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 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.
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.
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.
Avast, yee scallywags!
FYI, every version of macOS for over two decades has PDF creating/editing/signing built into the Preview app for free.
If you don’t use Macs, you should at least be friends with someone who does.
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.
Wish Reaper was intuitive like Garageband. I need to take like a weekend crash course to understand the basics.
Money aside, Adobe tools for PDF have gotten worse. Ten years ago Adobe was much easier and robust.
All my opinion, of course.
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.
Shrinkshittififlation is the new bullshit norm.
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.
