BECAUSE the employees are too comfortable not doing their jobs to a high standard.

Adobe used to be considerably pro-independent creator. As soon as they went to subscription rather than allowing the option to own your software, the writing was on the wall -- they didn't care about independent creators, or the hobbyist. At this point as solo and freelance creators we're all looking for an alternative to Adobe, and pretty much everything else that started off as pro-creator and became anti-creator as soon as the money got too good.

5:54 there are cheaper of even free alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator, and some that basically combine the two. For example, Krita can handle both raster and vector in the same file. It can also handle animations, although not as efficiently as programs that are specifically for animation (and yes there are alternative animation software too).

I began hating Adobe all the way back in 1994 when they acquired my favorite graphic design software company at the time - Aldus Corporation. Most people don't even remember Aldus, but they pioneered a large portion of the graphic tech that Adobe based their future success on. They were the makers of Pagemaker (first desktop publishing program), Photostyler (a competitor to Photoshop), After Effects (still the same name with Adobe), Intellidraw (Vector drawing - features merged with Illustrator), Freehand (vector drawing purchased by Macromedia), and many other graphic and pre-press software products. My hate for Adobe grew each time they devoured another competitor. When they eventually released Creative Cloud it was the culmination of their efforts to monopolize the graphic design business. I use Affinity products, Davinci, and anything else I can in order not to use Adobe.

Being more liked by employees than customers must be unique characteristic for company.

There was a time when I wanted to learn to use photoshop. I ended up using GIMP instead because it was free. When I finally had my own money and could afford it, they had switched to this dumb subscription thing and I decided it wasn't worth learning. Although it could have been useful, I avoid subscription stuff. I hate all this subscription stuff nowadays. Unless you are required to have it for your job, it's not worth it. There are things I want to do that I can't do without photoshop, so I simply just give up on it or ask a friend who has photoshop to do it for me. It's less accessible to non-professionals. Plus, when I was younger (in the age of Myspace), it seemed half the people I new had photoshop. It was THE program to have if you liked editing photos or creating art. I don't know many people who use the program anymore. Even friends who used to gave up on it when it went to subscription. I think that's kind of sad.

Several years ago, I spent $25 on Clip Studio Paint. I stopped using Photoshop, because CSP felt objectively better in every possible way (related to drawing). And that $25 was a one time payment. CSP 2 is out, and I can upgrade to it for another $25 (when on sale). But I still have the first version forever.

I babysat for an Adobe employee at my church a couple times when I was a teenager. His kid spat on me. I think about that every time I think about Adobe software.

Adobe is the worst example of a monopoly. Nice to see they treat their employees so well, but I still think their products are best to be pirated, or replaced with open source alternatives

My uni taught using Adobe software and the moment I realised this I began looking for the free alternatives. I was already using Krita (art focussed alternative to Photoshop) and DaVinci Resolve (though I've since switched to the faster-for-my-system Kdenlive), but I also got Ocenaudio and Audacity to avoid whatever that audio software is. And Inkscape for vector art.

When Abobe announced their subscription model in 2012 I ordered the very last hard copy version, CS6, and have used that ever since. It's more than I needed for my business and most of the upgraded features were nothing more than gimmicks. The best investment I ever made was purchasing that upgrade. I'm now retired and very rarely use this software. The only downside is that I can't upgrade my system software past OX10.13.6 or use a new computer as they've made sure that there's built in obsolescence should you need to go this route. Luckily there's plenty of old Macs on the market should my current computers give up the ghost and I need to run my CS6 version. I'd been using Adobe products since 1989.

Using photoshop feels like you’re tricking it into doing what you want it to do

Illustrator has serious competitors. Coreldraw and open source inkscape. Doing fantastic work.

I'm a digital illustrator, I switched to Clip Studio some weeks ago and it was the best decision ever. I was paying R$90/month to get Photoshop. Also CSP is better to create things like comics

I think Adobe expected to monopolize the market, but with the subscription model and pricing, they pushed out all the novices, hobbyists and future designers who will turn to open-source software; see Gimp for a free Photoshop substitute or hell, even Paint 3D does basic layering and text just fine.

