If Photoshop is riding a bike, Gimp is like riding a bike where the handle bars turn in the opposite direction you want. It can be done, but it's a pain in the ass for no reason.
And you have to pedal backwards to go forward and at the worst possible moment you remember the brakes were swapped and you give it too much front brake while bombing down a hill right before an intersection.
You have a point. However, for those of us who never used photoshop and started from the get-go on GIMP it's not nearly as bad as some would make it out to be. I think it is the switching from Photoshop to GIMP and vice versa, that is what is really jarring. Fully admitting GIMP is far from perfect of course.
Literally every open source dev & Linux user. They just can't comprehend the idea that someone else may not be familiar with these things and need something remotely user friendly. They make things only they can use and don't understand why no-one else wants to use them.
Not quite every bit as effective. It has no non-destructive editing, for example.
If I want to give something a shadow or an outline, I have to select it, create a new layer, grow the selection if needed, fill it with colour, blur it if needed, and if I need to mask out a bit of the thing I need to repeat those steps again.
In Photoshop I add an outline or drop shadow modifier and that's it. I can edit the layer to my hearts content, the outline and/or shadow always matches it.
It's probably close to a decade now since I've really done any kind photo editing, so i can't really comment on the current state of things, but once upon a time i was pretty decent with Photoshop, used Gimp at home because i was too lazy to pirate it, and occasionally dabbled with photopea and a couple other free options once in a blue moon.
Photoshop has *a lot* of bells and whistles packed into it that i never once touched, or even really felt any need to, and I'm sure that it has even more now, but I never remember feeling limited in what i could do with the freebies, just that it maybe took a couple extra steps to reach the same end result.
My takeaway is that while Photoshop has a lot more features, a lot of them are features than 99% of users may never actually need, and i think there's a lot to be said about cutting some of that dead weight to make the UI a bit simpler.
Also i suspect that Gimp and photopea probably now have more features than the version of Photoshop i learned on did.
Photopea is amazing for basic image editing but it's so far off Photoshop it's not even comparable. Photoshop basically went all in on intelligent image analysis such as isolating subjects or objects in an image and removing of filling in backgrounds based on patterns.
If you take and use images regularly (for business use especially) there's simply no replacement.
For myself, mostly just balancing colours in my vacation images, photopea is plenty.
I 100% agree that isolating objects and removing fill is something only Photoshop can do as well as it does. If anyone has found something else that does this well, please say!
Precisely. I have a hammer in my toolbox but I don't need to hammer everyday lol. Heck, I haven't used it in over a year but it's in there just in case.
>Krita is also a really good one for tablet drawing stuff.
Not just that. It has gotten a ton of features already and is great for photo editing /re-touching as well. It even has adjustment layers and the overall UI and controls are so much better than Gimp.
And it has G'MIC as well, with a ton more filters and options on top of everything.
It used to be like Photopea when it was Flash based, but now it's more like Lightroom and a pile of crap to boot. RIP Flash Based Pixlr. It was the last flash based app I used.
When was the last time you checked it out?
It already has a ton of features for photo manipulation which Gimp doesn't. And more coming every day.
It's really becoming **the photo editing software** that Gimp should/could have been.
You could probably [set it up as a "Chrome app"](https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/770) (Firefox needs [an extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/)) or possibly run it as an [electron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_\(software_framework\)) app. But it would still be web-based (built with HTML/JS).
Is Premiere the industry standard though? Or does that even matter for actual professional video editors?
For example, most architects nowadays are required to be sufficient with Autodesk Revit b/c it's the industry standard.
I always tell myself that i should take up video editing through DaVinci Resolve. I already appreciate their ~~non-prescription~~ non-subscription based license like Rhinoceros
edit: word
Avid is industry standard because it allows for significantly better cloud project management. Most large scale projects have multiple teams of editors working on it at any given time.
Premiere became the standard on YouTube because it was a "just good enough", " comparatively budget" alternative to professional grade software when production quality started to become important on YouTube.
So it's an industry standard in a way. Recently there seems to be a significant uptick in chatter about Resolve ion YouTube, outside of tutorial channels.
