Is Adobe's Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good? (vice.com) 128
Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs. Which means that, despite the fact that I'd certainly love to see what life is like outside of the world of Adobe, it looks like I'm stuck in that ecosystem for a little while longer. Don't get me wrong: Adobe's software is great, if a bit expensive. But I do think that its business model highlights just how consolidated its power actually is -- and it's not talked about nearly enough in the creative space.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
Powerful? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it too powerful? I dunno I stopped using around the year 2000. I use tools like GIMP and Krita for GUI based editing, but most of my editing is done on the command line with tools like ImageMagick or custom python scripts with the Pillow library.
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Whatever faults Adobe may have (and they have many) how is it Adobe's fault that nobody makes a program to handle animated GIFs?
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It's not even true. There are plenty of image editors which can handle animated gifs. What there might not be many of is photo editors which handle animated gifs, but there's an obvious reason for that: no-one with half a brain would consider animated gif to be a photo format.
Re:Powerful? (Score:5, Insightful)
In GIMP, each animation frame is just a layer. When you save you have the option to save to animation which does all the work for you. Here is a quick guide: https://elearnhub.org [elearnhub.org]
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You can even make it apply a transform gradually and build the intermediate frames, can't you?
I'm not a graphics professional nor a GIMP guru but I recall doing this once to make a kind of billowing flag effect, just 4 teh lulz.
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I've thus far been unable to find a "show only this layer" feature from the program.
Hold [shift] and click on the eye in the layer panel, of the layer you want to edit, all other layers are hidden. Do it again and all layers are shown.
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GIANT WORLD-WIDE PRINT CO: Hi. Adobe? This is the GWWPC rep. We were wondering if you could help us out. ... I haven't even told you what the problem is.
ADOBE: Yeah? We won't be able to help you out.
GWWPC: I
ADOBE: Sorry. We can't fix things for every user.
GWWPC: But we are LITERALLY your largest user.
ADOBE: Yeah. That's nice. Thanks for the business. Try sales. Bye now.
**CLICK**
Every. Single. Call. With. The. Adobe. Rep.
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Yep, GIMP for images, Davinci Resolve for video and Fusion 9 for VFX/compositing.
GIMP is free and Davinci Resolve/Fusion is free or (for the studio version) a one-time license fee (even the updates are free).
Adobe's rentware model will be its demise.
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Adobe's rentware model will be its demise.
*sigh* Should've happened a long time ago. CS6 was the last version for me.
It's not too powerful for its own good, it's too popular. Without a demand for alternatives, there won't won't be any.
I second the comments on Davinci, and it renders beautifully.
Re:Powerful? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who are not full-time creative professionals.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who can make intelligent decisions about when to pay for an upgrade and how to budget over more than the next quarter.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software outside the United States where the current subscription rates are significantly higher.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as someone involved with smaller businesses often working in creative industries one way or another, we chose some time ago to minimise our dependence on any software with a mandatory subscription, for the simple reason that regardless of price, anything that can be arbitrarily broken or turned off by the software developer is a huge liability. If we can't use the latest version, we'll stick with the old one. If we can't get the old one any more, we'll find something else. We have yet to encounter a situation where that was not possible and we couldn't transfer our important assets -- our data and the people who created it -- to use the new system in some reasonable way.
As a convenient side effect, almost all of the replacements we're using now are either the small-scale "upstarts" competing with established products from the lies of Adobe (think Sketch, Affinity, etc.) or from the FOSS world (think Linux, Blender, etc.). We're both saving money and supporting the little (but growing) guys.
Cheap for me (Score:2)
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Are you telling me you can't earn $50 a month with these tools?
Nope. But some of us don't want to earn $50/month with these tools. We just want to use them as a hobby when we want.
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Fair enough, but hobbies cost money. That's what makes them hobbies instead of businesses.
If you just use your computer to dick around, by all means stick with GIMP, Blender and InkScape.
