Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite? 695
jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."
Let's all suggest the Gimp... (Score:0, Insightful)
The one that doesn't support more than 8 bits per channel.
The one that doesn't support anything other than RGB, indexed, and grayscale modes for images.
The one that doesn't have adjustment layers.
Yeah!
I understand your willingness to help, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, let's be honest (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing out there that can compete in ease of use, or power. Someone mentioned superior tools to web design (notepad, for example) and I can agree there. But for the rest of the products mentioned (among them, photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.) there's nothing else that can hold a candle up to Adobe.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to learn webdesign you should learn to design webpages, not learn how to use a program.
Re:no alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Get flamed for bashing gimp on
Gimp is an alternative for photoshop in much the same way Openoffice is an alternative to MSoffice or linux is an alternative to OS X.
It depends on the job at hand. Sometimes the OSS tool is better for the job, at other times the proprietary tool is better for the job.
Re:no alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I could compare GIMP to Photoshop (Score:5, Insightful)
A reliable, economical, easy to drive car compared to something that's beautiful, but too powerful & expensive to buy & maintain for 99.99% of users?
Is that really the sort of analogy you wanted to make?
Re:I could compare GIMP to Photoshop (Score:1, Insightful)
Or: Is the Ferrari stolen?
Or: How about open hand slapping anyone that feels we need an analogy based on vehicles when it has nothing to do with proprietary software vs. open source software?
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:5, Insightful)
To make things easier- (Score:5, Insightful)
2.) Someone comments on the sheer mediocrity of aforementioned $ALTERNATIVE.
3.)
a. Someone brings up $ALTERNATIVE good points
-or-
b. Someone disses $LEADING_PRODUCT's management, pricing system, ethics, etc.
4.) Someone mentions that aforementioned is irrelevant to the quality of the $LEADING_PRODUCT, then complains more about $ALTERNATIVE
5.) Someone runs out of retorts, says "Go code it for yourself."
6.) Someone comments on how they had sessions of lengthy, drawn-out fornication with your mother; alternatively, your sexual preference.
CYMK TIFF is a backwards tradition that must die (Score:1, Insightful)
The proper conversion from device-independent RGB (sRGB unless you like pain) to printer ink is done by the printer driver or press house. It takes into account numerous ugly details of the printing process (exact ink color, dot gain, paper color, drying time, soggy paper concerns, worse...) and several economic/quality tradeoffs.
TIFF is a way to waste disk space. It's used by people who think "300 dpi" (used in place of pixel dimensions) is meaningful for a digital image, and by people who think that abusing CMYK makes you a Real Professional.
BTW, if you press house is so stonage that they prefer some random uncalibrated CMYK over a proper device-independent color space, go elsewhere! You'll get random quality variation from people who are that clueless.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me be the dick, please. (Score:1, Insightful)
My suggestion: Fire one or more of the marketers, hire a real graphic artist, buy the CS, and save yourself a nightmare of trying to explain to your best and brightest why they should use shortcuts even though all the choices are up at the top. You're going to get better, faster, nicer work that's compatible with every printer/host/etc, and the marketers can continue to come up with catchy slogans targeting bitter mid-30s graphic designers. I could go on about how marketers are a big toilet into which you throw money -as any decent graphic artist could come up with better ideas, but I think I just did. I've made my tiny company hundreds of thousands. Just me, CS, a sense of aesthetics that didn't start with a two year degree in douchebaggery.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should someone learn to program HTML just to make a webpage? With a WYSIWYG editor, it's unnecessary. Sure, those editors don't make the most beautiful code, but it's HTML for God's sake!
I think that statement's equivalent to saying someone shouldn't make documents unless they learn LaTeX, or should only use a computer if they know the command line - but then there are probably people who believe that too.
I think that some people have an overinflated sense of their own importance... but good for you if you know HTML.
They don't need the whole suite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
You've said it yourself, use older versions. Your marketing colleagues don't need the most recent versions. On ebay, you could probably pick up a few training videos and training manuals real cheap too, since the training stuff for old software loses its value as quickly -- if not quicker -- than the software it supports.
If the cost is still prohibitive, you could probably buy an old PC (or an old Mac), and have your coworkers share the station whenever they need to use the software. That's the thing with this kind of software, since it's not their primary job to do graphic design -- they may not all need to use the same graphic design software at the same time.
I realize you may just be looking for a place to complain, and perhaps my unsympathetic suggestions were not what you were looking for, but really -- look around some other businesses -- many businesses are still using Windows 98 -- and they're doing fine.
Re:I could compare GIMP to Photoshop (Score:5, Insightful)
The BMW drives in style and fast, gets full service for free (4 years of 50,000 miles), has touch-screen interfaces and 8-point surround audio that plays all the formats, and gets you where you need to go quickly and elegantly. Did I mention it's a brand new model, just out this year?
The Model T drives you places, but it takes 3 times longer and sometimes you have to go to the back and crank the handle, or even open the hood to fix that loose sprocket yourself. Plus the stereo is just a boombox and it's pretty hard to control and skips when you run over bumps. But hey, it goes. Practically the same!