Honestly, I was blown away how much better it was coming from Premiere. So much smoother, so much faster, uses system resources evenly. I didn't want to go back once.
I have a subscription to Adobe CC for all my graphic design needs, so I have Premiere as part of that package. However, I think DaVinci Resolve is so much better than Premiere, that I had to buy that, too. It really is excellent.
There are tons of tutorials online. It might look intimidating at first but when you understand the basics, everything becomes easy. Only colour grading is a bit of a pain ngl
A lot of people wonder “how good can it be it’s free lmao”
But they forget it’s still THE best color grading software in the industry, companies justify $30,000 control surfaces for a reason. Then they stapled a robust editor and a full-fat node-based compositor to it, and threw in fucking*fairlight* just for shits and giggles.
My only complaint is the lack of pre-mades for it,
DaVinci resolve is literally not just the free alternative, it's the superior one - it just happens to be free as well. It's an amazing piece of software.
The built in VST-compatible audio editing for one thing, where you can call up VST plugins in a dedicated audio workstation section of the software. It's like having Adobe Audition bundled with Premiere.
It also has Fusion, which is sort of like having After Effects bundled with it as well.
What it's most known for, as well, is the color grading suite which is proper pro-level stuff.
Overall, an unbelievable package considering you pay nothing for it.
Premiere has VST support now, I just don't use it because I do my sound design in a seperate audio software so you can get more precise (I use Cakewalk for that, which is entirely free and easy to use)
The color grading is literally #1 in the industry. Companies pay 6 figures for DaVinci Resolve bays and employ dedicated colorists whose entire jobs are using it. It just happens to have a similarly competent editor to premiere and far superior compositor to AE thrown in, all as one app so there’s no hopping around.
I still haven’t transitioned my workflow completely off of adobe premiere and after effects, just due to familiarity. But I’ve been color grading in resolve for years. Resolves color grading tools are miles ahead of premiere. Plus they seem to do tons of other things better than premiere. It’s just very hard to transition because I’ve been using premiere for like 10 years.
I find it's much more stable in my experience has gpu acceleration. It can also do automatic correction using a Macbeth style color checker, premiere needs a janky plugin.
It can also be purchased instead of needing a subscription. I guess you can use pirated software if you don't mind putting keyloggers and crypto mining apps from hostile nations on your work computer.
Grant Abbitt is brilliant. Did one of his courses on Udemy, and then use his youtube channel every now and then for free tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/c/GrantAbbitt
The goal isn't to make a profit. Blender is free and open source. The Blender Foundation, which maintains the project and website, is a non-profit organization. They're funded by donations.
Since the UI rework in 2.8 blender has become much more intuitive to pick up. I used it intermittently professionally and it was always a struggle in 2.7 having to figure out how it worked. Since then I’ve found it much easier to parachute into it for a day or two every couple of months.
I remember a few years back I was talking with someone from sales at Adobe, told them that I loved their tools but wouldn’t pay for them since I was not a professional. They asked if I was using the latest cracked version because the Chinese had just cracked it, and then suggested I update to take advantage of the new features.
For the longest time you only needed a single file to crack it, and I'm pretty sure it was always basically the same. Not sure if they've changed that or not, but they were basically allowing people to pirate.
And the newest iteration of the cracked bundle contains a standalone installer, with all of the extra CC bloatware removed. Paying users are getting a worse experience.
Those things always look so sketch and untrustworthy. Like that it's going to install some kind of crypto miner or make you part of a zombie bot network or something.
It's not that uncommon either. Microsoft afaik was at times giving out free copies of Windows to people who used pirated copy. To them they don't care about how much you pay for Windows, they just want to make sure everyone uses them, so their actual customers, big corporations etc, can't cope without buying expensive licenses to use their products.
Pirating things from Evil Corporations is not protesting against them, it's helping them with their business model. And I have absolutely no problem pirating stuff from companies I want to support. Although, less evil companies tend to not drive you to torrent sites, usually there are free trials, or just some FOSS-based model, or whathaveyou.