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There are passable alternatives to Photoshop, but there is no other product that comes close to Lightroom for organizing photo collections. Although it now has the most commonly used editing functions from Photoshop, the heart of Lightroom is a cataloging system that leaves your original images in place in whatever organizing scheme you want, keeping track of your folder organization and image edits in one catalog file. Many competing products impose a specific file organization on you and store your photo
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https://www.aftershotpro.com/e... [aftershotpro.com]
I don't know about keeping track of files on disconnected external drives (I'd recommend moving up to a NAS anyway), but I'm pretty sure it's 95% of what you're looking for, and costs $80 once.
Re:Powerful? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because it's actually just a bug report and a feature request for a piece of proprietary software; something which necessitates all the power of an international journalist outlet to get any actual response to from the developers. Just another reminder that Stallman Was Right.
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Thirding Gimp here.
Drag cut borders out, use HTML slicing tool. Besides basic graphics editing, I use it for 3d printing. Slicing tool is REALLY handy for my smallish print bed. While there's no direct text stroke tool, select text with magic wand, convert select into path, draw along path. It takes some learning, but once learned it's not bad.
Paint Shop Pro (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you want is Animated GIFs, lemme tell ya. I make them using Paint Shop Pro 5. It came out in 1998. It still works perfectly well on Windows 10 x64. It is also so small, it loads instantly on modern hardware. It is amazing for quick simple tasks.
Wrong target market (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I use Pixelmator - it easily covers anything I need. But again - my needs are reasonable simple and I'm simply not who Photoshop is really targeted at.
Seriously? (Score:3)
Somebody is offering animated gifs as “proof” that Adobe’s Creative Suite is “too powerful”?
Adobe is able to ignore the competition because it’s been able to purchase and absorb every meaningful competitor out there. The corporation itself may very well be too powerful, but it’s got little to do with its CC suite - that’s the end result, not the cause. A number of those applications weren’t created by Adobe anyway.
Ughhh. Gifs (Score:3)
I'm of the age when I remember GIF's from the 90's as a "cool" way to animate things, before Flash was a big deal. Flash has gone the way of the dodo, and so should gifs. I'm not sure what everyone's fascination with making animated gifs are when we have much MUCH better technology today with web-purposed video formats, like WEBM, instead of using clunky formats from the 80's.
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You can do the same thing with CSS animation
https://loading.io/css/ [loading.io]
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You can also use the USS Nimitz to go fishing.
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We're going to need a bigger boat.
Oh, shit.
Adobe's fault? How about Windows? (Score:1)
It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's.
That's not Adobe's strangle hold, that's MS Window's strangle hold. Adobe has no reason to stretch beyond Windows because Windows as ensured that nobody else would be worth stretching for. I'm sorry that it's an inconvenience to you NOW. It's bothered many of us for decades.
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I believe his name was Shigetaka Kurita.
It's the gentlest of criticisms from a fan (Score:5, Insightful)
I really like Adobe as a company, but I think its suite has become so costly and unavoidable for the average creative consumer that it needs to be a little bit smaller
No. You like the software. All of the things in your article are reasons you should NOT like Adobe as a company.
Side note: hard to take the criticisms about usability very seriously when they are posted on mobo.vice. Talk about a bloated.
Who cares? Pirates? (Score:3)
Honestly, who actually pays for Photoshop? I'll tell you who: professionals. If you aren't paying for it but you are still using it then you are pirating the software. Honestly, there are enough applications out there for every platform to do image manipulation that anyone crying over Adobe is unlikely to even be entitled to use the software in the first place.
these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs
Sure... but last I checked either was Photoshop. Also, who is paying for Photoshop to make animated GIFs? Nobody. Crying about a lack of alternatives not existing when you aren't even willing to pay for it in the first place is just pathetic.
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If you aren't paying for it but you are still using it then you are pirating the software.
Pretty hard to 'pirate' cloud based software. If you're 'pirating' Adobe, you're using an old version.