My favourite part with adobe is when I am forced to update photoshop to the next version and the only noticeable difference is that they switch the shift function with transform tool. Something that absolutely nobody asked for. I also love that they named their vector program "Illustrator", making it impossible for illustrators to find open jobs listings because 99% of the results are looking for someone who can use the software for graphic design. And not... and illustrator.

Well, it's hard to ignore the thought that much of their amazing company culture comes financed by their unethical milking of their customers, which in turn also helps them buy out the competition. Not sure I can really celebrate a company's internal culture when their external culture is hot garbage.

Not invading privacy? They use spyware to find versions of their old software and delete or disable it, so they can force you to upgrade to their subscription model! That may not be as evil as what some companies do, but it's definitely one reason I started learning Affinity!

I learned video editing in high school on Sony Vegas 13 I think it was. Then in a 1 year college program they were teaching Premier, and my god was Premier way more obtuse to use. So many things in Vegas you could do just by holding specific hotkeys then clicking and dragging while in Premier there was much more having to enter a specific numeric value to make the same change.

Recently I have been using the electric drill analogy to describe the absurdity of subscription model. Imagine you just need an electric drill for one hobby project, but you were forced to pay subscription to 'own' that drill for the month/year. That's not all, the supplier forces you to buy the entire toolkit bundle with tools that you don't even use. You were promised tool upgrades regularly but the upgrades weren't even good. Then when you want to return the drill/tool you're CHARGED for it (termination fee).

I absolutely love Affinity Publisher for my social media and physical promo design needs. It's much more useful and flexible, and it doesn't require constantly switching between Illustrator, Photoshop and inDesign to get a single thing done.

I encountered an over $400 cancellation fee for trying to switch Adobe plans. Absolutely insane. Never have I ever encountered that with any software in almost 20 years as a digital artist. Not using that software ever again. We’ll have to find alternatives now.

Honestly, there is a huge creative software opportunity for a halfway motivated developer out there. The fact that there is Olive Video Editor, Affinity, Krita, GIMP, and Inkscape makes me think the time is ripe for a suite of apps to happen in a low-cost or even open source ecosystem. Some brilliant soul or souls need to integrate GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape into one piece of smooth running software in order to kill Photoshop (which is absolutely love, but cannot afford). Tough job, but it would be a game changer. Blender is such an amazing piece of stable software - it is the proof of concept for this notion of an open source or low cost solution for independent creatives.

for adobe products, i either pirate or lie and say i'm a teacher/student. their pricing is absolutely ridiculous

My biggest annoyance with adobe is that similar functionality is implemented differently in different apps. Especially when it comes to keyboard shortcuts and the ui/ux for layers.

I was a huge Illustrator fan for many years. Then i learned Fusion360 and i realized how much cool features the program does not have (that Fusion has). I was absolutely shocked since Illustator is a decade or so older. Those functions like constraints, variables and the mirroring tool would be so useful. But as i understand, the issue is that illustrator does not work with actual formulars. A circle in Illustrator is not actually perfectly round

Bro I got a Photoshop ad on this video THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE EVER GOTTEN A PHOTOSHOP AD TOO 💀

"Looking for things like Lightroom, Illustrator, Photoshop [...] there are no alternatives." Darktable, Inkscape, Krita would all like to have a word.

There are proprietary alternatives from Affinity, who is filling the gap left by Adobe’s price increase. Then there are Open Source alternatives: GIMP or Krita (Photoshop), Scribus (InDesign), Inkscape (Illustrator). I have been using them professionally.

Illustrator and photoshop have a fair amount of competition nowadays, honestly there are tons of alternatives!

2 pain points which I have are as follows. Subscription only - when Adobe and Microsoft introduced their subscription services, they also had the option to fully buy the software and upgrades. I have heard from software developers that this is not that complicated to do since the subscription versions just have some extra code for the subscriptions but the main applications were the same. Users who prefer to own the software had that option. But not anymore. Buggy software - I returned to a job which requires use of Adobe apps. In addition to using the fully purchased versions in the past with the company, I personally own the last non-subscription version of Adobe Creative Suite. The subscription Creative Cloud is buggier than the older Creative Suite.