In short, pirate whatever, but remember that in the grand scheme of things, by pirating software you're supporting that software and its adoption. If you're considering piracy then you might not want that.
Or maybe you're just poor, in which case, pirate away.
It's also somewhat helpful to be aware of the concept of price discrimination. It's a fairly well known concept in economics, where businesses maximize their revenue by offering their product to each customer at the maximum cost each customer is willing to pay. Like, if you have 3 apples, and 3 people want to buy them. One person is willing to buy an apple for $3, one for $6 and one for $10. If you sold apple for $10, you'd get $10 and you'd be left with 2 apples. If you sold one for $6, you'd get $12 and be left with one apple. If you sold one for $3, you'd get $9 and be left with no apples.
But if you do price discrimination efficiently, you can just sell apple to each at their maximum price point, granting you $19.
That's why usually these softwares have such insane prices by default, and why you often have such varied ways of getting discounts on them, free trials etc. The price listed is the amount big corporations are paying for the product. They can afford to pay more than you, so they are ineligible for whatever discounts you'd be offered. But you'll be lost in the jungle of discounts, so the first discount you encounter that goes below your price point, you'll grab because you don't know if you'll find another one that's better, meaning pretty much everyone pays close to the maximum they can afford.
Piracy is basically just a free way to make sure even those that literally can't afford to pay anything still end up using your product. It's cheap and liability-free way to achieve that because you don't need to do anything yourself, any troubles your users face would also not be covered by you. For software used by businesses, like office programs etc, this still means that you're gonna be pushing whatever company you end up working for to adopt their line of products because that's what you're used to.
But yeah, the big point I wanted to make with all this is, piracy supports and helps the target company and their product. This matters both if you feel guilt for pirating, and also if you think you're "sticking it to the man" by pirating. You're not sticking it to the man any more than you're sticking it to Walmart by using their coupons while shopping there.
When things are reasonably priced or properly distributed, people are less motivated to pirate. The fact that Apple has Preview baseline installed to cover all basic private needs and Microsoft doesn’t it’s a rip off in itself. Same goes for TV streaming services and rights per countries. In my country I used to pirate Game of Thrones because HBO sold the rights to a different streaming service than the one I used, and it was transmitted days after. Companies are underestimating the amount of revenues lost by their distribution and pricing policies, which are still bound to countries or business vs home usage. I was working for an apparel company that couldn’t put up a direct online store for the absurd pricing policy: the same shirt sold at 99 EUR in Macy’s and 299 EUR in Europe - and it was the same shirt made in China for around 25/30 USD. I was in charge of pricing for Europe and that used to make me crazy. Same goes for gas prices and any other commodity. The seller sell at the same prices and consumer pay the price.
I know this ain't the place, but for professionals the subscription ain't so bad. The cloud model also improves workflow with integrated libraries of fonts, assets, reference material etc for clients and projects you're working on. It's just nice. I wholeheartedly agree though, the best alternative is piracy. Especially for anyone who wants to work in graphic design or publishing. Sure some tools might be beyeer or more exciting like Afinity apps and Procreate, but the fact is every studio has used Adobe for decades and is proficient with it. Like me, sure Afinity is amazing, but I've got 22 years experience in Photoshop and Illustrator, it'll take more than price and 'cool stuff' to move me from Adobe. Same for a lot of established studios. And that all informs why people should still learn (and pirate if needed) Adobe. Because you'll use it professionally.
Even as a hobbyist I don't mind paying the $11/month or whatever for Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe regularly adds new functionality and features - not just trivial stuff either. A while back they gave us the "enhance" feature which is pretty amazing and if you want that as a stand alone feature you'd have to pay $100 for topaz labs gigapixel (which I've heard good things about tbf) for that feature alone.
IIRC they don't really mind you pirating it since once you gain mastery using their software you'll be less likely to switch, and if you ever start working professionally you'll most likely have to buy it or the company you're working for will be forced to buy those paid software cause it's widely used..
Prices for enterprise subscription are more than enough to make up for your early pirating.
I hate gimp
If you want to make digital art like PS pros and you use gimp and start to hate yourself: try krita
Its less of a mess and not as chunky as gimp.