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That's the thing... it's *not* "cloud-based". It's still just plain old desktop software. The only part that is cloud-based is that the software constantly phones home to Adobe's cloud servers to assure itself that you still deserve to use it. There are some extra bits like stock photos and some shared storage bits, but the majority of the suite is just as hackable/pirateable as it used to be. You just have to somehow bypass the phoning part.
I think the saddest part for me is the fact that the marketing
Whinge piece (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary reads like nonsensical whinging about things that have nothing to do with Adobe.
Animated GIF not being supported is a good thing. We almost killed that crappy thing until bloody Facebook decided to create a GIF keyboard that allowed you to reply with animated memes. What good purposes outside of this still remains for GIF? Leave it in the 90s along with Zip drives, floppy disks, and computer cases without any style. You complain that Adobe carries itself like it's the only game in town while acknowledging that it's the only game in town and that you can't get away from it. *golfclap*.
As for not supporting an OSX feature, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you think Mac is as relevant as it once was. Once the platform of creators has for so long rested on its laurels, provided no good incentive for consumers to favour it and its expensive non-customisable hardware, and repeatedly shat on developers of it's own platform to the point where it's x64 migration was managed poorly enough that an entire major version of Adobe's suite wasn't released on Mac in 64bit variant at a time where > 4GB of memory was actually relevant to the industry. OSX has a native fullscreen feature? Cool, the couple of percent of the market may be disappointed that Adobe doesn't support it, instead it rolled it's own fullscreen feature for the far more popular (almost by an order of magnitude now) windows platform.
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Who doesn't use it or like it? The writer in TFS certainly uses it, I use it too. What's your point?
Re:Whinge piece (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree with thegarbz. Apple used to be amazing. But now? They are an insult. OSX is still ok-ish but it's less reliable than it used to be... and wow... don't get me started on their hardware.
Non repairable. Not upgradable. You're basically forced to buy a $5000 toaster. The only way out is to not buy their computers at all, and lease them instead.
And it's not even a *good* toaster. They took what was IMO the best keyboard in the industry and made it the worst. It's barely better than typing directly on a glass screen, which is seriously painful if you're a good typist. Only USB-C ports, so you better hope that you didn't forget your docking station or dongles, or that they haven't failed on you (as VERY many reviewers on the apple store have complained about...) as you're about to do an important presentation. Gimmicks like the touchbar that shoot the unit cost through the roof, are unreliable, and provide negligible benefit.
And funnily enough, every single method to work around all the various compromises just so happens to net apple more money. Buy more dongles. Interest from leases and you don't even keep the hardware.
Despite their claims to the contrary, Apple has abandoned the entire professional market that supported them for so long.
And the biggest killer of all? They can get away with it because at least it's not Windows 10.
I can't think of another time when Linux on the Desktop was not just desired, but desperately needed, than now.
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To be honest, why expect application support at all for these features? These things should be the domain of the OS, not applications.
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I think Mac is plenty relevant and primarily relevent to graphics manipulation in the professional design world.
It most definitely is not "primarily" relevant, it's market share is dwindling every year and is a fraction of what it used to be, and with every move Apple is making the situation is getting worse. Yay Adobe finally supports off-loading on CUDA. Apple says: We're restricting the user of NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA drivers in Macs.
All that would have to happen to put Adobe out of business is for Apple to match Adobe's software.
Not even remotely. Firstly you would need to match an entire suite of professional grade tools, good luck with that. Secondly you have incredible network effect, you have retraining, y
WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, maybe I am too tired, got back from work, but I don't understand anything on that post. The highlights I got:
- Not many programs handle animated gifs. Who cares? OK, those who care could use PSP or something?
- There some sort of annoying window movement when dragging a photo from a web browser to Photoshop? What???
- Photoshop does not support OS X full screen mode. Okayyy, hadn't actually noticed that, as I actually don't do serious work on the laptop display and full screen works really bad on a 3 monitor setup. Maybe it is a feature some people would like? Definitely not the major issue with Photoshop.