The biggest issue is just that the creative industry is all in on Adobe. There's just nothing else that can offer such a complete package for everything and have it all work together under 1 subscription plan. Additionally, there's a lot of plugins for design/print/video etc that are only Adobe compatible. Probably doesn't help that schools only teach Adobe either as it's industry standard. It's a catch 22 really.

Pick 2: - Great to customers - Great to employees - Making profits

Thanks for the video. It’s fascinating that they have a great company culture for employees at the same time they treat customers poorly. I use enough of their apps that I don’t mind the subscription price, but I am always thinking about switching out of some of her apps, and probably will, because 10% of my time I am dealing with crashes and bugs, they should’ve fixed. And their customer service is pathetic. They’ve almost never been able to answer my questions, and they end up wasting hours of my time. It’s not that the representatives are incompetent, it’s that the software is full of bugs that never get fixed. I do plan to switch to Davinci resolve, but switching out of illustrator in InDesign is much harder.

Just want to note that there are actually alternatives for Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign (Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher respectively). They're all nearly identical feature-wise, are faster to run, and one time purchases rather than subscriptions.

1. The monthly cost 2. The bloated software 3. The random glitches caused by that bloated software that may take months to get fixed, if ever. That last one is specifically why I quit using Photoshop and moved to Affinity Photo. My canvas screwed up and kept creating a ghost effect which made it impossible to use. I even tried moving to an older release and that didn't help. Same kind of issue happens with Wacom. That's why I'm glad XP-Pen and Huion exist now.

I think my biggest gripe with Adobe would be not only the sheer price but the fact they abuse copyright so other software developed can quite literally not compete with them because adobe has the full rights to particular functions in their programs. You don't notice these until you switch from photoshop to any other software that may be cheaper, or even free. One big example would be one of their image stretch tools which you cannot find in other programs because they have the rights to it and an individual copyright over the function.

I edit photos mostly to create LUTs to use with ReShade and I use GIMP with G'MIC QT and works wonders. I understand that its not a replacement for the professional sphere but for more hobbyist users that setup is definitly worth a try. Edit: I also sometimes use Darkroom but I'm not as good with that software yet as I'm with GIMP.

In many ways, the true question is "why does Adobe hate creators so much"

I think the one thing that could really compete with Adobe is another megacorporation like Microsoft or Google making their own suite of creative tools. Even though right now there's viable competitors to Adobe products, each product is made by separate companies and don't integrate with each other.

Need anti-trust laws to actually apply to these tech companies.

Affinity Suite is a drop-in replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom. In the sense theyre professional level and feature complete rastor and vector editors with comparable features. Add on resolve for video, and maybe supporting software's for whatever other adobe features you're missing. Depending what you're doing its definitely possible

I actually loved Adobe Audition that I used for years while a part of a radio and after that. It is an amazing software. Later I learned Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects, Acrobat etc. I forced myself out of the habit and switched to another, more fair programs. We feed the dog that bites us. This has to stop. I refuse to be the problem just because of lazyness.

Affinity suite is a perfect alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. You make a one time small payment for the whole suite. I switched a few months ago and I'm pretty happy with it. Affinity doesn't have the AI stuff but you can do almost everything else.

The only thing I dislike about adobe is their products are somewhat complicated and hard to use at first glance. They can indeed make their products much easier to use and also make one time licencing fees available again

As a graphic designer that will be graduating this year, the only good service adobe offers now is adobe fonts. I’d rather use the Affinity Suite since they actually have a good pricing plan. Its easier to run, and I like the way Affinity Publisher works better than InDesign thanks to the persona feature which allows you to complete everything in one software rather than jumping around between the three. Only downsides are that Indd and ai files are industry standards and only adobe apps can use them, Affinity designer is missing an image trace function (though Inkscape or Vectornator can pick up the slack on that end), and Publishers UI is a little clunky when compared to InDesign. Every app now supports PSD so finding a PS alternative is easy. I will defend Adobe on one front. Signing in and out on different computers is very easy with the authentication app. You just type in your email the select the number on your phone that appears on your screen. Would I prefer to have infinite sign ins like Affinity? Yes. Is signing in at a public computer easier thanks to Adobe’s app? Also yes.