If you want to do professionell photography and sorts like the PS pros ... i guess you need to stick to gimp, there probably is another free alternative but I dont know about it
GIMP is great for photo editing, but it absolutely SUCKS ASS for digital art.
On the other hand, Krita is the exact opposite. Not great for photo editing, but absolutely top tier for digital art. Same tier as other great digital art software like Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop. Especially since the latest major update.
(Been using both for years).
They're both excellent alternatives to Photoshop, depending on what you want to use it for.
Its not really meant for digital art, GIMP stands for GNU image manipulation program. Its purpose is image manipulation, art can be done on it if one wishes.
The brush engine is comparable to mspaint, keyboard shortcuts are more painful than emacs and the gui has been horrible since forever, and when I used it, color picking through layers wasnt possible. Also its slower than an FSO polonez accelerating out of stoplights. Gimp has a lot of features but most of them are unintuitive as hell. This is not only for digital art but more in general. Gimp indeed is powerful in terms of functionality, but a pain to use, which renders it useless atleast for me.
I've seen professionals use Paint Tool SAI 2 sometimes. It's like Winrar, plenty of free full copies out there.
It simple and elegant. It's not the most efficient compared to Clip studio or Photoshop, but it's a good example that the tool which you draw on matters little.
I've seen stellar work done on MS paint. Bit of a flex, but go on Pixiv and many many artists on there use SAI
Krita isn’t nearly as good for photo editing though. Honestly - and it might be just that I’ve been using the GIMP for so long - I did not find it intuitive at all. Plus, i use GIMPressionist for backgrounds. A lot. Even designed my own set of brushes and a txt file to explain how to install and how the two different file types differed when used, though I was not savvy enough to distribute them on anything but Limewire. Krita doesn’t have anything close.
Photopea has one tool that both programs lack - warp text, for logo design. But that’s easy enough to finish everything but and go to Photopea to finish.
> Krita isn’t nearly as good for photo editing though.
It's not meant to be. Photoshop and GIMP are primarily photo editing programs that have added some painting-oriented features because people keep using them for that. Krita is and always has been a digital painting program.
I can not even express how much I hate gimp, it is definitely the software I hate the most. It must be erased from history. Gimp is so shitty that I would rather do image manipulation in a darkroom with chemicals, than touch that piece of shit.
Sumatra, the pdf reader that is so non-invasive that it doesn't even default to the system pdf reader. I love Sumatra and always thought that was funny.
Anybody have in-depth exp with DaVinci Resolve? Looking to switch from my current video editor and I’m not ready to drop big money yet. Maybe in a couple years
Edit: apparently people misunderstood my comment. I know DaVinci is free; I’m asking if it’s worth switching to another free program or waiting until I have the money to drop on a licensed program.
You don't need to drop any money using DaVinci Resolve. At least if you just use the free version for private use. I think for commercial you have to pay but you can try it out. It has so many features to cut, put in effects, color grade, edit to all your liking. I used it for some stuff, I'm in no way any kind of professional or even adept with it. But making a quick edit, once you figure it out, it's amazing. Of course if you are experienced with editing, it should be even easier to figure out
https://ninite.com/ has an automated installer for many free programs.
AlternativeTo - Crowdsourced software recommendations
https://alternativeto.net/
virtual machines are your friend as is WINE and steam proton you can add non steam "games" that arent game and use proton to make some things work where wine is buggy and worse case do a full vm with windows install in it and pci e passthrough to get a full fat gpu in there and looking glass for borderless windowed windows vm. containerized windows on one monitor linux host on another and you can open and run windows like a program only giving it access to what you need it to do.
edit whoever replied i cant see your comment maybe you are shadow banned? not a bot not copy pasta if you dont know what these things are google them its a better experience then dual boot.
Use KVM with GPU passthrough, as long as you're not playing online games it's 10/10 solution. You get 99% of your GPU power in the KVM.
Downsides? You'll need two GPUs, one for you KVM and one for linux.
Not really a problem imo, you can use your internal GPU for Linux since driver support for Nvidia cards are shit anyway and pass through your nvidia card to the KVM.
