An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop • Hacker News Board

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#81

Post by S0und » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

dtagames wrote: post #7

Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#82

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

pauldoerwald wrote: post #17

JKCalhoun wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty clear marketing killed PS when they went to a subscription model.

A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.

They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#83

Post by graemep » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

jfyi wrote: post #31

pauldoerwald wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.

Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.

It looks like they can take their customer base for granted:

https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-r...

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#84

Post by nextaccountic » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #50

Nobody has mentioned Krita which is quite good.

Krita is excellent for painting (specially its brush engine). The problem is Photoshop is also used for other things

Krita could refocus into a more general photo editing software, but I think they want to focus into being the best painting software instead

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#85

Post by nextaccountic » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #36

harvie wrote: post #11

GIMP. How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.

GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs

Just use https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp in this case

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#86

Post by bananaboy » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.

I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#87

Post by afzalive » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #52

donatj wrote: post #48

My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again. Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly eve…

It’s better than a lot of modern software. One reason I stick with it is I have a hobby of printing smaller formats like 4x6 cards and Photoshop and Epson Print Layout are the only programs that I have 100% control of all the printer and color management settings and exactly where the image winds up on the printer (e.g. managing the mechanical uncertainty). I don’t send work out to people who have better printers bec…

Have you tried Affinity Photo?

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#88

Post by tokai » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #21

harvie wrote: post #11

GIMP. How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.

World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it. If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem wou…

GIMP haters needs to be studied. The amount of extreme petty vitriol that project gets is completely out of proportions.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#89

Post by hn_acker » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

What a dreadful memory to resurface. I had the exact same errors when I tried running the Creative Cloud uninstaller program, so I hunted through all of my /library and ~/library subfolders for anything containing "adobe", "photoshop", "creative cloud", or "CC". I'm very confident that I didn't delete anything unrelated to Adobe, and I'm equally unconfident that I deleted every single file related to Adobe.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#90

Post by yabones » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

3form wrote: post #63

amelius wrote: post #40

> A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes. Holy moly.

I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).

There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.

The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.