A couple of years ago I ran into this exact conundrum and did make the switch to Affinity software, and for other needs I turned to things like Hitfilm, blender, inkscape, etc. I was happy with that. But then last year I had to get Adobe License because of a client who needed to receive editable files and they don't use Affinity. It's hard to completely break apart 100% from Adobe, because everybody is using it one way or another. I do wish we all aging conscience about this and make the industry turn and be more balanced.

the subscription model broke it for me. I used to teach photoshop and insisted the curriculum be changed to Affinity

Regarding adobe not being evil, adobe users should review their privacy settings. You are most likely consenting to your work being used to build their AI. Also, the subscription model is not too bad for casual users. I sometimes need to use Adobe products, maybe once every 6 months. I can sign up to the subscription which has a 14 day trial... Then do what I need to within the 14 days and cancel. Once I forgot to cancel and it charged before I realized...oops.

6:00 Lightroom: darktable or rawtherapee Illustrator: Inkscape Animate: Synfig (maybe) Photoshop: Krita or GIMP [EDIT] { After Effects: Natron (Effekseer if needing more advanced VFX) Substance Painter: Armor-paint Figma/XD: Penpot or Plasmic } Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!

I have the photography bundle at $20/month. I'm just a hobbyist photographer and decided to get it after getting a shiny new digital camera in January (switching from film). I don't use Adobe for storage, I'm an Amazon prime member and has been 14 years and they have unlimited photo storage of the full resolution raw files.

I switched to Affinity Photo recently, and Davinci Resolve a couple years ago, and both have been so much faster with less crashing than Adobe. The only thing I still need Photoshop and Premiere for is compatibility for some of the more complicated files people send me, or gif exports from Premiere. Other than that, I never open them, and I just have pirated versions now that my student license has run out.

Autodesk is another very similar company - within the animation industry specifically they make Maya, which is the industry standard animation software. However, they’ve switched to an expensive subscription model and the quality of the software has declined over the years, they’re only still in business because everybody is so used to using them already

i definitely understand the pricing for someone using it for business purposes like its something your profiting so much off of using that its price doesnt phase you but, for anyone that wants to try it or get used to using it, its such an expensive comodity and makes it difficult for people who just want to try a few things

We used CorelDraw at work ( a sign company ) as our main graphics app, and it suited us well. Cheaper than Adobe and versatile. We reached a point where we had to get Photoshop and Illustrator, just to be able to deal with the designers we worked with, because nobody wanted to work out file formats. (What was wrong with sending us a pdf ? But that's another story) We only used them to open files and transfer to Corel !! About the time I was getting ready to retire, a colleague put me onto Inkscape. From there I discovered Gimp, Krita, Blender, and many more - I do graphical and musical stuff at home now, all on open source software, and I'm loving it.

PhotoPea has been my choice for a few years now. I was so used to PhotoShop's dashboard, but just couldn't keep using new versions unless I paid a shit ton of money on new devices. But PhotoPea was a lifesaver. Never using any Adobe software ever again, and I am even going to shift away from Figma, now that Adobe has acquired it.

Affinity is making a very competitive alternative, Affinity Photo.

I stopped using adobe many years ago. I only used it when I had to for collage, but the only software I ever used from adobe was photoshop 7.0. until 2015. Afterwards, I switched to clip studio and never looked back. I thought about getting adobe again once, but overall, the negative feedback from everyday users and business employee's alike has permanently kept me away.

IM still using my adobe photoshop 7.0 from 2006. love it. meets my every need!

I use Krita, Blender, lunacy/inkscape. If I had the money I would purchase the Affinity software "Photo" and "Designer".

The worst thing adobe has done is getting rid of Flash

I remember learning how Illustrator has a memory leak regarding autosave. So their solution is to silently disable autosave on large files. That was their solution after 5+ years of the memory leak being known.

I abandoned Adobe 4 years ago after almost 2 years of dealing with problems withing Premiere Pro that I notified them about but in two years did nothing to fix. They were one of the first software companies to go all in on the subscription model and I hate the subscription model -- it offers only modest benefit but at significantly higher cost (profit for Adobe). Also, their priority for upgrading software is to add new features they can market but fixing longstanding bugs is very low on their priority list. Also low on their priority list is expanding GPU implementation to speed up effects -- some of the most common tools get implemented, but they less frequently used but still fairly frequently used tools are dog slow. Lastly, they've outsourced much of the programming and pretty much all of the support.