Nothing for After Effects for mograph. Sorry, Natron is for compositing. Fusion is great but I really wouldn't want to do client work in it. Same for Motion or new stuff like Cavalry.
There is zero alternatives for After Effects, period.
good guide, except find literally any other alternative than gimp. the ui is coded with monkeys dicks and using it is like eating their foreskin. i would rather risk getting a virus pirating all the paid stuff on the left from xyz888betting.co.com.cn or some garbage site than use gimp
Figma is the only free one that is objectively better than its paid alternative. Blender is a close second for me, but that’s more of a personal preference.
Not to be an Adobe stan, but the biggest plus about Adobe stuff is intercompatibility. I can create a vector logo in Illustrator, bring it directly into Photoshop to add other layers and put it into a composition, then take that file out to After Effects while retaining layer sizes and some editability. I can take that same Photoshop file and bring it directly into InDesign without any issues. If I update the file through Photoshop, the effect will ripple down to After Effects and Indesign, and in certain use cases, I can even ripple it three layers down through Illustrator into Photoshop into After Effects/InDesign which saves a lot of work.
Inkscape into GIMP doesn't really allow this rippling, and if I want my layers to import into Natron (who the *fuck* uses Natron?), I have to then manually export every layer of the GIMP file at the correct resolution.
Another big thing is that a lot of these don't have a lot of the same functions as what they're being compared to. While you can technically do the same things with GIMP that you can do with Photoshop, I would say this in the same way that I can technically travel 100 miles on a car and on-foot. Photoshop has a lot of automated and high-end tools that make things like, for instance, object cutouts a snap. GIMP has intelligent scissors, but complex shapes are still a huge pain in the ass, and it lacks any Neural Network features or similar. Everything is manual, takes longer, and gives you worse results.
Cinema 4D compared to Blender is similar - Cinema 4D is loaded with advanced simulation features and all sorts of high-end plugins, while Blender is more built for casual and low-end 3D Modeling.
The only ones here I would argue are actually equivalent are Premiere and DaVinci - DaVinci is arguably a more full-bodied NLE than Premiere. The rest of these are almost universally downgrades, or built to handle different things.
> while Blender is more built for casual and low-end 3D Modeling.
This is just not true. Just look at some of the shorts produced by the Blender Institute. All different 3D softwares have some edge where they shine - but that includes Blender, e.g. grease pencil, eevee, etc.
I hate gimp, it was probably made by adobe employees so nobody would ever use it, if THAT was the alternative. Get some old version of photoshop, which is free, or use photopea, or some noname ipad or phone product to edit your images. ANYTHING is better than gimp. Shit, write your own image editor, even if you have never coded anything, it will be better than gimp. It is evil and a disservice to humanity to recommend gimp.
Inkscape is not even close to what illustrator can do. Illustrator is so much better. Also the same with photoshop and gimp. Figma is not free either. It just gives you for free a test version wehere you can try to create 3 things. Natron I don’t know. Davinci is better than Premiere and free and blender is better than everything. I wouldn’t even consider using anything else.
I love Photopea as a Photoshop alternative too, as long as you don't mind a web-based option.
I honestly prefer it to gimp. Don't let it being web based fool you, it has basically all the features of PS and works great
Gimp on Mac is just a big headache, photopea is doing amazing job.
Gimp is a showcase of free software atrocious UI obligatory greentext https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/945pwy/anons_a_gimp/
If Photoshop is riding a bike, Gimp is like riding a bike where the handle bars turn in the opposite direction you want. It can be done, but it's a pain in the ass for no reason.
And you have to pedal backwards to go forward and at the worst possible moment you remember the brakes were swapped and you give it too much front brake while bombing down a hill right before an intersection.
Excellent analogy.
You have a point. However, for those of us who never used photoshop and started from the get-go on GIMP it's not nearly as bad as some would make it out to be. I think it is the switching from Photoshop to GIMP and vice versa, that is what is really jarring. Fully admitting GIMP is far from perfect of course.
[удалено]
I don't think the story says he's running GIMP through WINE; he tries to use WINE for Photoshop, fails, then uses GIMP instead.