Though there is still the question, would you take a free Model T over a BMW at full price?
Re:no alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
Mabye they are the best, I wouldn't know, I don't use them, but "you get what you pay for" and "they're standard for a reason" are surely no good arguments for that. I think we all know that there are many counterexamples.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:4, Insightful)
Gah, I can go on and on about the crap that frontpage and dreamweaver spit out as an excuse for HTML, and don't even get me started on XHTML. Designers who use those tools can do great creative things with it and it looks great on one or two browsers that are configured they way most browsers are configured. Unfortunately in my line of work I have usually take what the designer has done and completely rewrite it. If designers were actually forced to write in HTML or at least look at the HTML output of the programs they used, then I wouldn't have to do that nearly as much.
Re:no alternative (Score:2, Insightful)
If I had the spare cash I'd still buy Photoshop but it's nice knowing that Gimp will do the job. And it'll presumably only get better from here.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP.
GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.
The closest I've seen to Photoshop is Pavel's Pixel [kanzelsberger.com] editor. It works on any OS you can imagine, from DOS to OS/2, Windows, MacOSX, Linux etc. It's very cheap and it's basically a clone software of Photoshop in many regards.
Other than this, there's Corel's Paintshop and Painter, but Painter is more oriented towards natural media art, not synthetic design or editing photos. Yes, neither of them are free, either. That's because people who have a clue designed them, and people who have a clue in the design industry don't work for free.
You could skimp on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, but you won't last long without Photoshop, even if when someone sends you PSD next time and you realize that when GIMP advertised "importing PSD" they actually meant more like importing Photoshop 4 level PSD and losing everything else in the design, thus wrecking it in the process.
Comparing Photoshop-GIMP to MS_Office-OpenOffice is extremely unfair. GIMP is really a toy, it has few interesting plugins and crude tools, while OpenOffice is actually quite usable, even if it lacks some features, it definitely has the basics right, and working.
I have both OpenOffice and GIMP installed here, next to MS Office and Photoshop. I use GIMP only to run the texture resynthesis plugin when I need a tileable texture.
Re:no alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
But I actually said:You see, Linux is not an equal to OS X and OS X is not an equal to Linux. They're completely different beasts. There are some uses where OS X will absolutely not cut the mustard. There are some uses where Linux won't be adequate. Everyone but clueless partisans can see that.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:3, Insightful)
Design and implementation are two different things.
Let a graphic artists/designer/whatever *design* the pages, but get a real web engineer to actually implement them. Do you think the editors of
HELL NO
Any company worth its salt and with a web presence that matters to them will have some kind of artistic person draw a pretty picture and then LEAVE IT ALONE. From there a web engineer / code monkey / webmaster will actually implement the page as given to them, taking into account all the stuff that one has to account for on the web. Probably more than half the time if they are given HTML they will rewrite it.
Design tools give absolutely, utterly horrendous HTML as their output. Nearly any simple page you can imagine will end up as a bloated chunk of HTML with tons of cruft. Just getting a webmonkey to rewrite your HTML from one of those things could save you half of your bandwidth costs! Nested tables-within-tables are insane to manage, even when they're properly designed and not randomly slapped anywhere you need an extra 16px. Forget about CSS, XHTML or JavaScript/PHP/other dynamic content in a design tool, they're useless bastard-children at best, and are usually just ignored wholesale.
If you want to be respected as a web developer, you won't use WYSIWYG. You'll find yourself a decent syntax-hilighting text editor that handles Unix + MSDOS linebreaks and will work with UTF-8 content. Anything beyond that is gravy, but only to a point; if you have some magic one-click-homepage button in your editor, you probably have something that's trying too hard and will hold you back more than it will help.
Personally, I used notepad for a long, long time. At one point I switched to Dreamweaver because it did syntax hilighting, but it was just way too much to deal with and it kept trying to "fix" things that I knew weren't broken or which were "broken" in a particular and useful way. Nowadays I use either vim or emacs with a decent set of syntax rules - they do everything I need, and I can write scripts to interface with them if there's something extra I want to do.
In our office a few people have raved about TextMate, but apparently it's a Mac-only application. AFAIK it does the same thing - plain text editing with syntax coloring, and a couple of plugin-type scripts that make life just a little easier.
Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:no alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more complicated than that - the submitter wants particular high-end features (like CMYK for professional print output).
In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:
- transport several people / several tons of kit
- rapidly (>100mph)
- to / from endpoints without infrastructure (ie. no roads / runways etc.)
- over inhospitable terrain
Good luck searching. Most people just accept that they need a helicopter to do this job, and therefore you have to pay what a helicopter costs (or a V22 if you're feeling lucky / suicidal - IMO).
Teen Talk Barbie says "Photoshop is hard!" (Score:5, Insightful)
And I notice that some people say that GIMP is nicer for programmers and people with that mentality. Which is fine, but Photoshop wasn't created with primarily that market in mind.