I used a lifetime license to CS5. Suddenly the authentication for that software went offline. Right about when the subscriptions came out. I found... a way to keep using the software I own.

The termination fee has been around for many years. It’s definitely not new. I think it’s been 6 or 7 years ago they pulled this with me. I had to cancel my debit card to keep them from continuing to charge me or taking this crazy huge termination fee. It’s great they treat employees so well, and I applaud them for that. But why don’t they treat customers with the same respect?

I'm a digital artist and I needed softwares for digital drawing and maybe 3d modeling and video editing. My boss (this was before I went independent) forced me to use Adobe software only. Initially she wanted me to use Illustrator, but that was a heap of garbage that didn't have the functions I needed. I was then put on Photoshop and it was very intuitive, even with the fact that its functions were similar to my preferred software (krita, which is completely free) it felt clunky, awkward and confusing to use. Input lag was a constant and sometimes it would not let me save or just straight up crash. I only had those issues with my preferred software when I was working on my personal old and cheap laptop. Once I switched to my current one (an HP pavilion with touch screen), those problems were gone. Only recently did I have the issues because of how big I make the files and how much stuff was stored on there. But once I put a bunch of stuff on an external hard drive, that was fixed. At my old job, we had high end expensive PC's and gaming laptops with all sorts of high quality stuff. Photoshop ran just as badly on those as my preferred software did on my old crappy laptop. For a little while they also wanted me to learn animation. So they gave me adobe animate and told me to make my art move. I could never do more than make simple bounce, sway or walk animations and the software crashed 50% of the time. One time I tried to make an animated Christmas card and apparently added too many snowflakes, because it crashed, refused to boot up the file and even corrupted the file so it became literal dead weight. Wouldn't even start up older versions of the file. For obvious reasons I skipped out on trying video editing software from adobe and asked if I could pretty please just go back to drawing cute art or painting our 3D printed products. I was fortunately given permission for that. If I had to work with the video editing software or even more animation stuff, I would've quit a year sooner. Now I work as an independent artist and streamer, where I do two krita art streams and two Minecraft streams per week. And I am able to create what I want, when I want in software I actually like. Krita may be pixel based, but it's free and I can get loads of custom brushes for cheap or even free. Companies, please just let your artists work with their preferred software. You're idiots by forcing the dude that makes digital fashion sketches to use Photoshop when they're much better at working with free art software that's also pixel based. You're paying for stuff unnecessarily, you're stifling the creativity of your artist and you're getting lower quality work overall. We know you're not properly paying them for their work, the least you can do is let them work with the software they can get the best results from. And artists: know your worth. Know that you can produce the best quality when you work with the software you understand best and feel most comfortable with. "but adobe is the industry standard" is a shit excuse and you don't have to take it. Adobe is not the BEST software provider, its the one that tries to monopolize. There's still plenty of good art softwares around. 3D modeling? Blender is a clear favorite, but there's also less technical ones that might suit your needs better. Same with video editing. Pixel based art softwares like krita or even Microsoft Paint (which apparently has layers now) are free and good quality. There's also clip studio paint if you want to have the options for vector and pixel art in one software, though the free version lacks basic features like saving your artwork. The same company also had a studio software where you can import 3D models and rig them to use for reference pictures, though it feels clunky to me. If you work on tablets, there's also softwares like ibis paint x (which I used a lot in my early career and it's pretty beginner friendly) and flipbook apps. There's obviously a lot more than just those softwares, but these are the ones I'm familiar with. And adobe being the industry standard isn't even accurate. For independent artists, the industry standard seemed to be stuff like clip studio paint for a while. And a lot of UKpostsrs have shown great disdain for adobe animation or video editing software, going instead for different brands. I recently heard that Markiplier (who's pretty big in especially the FNAF community) apparently uses DaVinci resolve for his videos (or his editors do). For screen recording or streaming, obs is literally the industry standard and its completely free. And if they released a video editing software that you have to pay for, I'd put down the money for it in a heartbeat. Adobe is only the "industry standard" because they're the biggest and hella shady. Not because they're the best. If a better quality software comes around that does the same functions as an adobe software, the independent people would absolutely switch to that with companies following soon after. The reason not more companies switch to blender for video editing is because people know it as a 3D modeling software and its way less known than adobe software in general. If you're a 2D artist, you likely don't know about blender or krita. But you do know Photoshop and illustrate because those are the big names for what you need. It's like Vocaloid. Miku isn't the industry standard. She's the most well known. There's plenty of others in that industry and some are better suited for the job than Miku. TLDR: Adobe is biggest, but shitty quality. Various industries have non-adobe software as industry standard (that adobe does have software for). Let your artists work with their preferred software. Look online for non-adobe software for what you need and what the reviews for it are. Chances are you have better quality.

