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Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

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Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#61

Post by bbx »

karaterobot wrote: post #46

Figma for all UX design. Affinity Photo for bitmap editing (which is vanishingly rare these days). Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma. Affinity Publisher for print design (aka when I need to update my resume...). Instead of Adobe Stock, I use Pexels, or just generate a sufficiently generic image on ChatGPT. Instead of Adobe Fonts, I just stopped being a web developer, ha ha…

> Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma

Can you elaborate? I like Figma for its interface design capabilities, but feel like Illustrator has more complex vector design. Would you consider Affinity Designer as more similar to Illustrator feature-wise?

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#62

Post by dirtybirdnj »

I got a mac app called Graphic off the app store a few years ago and it does everything I need in a vector graphics tool. Illustrator can go get fucked.

I really wish I could get behind inkscape but the UI has never improved enough for me to tolerate it. Graphic just feels much better.

Use Pixelmator Pro for photoshop stuff. I don't do a lot of work in it anymore but it's great for making youtube thumbs and other basic stuff. The photo retouching stuff is nice, stills from my gopro are kinda dark and it does a great job making them look better for web use.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#63

Post by karaterobot »

bbx wrote: post #61
karaterobot wrote: post #46

Figma for all UX design. Affinity Photo for bitmap editing (which is vanishingly rare these days). Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma. Affinity Publisher for print design (aka when I need to update my resume...). Instead of Adobe Stock, I use Pexels, or just generate a sufficiently generic image on ChatGPT. Instead of Adobe Fonts, I just stopped being a web developer, ha ha…

> Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma Can you elaborate? I like Figma for its interface design capabilities, but feel like Illustrator has more complex vector design. Would you consider Affinity Designer as more similar to Illustrator feature-wise?

Illustrator definitely has more sophisticated tools than Figma. Figma's basically got the pen tool, point manipuation, and a couple of boolean operations, and that's it. It's perfectly fine for making simple icons and so on, but you would suffer if you tried to make a complex illustration in Figma. Affinity Designer has a lot more than Figma, but less than Illustrator.

A practical example would be the "Divide" operation. This is the boolean operation that creates new shapes out of overlapping sections, for example if you had two partially overlapping circles and you used Divide on them, the result would be two pac-man shapes and a leaf shape.

Though it has Boolean operations like Union, Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude, Figma doesn't have Divide at all. Both Affinity and Illustrator do.

Divide is a really, really powerful step in building complex shapes out of simple ones, so when I need to use it, sometimes it's easier to just open up Affinity Designer, even if the rest of the design is in Figma.

Beyond this, Illustrator has a host of neat ways of working with vectors that neither AD nor Figma do. All kinds of warp actions, meshes, and a really nice system for recoloring shapes quickly. It's been 5 years since I opened it up, so I am probably forgetting a lot of important differences.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#64

Post by tambourine_man »

fsloth wrote: post #60
jwells89 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO many of its most glaring issues could be fixed by “simply” (I know it’s probably more involved in reality) swapping out bespoke widgets for standard GTK counterparts with more standard/commonly familiar behaviors. The poster child for this is easily the layers palette. It looks like a scrolling list widget like you’d find on any major desktop OS released in the past 30 years but doesn’t behave like one, with oddi…

IMHO the problems in the usability of the software go far deeper than simply switching the widgets. This is not to shit on Gimp! It's a completely adequate package of various image processing algorithms . However, this does not make it a replacement for Photoshop for a large segment of users. I've been using Photoshop for 30 years and tried to use gimp for 25 years :D

Roughly the same amount of years here, same conclusion.

I'd love to ditch Adobe for an open stack. I've day-dreamed about creating an open alternative to Photoshop many times. It's a daunting task, it would take many years of dedication for reaching even a mediocre competitor to the 90s Photoshop.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#65

Post by pupppet »

chirau wrote: post #36

For Photoshop: 1) Photopea (quite brilliant for most of the things photoshop can do) 2) paint.net for not too advanced edits 3) Krita For After Effects: 1) Natron 2) BlackMagic Fusion For Premiere Pro: 1) DaVinci Resolve 2) KdenLive For Illustrator: 1) Inkscape 2) Graphite Please note that most of these are not feature for feature replacements, but for the most part and most common tasks, they are very good offerings…

I actually prefer Photopea over Affinity Photo, it’s a shameless clone right down to the keyboard shortcuts which at this point are muscle memory.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#66

Post by exz »

patchorang wrote: post #35

If anyone can comment on good alternatives for After Effect, I'd be interested to know.

for SVG and Lottie animation Glaxnimate: https://glaxnimate.mattbas.org

for simple pixel-based image animation/distortion Anime Effects: https://animeeffectsdevs.github.io

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#69

Post by Gigachad »

fsloth wrote: post #39
TrevorFSmith wrote: post #5

My free stack, 2024 edition: Fedora Linux Sway spin, Inkscape, GNU Image Manipulation Program, KdenLive, Natron, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, OpenSCAD, Orca slicer, IceCat, Zulip, LibreOffice, and a flock of CLI tools

2024 and Gimp remains horrible (as it has always been). It’s cool it brings value to you and others but Photoshop replacement it is not.

Gimp is painful to use for even once off small stuff. If you at all do anything commercially, the benefits of photoshop would have paid for itself over gimp.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

#70

Post by bbx »

karaterobot wrote: post #63
bbx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Affinity Designer for a few vector operations and tools not supported by Figma Can you elaborate? I like Figma for its interface design capabilities, but feel like Illustrator has more complex vector design. Would you consider Affinity Designer as more similar to Illustrator feature-wise?

Illustrator definitely has more sophisticated tools than Figma. Figma's basically got the pen tool, point manipuation, and a couple of boolean operations, and that's it. It's perfectly fine for making simple icons and so on, but you would suffer if you tried to make a complex illustration in Figma. Affinity Designer has a lot more than Figma, but less than Illustrator. A practical example would be the "Divide" operat…

I love Figma but I agree that proper vector tools are lacking. Illustrator is complex but very powerful.

Would you say that AD is enough for your needs regarding vector design? (I'm looking at ending my Adobe sub this year, would like AD to be a suitable replacement).

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