And all these inane points suggest "Photoshop is to 'powerful' for it's own good"? How? Why?
Dear god, is our post quality going to reduce even more?
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I'm not sure but I think the point he's trying to make is that Adobe is not bothering to spend money fixing its "rough edges" because people will buy it anyway.
Network Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
ACC has used the network effect to get and stay on top. A manager for a graphics department wants to spend as little money as possible on software. ACC has made a one-stop-shop pretty much. You buy/rent ACC and you get the vast majority of what you need to make and manage graphics.
While there are competitors, they are not as complete as ACC, meaning you have to buy and/or learn yet more software to get the missing features. And orgs also don't want a learning curve for newly hired graphic artists. If your shop uses a mish-mash of tools, finding employees who are a ready fit will be harder. Orgs want plug-and-play employees.
It's similar to Microsoft: an org buys Microsoft not because it's the best, but because everybody else knows it, and they cover the gamut of most business needs in a good-enough way. IBM used to occupy that niche, but MS knocked them off the hill.
It's a winner-take-most economy. Enjoy.
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That's kind of the same thing: you can buy everybody out because you started buying everybody out first. Regardless, it's a positive feedback cycle ("positive" being a type, not a value judgement). Snowball Effect?
F**k Adobe (Score:4, Interesting)
Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla of the digital graphics market. Whenever any application achieves dominance, it jacks its pricing up to as much as the market can bear. Remember Word Perfect? It used to be the dominant PC word processor (and was priced accordingly) until it lost out to Word as the world switched to Windows. When Word and the MS Office Suite achieved dominance, their pricing also pushed the limit of what the market can bear. You see where I'm going here.
Adobe and its graphics troika Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have dominated the industry for far, far too long and Adobe is in need of serious competition. Corel has been content enough with being a distant #2 that I don't think they'll ever aspire to push for the #1 spot (their pricing is better than Adobe, but is still too high for the solo graphic designer operating on a shoe-string). Fortunately, Serif's Affinity line with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (and the upcoming Affinity Publisher) may just have a clear shot at Adobe. Their pricing is insanely aggressive ($50 with free upgrades) and their feature sets gives you about 80% of what Adobe has. Because Serif is a UK company, I hope it can avoid getting bought out by Adobe when it becomes a perceived threat to Adobe's cash cows.
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I couldn't agree more. I'm a web developer, and I used to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver all the time (I started using Dreamweaver way back before Adobe even bought it). I stuck with both for a long time - probably longer than I should have. Once I started writing React code, and DW's syntax highlighting for it was pure garbage, I made the switch to VS Code. Haven't looked back.
When I was using both, I had a full subscription to CC, since this was actually less expensive than just getting the two apps I
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I'm right there with you. If I'm required to use it by my employer, I expect them to pay for the license. If I'm using it for my own personal use or side/consulting projects, I'm going to seriously look at more economical options.
Insane license (Score:2)
I was looking into it because I wanted to use photoshop, after effects, perhaps learn premiere pro to get away from apple and fcpx. (Although now I guess I would go for davinci resolve).
For the 5 years I have used my iMac, I paid for FCP X once. And so while the iMac is expensive, I have saved a lot of money in licences towards a new machine if I donâ(TM)t switch back to pc.
I can get by with The Gimp, not perfect but ok for my personal use. After effects I donâ(TM)t need as such and I can do what
Shill post for vice.com ? (Score:3)
Go look at this submitter's profile - all are from vice.com. And the submissions are direct lifts from the articles themselves.
So while it seems this "person" was out looking at image editors, they weren't. They are just copy/pasting from articles into a slashdot submission form and the editors are doing nothing of the sort.