I was annoyed by Adobe "Australia Tax" for which even for accounting for exchange rate charges and administration, loaded an extra 30%. All I do is use pdf management software and there are plenty of alternatives. The problem with companies like Adobe is that they set the benchmark for what is acceptable.

6:00 Affinity doing very good job developing excellent alternatives for those

Theres a typo in the description It says "had" instead of "hate" In the hate with passion part

yeah right. after 5 years working back in NZ i asked for a week off in the middle of the year, winter, and was flat out denied.

im at university rn and we have anual adobe subscriptions, and i use it just because of that. Plenty of profesionals come make a speech to us about their work and plenty of times they say they are shifting out of adobe because is just not creative, not spontaneous and way too complex. i think there are options, i mostly do my work in vectornator (because i work on my iPad) and procreate

One time I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how to flatten a pdf file with Acrobat while another program called PDF-Xchange simply has a fat "Flatten PDF" button on the ribbon. 90% of the people at my company flatten PDFs by "print as PDF" and it's sad af.

As someone who uses Adobe Premiere Rush, the only problems I’ve really run into are that it glitches every now and then, but even then most of the glitches that I run into aren’t too bad

I can tell you that. About 20 years ago Adobe once more did what it always did: It bought a (more advanced) competitor and buried its products. Well, except for Flash. But mainly Illustrators better rival "FreeHand". I founded FreeFreehand that time and with over 6000 members (designers) all over the world, we tried to force Adobe to continue FreeHand. No luck. It got buried. 1. Adobe is such a dominant player in the graphics sector, that it dictates the terms to its customers and even the whole market. 2. That leads to their products not being very good regarding usability and GUI (Illustrator, Acrobat, Premiere, really terrible), but also users not really have an alternative 3. Its rental model of software use lets us users being forced to continue to rent it, or else we can not access our own work / files anymore. Like you point out. As we do not own the software, we have no control to install it when and where we want. Even before the rent model, Adobe made it so difficult to handle software installations with register numbers and checking in at Adobes servers. Luckily, I am working as a graphics designer and photographer ADOBE FREE since 2018, thanks to Affinity who replaces photoshop illustrator and indesign.

There are actually alternatives for applications like Adobe Illustrator, notably Inkscape. I can't express how amazing of an application it is. Not only is it free, but it's also open-source and has a friendly community of people who provide and explain each and every tool that you could possibly list. It receives frequent updates with major improvements each time. As someone who started with Inkscape in 2019 and has over 600 projects under my belt, I can comfortably say it's simple to use and doesn't require high-end specs, so it can be used on low-end laptops for simple work. This is a personal opinion, but the BEST part of Inkscape is just how fast you feel when you use it. If you want to edit a PDF document, just drag it in, and boom, you can edit, change text, and everything.

I completely ditched Adobe as soon as Photoshop was no longer lincensable. I refuse to pay a huge annual or monthly fee for something like this. Both of the art programs I use I paid for once and never have to worry about it again.

photoshop is so expensive I can't believe they thought it was a good idea of charging users $1000+ per year to use it.

Affinity Designer thankfully has been my alternative to Illustrator. And It's amazing!

Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher. I have had this software for several years, a few months ago I purchased an update to version 2. I am satisfied, despite a few shortcomings.

