The Avoid Adobe Products Game

As a freelance designer I've had some steep slopes to climb paying for things I want. I don't mind paying of course, I just don't want to go over my normal budget for things. Adobe's recent move with their products has got my attention, and I love the creative cloud... but there comes a time when I just feel like letting go of it. In any case, as much as I enjoy Adobe products, I always had this idea to "avoid it" as well. There's a growing number of functioning apps that work just like Adobe products do. While there are missing functionalities, there's nothing too awful about them and in some ways slightly better and more streamlined. So began the Avoid Adobe Products game to keep my motivations high.

Avoid Adobe Products the game has three rules:

1. Avoid adobe products. (Note I'm using the word "avoid" rather than "don't" since some clients do utilize Adobe software and certain file types can't be exported from alternatives.) -10 points for opening an Adobe product.

2. No illegal conducts - This rule is obvious. -1000 points for any illegal act including usage, installation, and otherwise.

3. +1 point for every time I use an alternative product. Bonus +10 for establishing a workflow between products.

Based on those rules, I earned 20 points within the week I've been playing this. The difficulty of this game is very prevalent when you get requested for certain file types. I ended up opening Flash several times this week and also Photoshop. Damn it.

The alternative products I use are:
Pixelmator - Photoshop alternative
iDraw, OmniGraffle, - Illustrator alternative (I don't do vector as much)
Motion 5, PixelConduit- After Effects alternatives
Logic Pro - Audition alternative
Sketchbook Pro, ArtRage, Studio Artist - Covers Photoshop's painting functionalities.
Bonus: Blender - Autodesk Maya

Of course that anyone is totally free to use whatever software they want and prefer, and the one that you like most and is better for you.

Curious Adobe avoid game you have done

As far as I know MOST of the alternative software list is exclusive to the MacOS so it is not possible for windows users to play the same game as you suggest.

Only ArtRage, Studio Artist, Blender and Autodesk Maya are available for Windows.

I would surely like to try other possible alternatives to Adobe software BUT this must be windows compatible.

When I buy software, I do like to own it. CC doesn't allow me that, so I've been playing a watered down version the Avoid Adobe game for some time.

Basically, mine is "CS 5 suits me, so I'm sticking with that".

I have moved from Premiere to FCPX. The others (Illustrator, Photoshop) I continue to use and I can't see needing anything that CS5 doesn't provide.

The one app I simply can't move away from, though, is Lightroom. I'm very relieved to hear that LR5 will be available as a non-CC license.

Flash is installed but pretty much permanently disabled (fast stable browser FTW)

But that underlines why I loathe the CC strategy. Updating for $600-$700 every three years on alternating CS releases was a good balance of keeping up to date and a cost that suited how much I used it.

$600/year is outrageous and simply doesn't represent anything even approaching good value to anyone except those who use a good chunk of the whole suite as core tools of their business. (and the whole "but it's only $20/month, not $50" argument is crap. I've been using Adobe products since PS2 / Freehand. This is a long term thing. Anyone making decisions or arguments based on "introductory" pricing needs to give their heads a shake.)

I'll upgrade to LR5 the day it's available.

Presuming, though, that that will be the last non-CC version of LR, it will also be the last money Adobe gets from me. As others have pointed out, there are now great alternatives to almost all the components of what was the Creative Suite.

I hope that someone comes up with an alternative for LR soon (and no, Aperture is not it, and I don't foresee Apple doing for it what they did with FCP).

/rant off

Bonus points, yeah man!

Too expensive annually for me too. True!

Regarding ownership and right of resale, you know about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sa...tal_copies ?
"
the European Court of Justice ruled on July 3, 2012, that it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly fr om the Internet, and that the first-sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlim ited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners.
"
Thats why they are going all cloud to prevent resale no? I'm worried they'll also get users sources and methods too though.

Yes, FCP X is $300. Motion is another $50 and Compressor another $50.

Absolutely incredible value. $400 for the entire thing.

Yes, Apple got an incredible amount of flak but I do know a few very vocal critics who have (quietly) migrated their work to FCP X.

Apple has put out a number of "third dot" revisions which have filled in the holes. Bottom line in my opinion is that they simply released too early. It's now a very solid player in that field.

I had a conversation last night and what came out of it is what I feel is a very good distillation of the complaints about Adobe's CC strategy.

First, it's absolutely amazing how many people had an "Every Second Version" policy for major releases, extending even well before CS.

Why? Well, for most people, the new capabilities in any given release simply were not worth the money being demanded. Once the subsequent release came out, the combination, though, represented enough value to pony up the cash for them.

But that's the reason that I believe is behind everyone's unease with CC.

CC licenses explicitly demand that every user update to every version with no option to decide whether Adobe is presenting a good cost/value proposition.

There's no feedback loop to Adobe to say "you need to do more work to earn my money".

And they have a decades long history of failing that exact specific test.

I keep losing points opening After Effects just to enjoy a couple plugins I purchased. I also lose points to export illustrator files for client work and otherwise. Overall I come down to -30 or so points if I were to keep a strict record.

Angelize.... You're going to make me jealous.

I just feel like my job doesn't easily permit complete transitions.

Just out of curiosity, Targos what would you use just as alternatives?