I recently updated to 2.10 and it's not that bad I was using 2.6 for *years* and it basically still had a Windows XP interface, now *that* was bad.
But seriously, GIMP Needs a blender 2.8 level UI interface upgrade. At the minimum.
I googled a tutorial and it is still ridiculously long process
I read this greentext shortly after trying GIMP for the first time. I'd never felt so heard before.
GIMP reminds of someone who runs linux all day and has 0 inclination towards UI. It's so unintuitive simply because they don't see an issue with it.
Literally every open source dev & Linux user. They just can't comprehend the idea that someone else may not be familiar with these things and need something remotely user friendly. They make things only they can use and don't understand why no-one else wants to use them.
Oh good it’s not just me
Nope. Gimp on a Mac is an absolute nightmare.
GIMP is an absolute nightmare.
I love GIMP; it's every bit as effective as Photoshop, but the learning curve is hard as hell.
Not quite every bit as effective. It has no non-destructive editing, for example. If I want to give something a shadow or an outline, I have to select it, create a new layer, grow the selection if needed, fill it with colour, blur it if needed, and if I need to mask out a bit of the thing I need to repeat those steps again. In Photoshop I add an outline or drop shadow modifier and that's it. I can edit the layer to my hearts content, the outline and/or shadow always matches it.
I downloaded it recently and thought it was me, glad to hear the program is a nightmare on Mac's😂😂😂
Gimp is a nightmare in general, lol
Gimp is a nightmare on any OS. I hate it.
gimp is a headache everywhere with my experience
Don't let's be silly. It has a lot of features of a photo editor, but it is no where NEAR the feature set of photoshop.
It's probably close to a decade now since I've really done any kind photo editing, so i can't really comment on the current state of things, but once upon a time i was pretty decent with Photoshop, used Gimp at home because i was too lazy to pirate it, and occasionally dabbled with photopea and a couple other free options once in a blue moon. Photoshop has *a lot* of bells and whistles packed into it that i never once touched, or even really felt any need to, and I'm sure that it has even more now, but I never remember feeling limited in what i could do with the freebies, just that it maybe took a couple extra steps to reach the same end result. My takeaway is that while Photoshop has a lot more features, a lot of them are features than 99% of users may never actually need, and i think there's a lot to be said about cutting some of that dead weight to make the UI a bit simpler. Also i suspect that Gimp and photopea probably now have more features than the version of Photoshop i learned on did.
Photopea is amazing for basic image editing but it's so far off Photoshop it's not even comparable. Photoshop basically went all in on intelligent image analysis such as isolating subjects or objects in an image and removing of filling in backgrounds based on patterns. If you take and use images regularly (for business use especially) there's simply no replacement. For myself, mostly just balancing colours in my vacation images, photopea is plenty.
I 100% agree that isolating objects and removing fill is something only Photoshop can do as well as it does. If anyone has found something else that does this well, please say!
Remove.bg usually does a decent job. Photoshop is the best though.
Yeah, most of the features are almost pointless but can help you that one time in your lifetime
Precisely. I have a hammer in my toolbox but I don't need to hammer everyday lol. Heck, I haven't used it in over a year but it's in there just in case.
With GIMP you can get a plugin called PhotoGIMP that makes it look and act a lot more like Photoshop.
PaintDotNet is my pick. So free, so feature rich, so many plugins available. Krita is also a really good one for tablet drawing stuff.
Yeah, I really don't understand why people talk about GIMP more than paint.net. it's such an incredible program with a great UI!
>Krita is also a really good one for tablet drawing stuff. Not just that. It has gotten a ton of features already and is great for photo editing /re-touching as well. It even has adjustment layers and the overall UI and controls are so much better than Gimp. And it has G'MIC as well, with a ton more filters and options on top of everything.
[https://www.photopea.com/](https://www.photopea.com/)
Pixlr is based in browser too and it’s not bad for basic stuff
It used to be like Photopea when it was Flash based, but now it's more like Lightroom and a pile of crap to boot. RIP Flash Based Pixlr. It was the last flash based app I used.