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CS is multi-platform software. (Score:2)
Yes, certain elements are kind of a pain in the ass on the Mac. But the Mac hasn't been the best platform to run CS apps on in years. Windows is. Hell, Photoshop runs better in Windows than it does in OS X *on identical hardware.*
Since the 90s, to maintain an Apple product, Adobe has had to: Port from 68k to PPC, then from Classic MacOS to OS X (Photoshop 7 SUCKED on the Mac, but it ran in both operating systems), then they had to adapt from OS X PPC to OS X Intel. Apple jerks their developers around co
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Give Affinity Photo [serif.com] a look.
I believe they have a 30 day trial, is on both Windows and Mac.
Most of the layout is the same, as are most of the keyboard shortcuts.
Parody is dead (Score:2)
No, and that's a stupid question... (Score:2)
No, and that's a stupid question, and vice specializes in outrage porn. It might be too powerful for YOUR good, but more powerful is good for Adobe.
Adobe ist shite. (Score:2)
Adobe has gone downhill ever since PS 5.5 and Flash MX 5.5, which was a fraudulent product IMHO And if missing animated gifs in affinity are a dealbreaker for you, I'm sorry, but you're smoking crack or something. Gimp costs nothing and will do animated gifs just fine. Better than any other tool in fact.
As for image editing I'm very glad affinity is pissing in Adobes soup just now and that Adobe is losing ground to them. Adobe needs to die in a fire ASAP as far as I am concerned.
BTW, of you're on Windows t
The market is consolidating .... (Score:3)
It doesn't matter if you're into music creation, video editing, photo editing, or just working on spreadsheets. The software applications market has trended towards consolidation. mergers and the little guys becoming niches or irrelevant.
I'm not an artist, but I work for a company full of creative people who do use software like Adobe Creative Cloud. I really don't believe they NEED it to get their work done, but it's much more an issue of what they learned to use back in school, or with previous employers. We still battle constantly with people demanding we buy full versions of even the Adobe Acrobat software, when plenty of shareware PDF editing solutions already exist that cost FAR less. Since Adobe invented the PDF document, it stands to reason they're the most comprehensive editing solution for the file format. But there's no way we really have dozens of people employed here who fully utilize the esoteric features you only get with the "real" Adobe branded software!
I've been able to do pretty much everything I needed to do with a PDF file using the Preview app that comes with OS X on my Mac. It lets me selectively remove pages from a document, annotate it, add a saved signature to it, re-order pages or insert pages .... all the common stuff.
But yeah.... the times when I wanted to do some graphics work for a web site or what-not? I always found great solutions with little freeware or shareware tools out there. You don't get everything in one application, under one set of menu choices though. Maybe for a lot of professionals, that's the deal-breaker? But I think I'd rather shuffle my drawing or photo in and out of 6 or 7 different tools, as needed, vs. paying month after month to keep my Adobe applications properly licensed and running. Clearly though, there are plenty of people making enough money with their creative works so they'll pay Adobe's prices.
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Mostly this, but there are a few other reasons...
1.) Internal documentation. Some people know Acrobat well enough to help others trying to do an uncommon process. Any training documents can reference a single piece of software and will be accurate for all of those people. You and I and the rest of Slashdot can probably figure out PDF Architect or PowerPDF or whatever-command-line-soup-is-required-for-Ghostscript, but there are still people in 2019 who don't know how to use Excel beyond typing things into ro
Apple? Mac? Market share? (Score:1)
It's always been overpriced (Score:2)
Adobe could have cut the prices of all their graphics software in half during the 90's and probably more than doubled their sales while drastically reducing piracy.
The CC subscription scheme is a consumer-hostile money grab designed to combat piracy and further trap users in a walled garden. Semi-regular users simply stick to the pre-CC versions.
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Fullscreen also does not work on Firefox. (Score:2)
Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's.
Mozilla chooses to ignore it, too. Here's the relevant Bugzilla entry [mozilla.org], in case anyone wanted to vote, not that it's going to do any good. Their game plan seems to be "wait until everyone who cares about this bug changes OSes or browsers so they don't care anymore".
MS GIFanimator (Score:2)
since 1997
Wait, Macs didn't have native fullscreen (Score:2)
Irony (Score:2)