Adobe released Photoshop Elements for that market. You may think I'm demeaning you by suggesting the lite "consumer" or "beginner" version- but you were the one you expected it to be easy, and criticised it for failing in that respect. The full Photoshop is designed to be powerful, not easy. Elements is still quite powerful for something easy to use.
Actually, I'd suggest that Photo Deluxe (Elements' predecessor) was even easier to use- but that was very cut down and wizard-based, and has been discontinued.
You can only go so far in making something easy to use without losing flexibility.
I don't know Photoshop well enough to claim that everything "hard" in the interface can be explained as an intentional move by its developers to choose power and flexibility over immediate ease-of-use and intuitiveness (as opposed to bad interface design). But I do know that it's generally accepted that Photoshop is *not* aimed at the casual user.
Re:Or just use PDF... it has links (Score:2, Insightful)
your CS can dynamically make pdf from any source. If you have a targeted audience of specific content, then use pdf. Html shouldnt
be enhanced beyond design to achieve something else.
You're joking, right? You say you shouldn't enhance HTML to do something it's not designed to do, and what are you advocating, Building websites with PDF? PDF files are huge compared to HTML. It is slow, and the available browser plugins are extremely bloated. Your browser has to load a plugin to display PDF files, but it displays HTML natively. PDF is designed and well suited for cross platform print documents, but not in anyway suited for making websites with. Trying to design a website with PDF is the very definition of "enhancing" a file format to do something it wasn't designed to do.
HTML was designed from the ground up for displaying web pages and web sites. It's been extended so much and in so many different ways that it is rather Frankenstinian in appearance, but it still works amazingly well and I have yet to see a file format that can replace it effectively, ceartainly not PDF.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:just pirate it (Score:3, Insightful)
Now your company CAN afford to buy the Adobe Creative Suite (after all, it's ideally an investment that will make money). After the individuals pirate the software for home use, another marketing department has people with experience in Adobe software, and Adobe gains a paying customer (without losing any, as your co-workers aren't going to buy it anyway).
Or so the "model" goes.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Proving once again, you can be modded "insightful" or "informative" for talking out your ass on slashdot if enough moderators don't bother to actually read the threads.
Re:just pirate it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:just pirate it (Score:5, Insightful)
Education may just be where pirated software is most appropriate. If most corporations are paying full freight for applications, and an employee skilled on an application is the best salesman for that product, software vendors shoot themselves in the foot for NOT providing their products free to students. Maybe a hidden watermark that says "academic" would prevent them from using it once they land that good job.
It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?
Re:no alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
OOo is not a horrible replacement for MS Office. I could, with a straight face, recommend that the average user use OOo rather than fork out $400 for Office 2007 Standard. Especially if that person is not an Excel junkie. I use OOo at home and MS Office at work, and not only am I am perfectly happy with both, I can honestly say that for my purposes, OOo is a drop-in replacement for MS Office.
If you leave that one out, then I agree with your statement, even if it's a little funny. GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop because GIMP has a lousy interface and lacks functionality. Indeed, anything that the GIMP can do, Photoshop can do better and faster, and Photoshop can do way more than the GIMP.
Regarding "Linux is not a replacement for OS X", that is true, but for different reasons. There are some applications where I would prefer Linux to OS X and other applications where I would prefer OS X to Linux. They are both operating systems, but they are extremely different. If I had to say that one was "better than the other", that title would have to go to OS X and that's coming from a Linux user. However, there are definitely applications where I would prefer to use Linux. Oh, and Linux is free, of course.
That was rambly. Summary: OOo is a great replacement for MS Office. Linux does everything I need to do and, even though OS X is better, I'm not paying for it. Photoshop and the GIMP are not in the same league. Photoshop is truly great software and, even given the existence of the GIMP, Photoshop is definitely worth every penny it costs, and it costs a lot of pennies.
Re:just pirate it (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm all for academic licenses for the reasons you mention--such as being able to learn the software before one has a corporate affiliation. But if the company is sending it out free to students, this is far from pirated. Pirated means downloaded illegally, cracked, stolen, etc. It wouldn't be appropriate for a school's tech person, for example, to install 35 copies of CS3 in the high school computer lab just so the kids can learn.
Something that /. always misses on this topic (Score:5, Insightful)
Designers don't give a damn about open source, free software, EULAs, software patents, etc.
Designers care about getting a tool that allows them to complete their workflow in the highest quality, in the shortest amount of time. If the tool they are given has some fucked up interface where they can't find anything, that prevents them from getting their work done, and they get pissed off. They see no benefit to using GIMP over Photoshop, because they have been using Photoshop for years, and know exactly where everything is.
I managed to ramrod through a transition from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign at the company I work for three years ago, and the only way I could make that transition was to set InDesign to use Quark keyboard shortcuts and menus - something Adobe added because they knew it was necessary to match functionality and ease transition, because no one in their target demographic is going to take a couple weeks out of their advertising schedule in order to learn new layout software.
In the real world, billboards and newspaper ads need to be produced, and fucking around with the flavor-of-the-month OSS version of layout or editing software impedes that for most people. Paying Adobe's price usually ends up saving a lot of time and money in the end.