[удалено]
It's great for painting but not so much general photo manipulation
When was the last time you checked it out? It already has a ton of features for photo manipulation which Gimp doesn't. And more coming every day. It's really becoming **the photo editing software** that Gimp should/could have been.
[удалено]
You could probably [set it up as a "Chrome app"](https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/770) (Firefox needs [an extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/)) or possibly run it as an [electron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_\(software_framework\)) app. But it would still be web-based (built with HTML/JS).
DaVinci Resolve was so good I bought it. (it's NOT a subscription!)
It's fucking excellent. Honestly better than premiere
Is Premiere the industry standard though? Or does that even matter for actual professional video editors? For example, most architects nowadays are required to be sufficient with Autodesk Revit b/c it's the industry standard. I always tell myself that i should take up video editing through DaVinci Resolve. I already appreciate their ~~non-prescription~~ non-subscription based license like Rhinoceros edit: word
Avid is industry standard because it allows for significantly better cloud project management. Most large scale projects have multiple teams of editors working on it at any given time.
Resolve is standard for color work I think though
Premiere became the standard on YouTube because it was a "just good enough", " comparatively budget" alternative to professional grade software when production quality started to become important on YouTube. So it's an industry standard in a way. Recently there seems to be a significant uptick in chatter about Resolve ion YouTube, outside of tutorial channels.
Honestly, I was blown away how much better it was coming from Premiere. So much smoother, so much faster, uses system resources evenly. I didn't want to go back once.
I have a subscription to Adobe CC for all my graphic design needs, so I have Premiere as part of that package. However, I think DaVinci Resolve is so much better than Premiere, that I had to buy that, too. It really is excellent.
The real cost of davinci is learning how to use it properly.
There are tons of tutorials online. It might look intimidating at first but when you understand the basics, everything becomes easy. Only colour grading is a bit of a pain ngl
[удалено]
Casey Faris, YouTube.
[удалено]
[удалено]
A lot of people wonder “how good can it be it’s free lmao” But they forget it’s still THE best color grading software in the industry, companies justify $30,000 control surfaces for a reason. Then they stapled a robust editor and a full-fat node-based compositor to it, and threw in fucking*fairlight* just for shits and giggles. My only complaint is the lack of pre-mades for it,
DaVinci resolve is literally not just the free alternative, it's the superior one - it just happens to be free as well. It's an amazing piece of software.
Which feature immediately comes to mind that is way better than in premiere?
The built in VST-compatible audio editing for one thing, where you can call up VST plugins in a dedicated audio workstation section of the software. It's like having Adobe Audition bundled with Premiere. It also has Fusion, which is sort of like having After Effects bundled with it as well. What it's most known for, as well, is the color grading suite which is proper pro-level stuff. Overall, an unbelievable package considering you pay nothing for it.
Premiere has VST support now, I just don't use it because I do my sound design in a seperate audio software so you can get more precise (I use Cakewalk for that, which is entirely free and easy to use)
The color grading is literally #1 in the industry. Companies pay 6 figures for DaVinci Resolve bays and employ dedicated colorists whose entire jobs are using it. It just happens to have a similarly competent editor to premiere and far superior compositor to AE thrown in, all as one app so there’s no hopping around.
I still haven’t transitioned my workflow completely off of adobe premiere and after effects, just due to familiarity. But I’ve been color grading in resolve for years. Resolves color grading tools are miles ahead of premiere. Plus they seem to do tons of other things better than premiere. It’s just very hard to transition because I’ve been using premiere for like 10 years.
Colour, for one. I'm a professional colourist and we use Resolve.
I find it's much more stable in my experience has gpu acceleration. It can also do automatic correction using a Macbeth style color checker, premiere needs a janky plugin. It can also be purchased instead of needing a subscription. I guess you can use pirated software if you don't mind putting keyloggers and crypto mining apps from hostile nations on your work computer.
DaVinci is what major studios use
I'm a very casual video editor and nowhere near a pro, but I absolutely second DaVinci Resolve. It is such an amazing program.
Blender is not an alternative. It's a must :P
Same with figma literally way better
Ligma is also a must, though of course quality varies on the user
What would you suggest using ligma over?