There is one service I can think of, Amazon Prime. In india, they increased price, and for the price, they decreased the services. Sure, Prime video and Prime music are there, but the basic 2 day delivery option was pulled back, and some deliveries are still chargeable. My financial services and daily life are so tied with Amazon that there is not enough incentive for me to move out of it.

You know, I was listening to this in the background thinking I wasn't really dependent on any specific software despite ethics. Even though much of the software I use is free, including image and video editing software; I realized that there was a controversy over audacity a little while ago. They recently had a license change that people didn't like, but because I still loved that program (used it even in my pre-teen years), it's still been stuck with me to this day. I could make the blanket excuse of "there's no other software that does what audacity does", but the thing I'm noticing is that I'm just not using energy really to go fight that statement, and thus I just sortof live with it still. I still love audacity, I don't use it often, but when I do it gets the job done, so it still lives on my machine despite recent controversies

Corel corporation is probably the closest to having alternatives to most things Adobe under one roof. They also still offer once off purchases (with upgrade pricing) alongside their subscriptions. Unfortunately, the quality seems inconsistent outside their main suites and interoperability isn't fantastic either. At least they are holding on to their production niche, but they need to grow back beyond that to claim back their relevance in the broader creative industry.

I remember having to use one of the Adobe programs for some college class (students were given access to it for free, thankfully). Even for free, I hated it. It just didn't sync properly between group members and after closing, it still left behind a Hydra of Adobe processes that I had to kill in a certain order in the task manager. Needless to say, I purged my laptop of all Adobe software after finishing that class (except Flash Player, as I use that for Flashpoint).

Apple and adobe go hand and hand with the price gouging.

Omg yes I hate the 2 device limit, it's so stupid that there's even a limit when they milk so much from consumers...

Great video But I'd recommend cutting down the music after the intro

What's wild to me, is these would be the perfect conditions for a competitor to swoop in. The closest one to Photoshop was ClipStudio but they're unfortunately taking a page from Adobe in recent years.

I ditched Adobe about 5 years ago. The main apps I used were Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. I've moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and it does most of what I need, but does lack some features. The one thing I really miss is the ability to work with CMYK images, and I haven't found an open source solution that can handle them. I imagine for many people working with print, that would be a deal breaker. For InDesign I've moved to Scribus. Again it's a little less capable, but I do feel InDesign tries to do too much, and I can generally get what I need done, but sometimes I need to produce elements in another app and import. The app I'm happiest with is my replacement for Illustrator, which is Inkscape. It took some getting used to, but now I like it more than I ever liked Illustrator. I find it suits the sort of vector art I do best. This could be because I do a lot more vector work than I used to, and I fully accept that just because it suits my vector work, doesn't mean it will suit everyone.

Literally got Adobe After effects so i could teach myself how to animate my drawings. After trying to learn how to use the app as best i could i figured out that Adobe animation would be a better option for the type of animation i wanted to incorporate into my drawings. I had looked into the Spine software (which does the exact animation i wanted) but right now its $329 - and its on sale believe it or not lol, but i don't have that kind of money to spend on one app that i don't know how to use. So i decided to just go with Adobe animation and try to cancel my After Effects subscription. As soon as i tried however, i was told that i needed to pay £120 something for a cancelation fee on a program i've only been using sporadically for 3 weeks. Even though they advertise that you have a month free trial you STILL have to cancel within 14 days- if not, you'll have to pay a cancellation fee or suck it up and continue paying for another year. If you're a small artist, photographer, animator, whatever else, Adobe is definitely not friendly towards you.

recommended this video while i wait for photoshop to uninstall because it can't open any files due to a generic "program error" with a help doc link from adobe being absolutely useless when you're on a locked work computer :)

The main programs I use are Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Audition, and Illustrator almost everything else is bloatware for me. The issue of why I don't feel like I can get rid of Adobe comes down to the next reasons. 1. I do not know which programs could replace all of those (especially after effects) 2. The learning curve of using a new software, some like DaVinci can imitate Premiere controls, but other than that it uses very different interface methods that would need at least months to master. 3. The workflow compatibility cannot be achieved easily with independent programs. Being able to go back to the source file and edit it in its intended program and throw it back into the project you are working on is very easy. And to this date, no other set of programs can do this it seems. You have to render out, import check, make changes and repeat.