It is always morally correct to pirate Adobe.
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.
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.
Affinity just got bought by Canava. 1 time purchase license for now. But we will have to see !!!
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.
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.
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.
Just so yall know, Firefox added a pdf editor.
Firefox just added PDF editing to the native browser!
To all the windows users out there, just use Okular its free and available in the Microsoft Store. its a KDE application and still better than Adobe imo.
PDF is not a format designed for editing. It’s an export format designed to be a middle ground between a word processor and a printer.
You can bastardise extra layers onto it, but that’s about it.
But sometimes you need to edit it. Checking boxes. Signing things. Changing numbers so you can lie about things.
I mean, you can pretty much completely edit a pdf with Acrobat. Delete elements, move them around, edit text. It may not be designed for it, but it’s very much possible.
I gotta admit I’ve done it a few times because I was to lazy to recreate old, lost templates, so instead I just copied the pdf and edited it with new text and data.
