Shoutouts
Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!
- bruhduh
- Toes
Free Open Source Alternatives
[Visual/Graphical]
For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by urska@lemmy.ca
I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.
However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.
Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.
The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.
And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.
That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.
I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.
Workflow is big, but it isn’t the biggest issue with Gimp for serious work, the destructive editing is. Workflow you can get used to, destructive editing means you’re fucked if you need to edit something you’ve previously edited - something most if not all professionals do all the time.
This.
It is planned feature for Gimp 3 I believe, hopefully it will be implemented well.
But for now, people that aren’t professional graphic designers should really stop recommending Gimp as a viable replacement. It is a very capable piece of software, but too many professional-grade features are missing.
And it’s never only about Photoshop either. It is the integration that the suite has. Illustrator to Photoshop to Indesign is (mostly) seemless.
I’m currently trying to switch to foss alternatives, but it’s rough.