[More personal rambling]
I honestly don't really care if Adobe's doing this or not. If I make room for it, I can deal with it. I just hate seeing money monthly being taken away every month. It sucks. I prefer to have a 1 time pay and be happy with it. Either way, I'm playing this game just as a demonstration to myself and others... that there are a ton of options available and being flexible can help in situations where the software becomes unavailable for whatever reason.

I've basically come to a conclusion that since the principles of design don't change it's more like just being adaptable and flexible with in-coming situations like this.

I'd like to think I have a pretty relaxed, humble opinion about it as much as anybody has their thoughts regarding the software and how you pay for it.

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Have you tried Gimp-2.8.4 yet

It doesn't work well with .8BF plugins does it? Gimp seems to be a poor alternative to Photoshop in terms of working with plugins.


I personally can recommend Serif Photoplus: it just has all the image editing functions I need.

Maybe as you all disagree and are against Adobe decision to make subscription ONLY software then you can now be heard and noticed by signing this petition on the web change.org

Petition to eliminate the mandatory "creative cloud" subscription model

Until now there is already 12.901 signed to be able to request to eliminate the mandatory "creative cloud" subscription model.

I agree that is wrong and bad to force everybody to subsribe to a monthly payment and do not leave open the option to BUY the software and own it

Although according to Adobe press release

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Creative Cloud’s advanced capabilities are making it a hit with the worldwide creative community: more than a half million paid members, and well over 2 million free members have signed up for Creative Cloud since it was launched in April 2012

So if there is many people already subscribed to the adobe cloud and it seems that is a possible success, I do not know if a few thousands could change something, but you never know.

I think that it will be more important in 3 or 4 months after when they now the impact of this news and how the earnings are and what happens by then, or even better wait for next year, and see if Adobe has lost many customers and so they can decide to return to the packaged creative suite or not.

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Casual Pixels When I buy software, I do like to own it.

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Skybase I just hate seeing money monthly being taken away every month. It sucks. I prefer to have a 1 time pay and be happy with it.

I totally agree with you, and I think in the same way, and I am also against it, and would like to be able to do it, BUT regretably there is also one big problem, at least for me, and is that I CAN´T pay the full price in 1 time (and I can´t have a credit from the bank) so paying around 1400$ for the software in one time is not possible, (or 600$ for the upgrade) BUT I can pay 30€ per month and get a $4000 worth products (and seems to be more in June), although of course that I will NOT use all the Adobe products right now, just Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Acrobat Pro and maybe After Effects and some other.

I also would like to OWN the product and do not have to pay for it every month and do not get nothing to own in the end, but this is in some way, like that you can´t afford to buy an apartment and then you rent it and use it.

I totally agree that all of you may be against Adobe for forcing you to subscribe as the ONLY way to get their software and I think is a bad thing, and should be possible to decide if you want to rent or buy the software.


But I have signed for the Adobe Clous thanks to the Cybermonday Adobe offer of 50% discount in a yearly contract, and so it was good to join this way. Maybe this year when the contract ends in November, could be another cybermonday discount offer.

Also there are many more reasons to be against subscription ONLY and with no option to buy it.

With Gimp-2.8 you are now able to dock anything pretty much anywhere, and as i stated it has an optional one click single window mode.Here is a screenshot of mine.

I am able to run many 8BF's through Gimp/PSPI though.
AlienSkin
Diard
Redfield
Richard Roseman
Mehdi
Growcut
Name Suppressed
FilterMeister

And many more.

Oh sweet this thread again.

I've been using Affinity Designer for a while over Adobe Illustrator, seems easier.

Affinity also came up with Affinity Photo which kinda has some functionality of Photoshop, not all but it's more focused.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

I mean in the end clients may as for Illustrator file formats in which case I can't use any of the tools mentioned because .ai format is apparently Adobe's proprietary format. It pisses me off finding that the one format cannot be used simply because Adobe doesn't allow others to export. It's rational of course to do that as a company, it's just irritating how people ask for proprietary formats.

You can do a lot in Illustrator of course, so can't complain about that. It's really not just a vector tool but hosts pretty interesting utilities both vector and raster. So I mean it's reasonable to ask for .ai files in the case you use those.

Oh well.

.svg everybody. Learn to use .svg.

Adobe charges around $650 (apprx.) for their "Illustrator" software. Xara charges $299 (apprx.).

Doesn't sound right in regards to Adobe's pricing: Adobe charges $19.99 annual subscription with commitment, paid monthly for a single program. It comes to around $239.88 for the full of year of using Illustrator alone. There's another monthly option which will cost $10 more.

Adobe got rid of paid licenses a couple years ago and since it's basically been only subscription. The subscription includes every update / upgrade so it's really not a bad deal considering the fact Adobe continuously adds new features while fixing bugs here and there (that I rarely encounter personally). At work I do end up using tools anyway. It's just more like I feel like I owe them money all the time lol.

I guess Xara looks like another chill alternative to Illustrator. The UI could do some redesign... (personal preference lol).

Although just a note in regards to what I use lately, I'm currently using Affinity Designer. It's probably THE SMOOTHEST alternative to Illustrator I've ever used, next to iDraw. And it's also ridiculously feature rich for the $39.99 price tag. No subs of course. Such a + for the community really.

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Plus, none of my clients ever ask for a particular format.

That's fortunate. I work in a pipeline so I always need to consider what they want as well. Although I'm not really a designer per say, I just work on motion graphics and do weird artsy things all the time. I'm a general R&D person so it's not as bad as I say probably. I just don't like using proprietary formats because I have to deal with specific software.