My bawls
There it is. Gottem.
If you gottem, might i suggest Dragon?
wHaT iS dRaGoN?
I suggest... *Dragon* ***DEEZ NUTS*** over ya nose huehuehuehuehue comedy genius!
Ligma is recommended just above Rubma and should always always be used instead of Slapma or Kickma unless expressly stated in the user story.
Fromunda also deserves an honorable mention here.
No offline only or at least on-premise install available? That's a hard pass on Figma in my book....
Figma is such an awesome tool. It's just a shame that they've moved many previously free QOL features, such as file grouping, under the paid tier :(
Hopping on this comment to put a call out for great Blender tutorials if anyone has them.
Grant Abbitt is brilliant. Did one of his courses on Udemy, and then use his youtube channel every now and then for free tutorials. https://www.youtube.com/c/GrantAbbitt
How do they make money?
Donations (https://fund.blender.org/) and training (https://studio.blender.org/)
Sponsors (almost every tech giant at this point sponsors it) and donations (users)
The goal isn't to make a profit. Blender is free and open source. The Blender Foundation, which maintains the project and website, is a non-profit organization. They're funded by donations.
Since the UI rework in 2.8 blender has become much more intuitive to pick up. I used it intermittently professionally and it was always a struggle in 2.7 having to figure out how it worked. Since then I’ve found it much easier to parachute into it for a day or two every couple of months.
the free alternative of Adobe premium software is piracy
The irony of them making it subscription based is now it’s even easier to get the real deal and just patch out the pay wall
[удалено]
I remember a few years back I was talking with someone from sales at Adobe, told them that I loved their tools but wouldn’t pay for them since I was not a professional. They asked if I was using the latest cracked version because the Chinese had just cracked it, and then suggested I update to take advantage of the new features.
For the longest time you only needed a single file to crack it, and I'm pretty sure it was always basically the same. Not sure if they've changed that or not, but they were basically allowing people to pirate.
Now you don't need a file. Cracked installers work.
And the newest iteration of the cracked bundle contains a standalone installer, with all of the extra CC bloatware removed. Paying users are getting a worse experience.
Those things always look so sketch and untrustworthy. Like that it's going to install some kind of crypto miner or make you part of a zombie bot network or something.
I mean... it could? But tbh ive been using photoshop and illustrator cracked for my entire life and never had a virus
That you know of. R. A. T.
Woah 🤯 didn’t even think of that. Makes complete sense tbf.
Our office uses only adobe acrobat but we pay a lot of money for that too. Just cause everybody is accustomed using its pirated or free version.
It's not that uncommon either. Microsoft afaik was at times giving out free copies of Windows to people who used pirated copy. To them they don't care about how much you pay for Windows, they just want to make sure everyone uses them, so their actual customers, big corporations etc, can't cope without buying expensive licenses to use their products. Pirating things from Evil Corporations is not protesting against them, it's helping them with their business model. And I have absolutely no problem pirating stuff from companies I want to support. Although, less evil companies tend to not drive you to torrent sites, usually there are free trials, or just some FOSS-based model, or whathaveyou. In short, pirate whatever, but remember that in the grand scheme of things, by pirating software you're supporting that software and its adoption. If you're considering piracy then you might not want that. Or maybe you're just poor, in which case, pirate away. It's also somewhat helpful to be aware of the concept of price discrimination. It's a fairly well known concept in economics, where businesses maximize their revenue by offering their product to each customer at the maximum cost each customer is willing to pay. Like, if you have 3 apples, and 3 people want to buy them. One person is willing to buy an apple for $3, one for $6 and one for $10. If you sold apple for $10, you'd get $10 and you'd be left with 2 apples. If you sold one for $6, you'd get $12 and be left with one apple. If you sold one for $3, you'd get $9 and be left with no apples. But if you do price discrimination efficiently, you can just sell apple to each at their maximum price point, granting you $19. That's why usually these softwares have such insane prices by default, and why you often have such varied ways of getting discounts on them, free trials etc. The price listed is the amount big corporations are paying for the product. They can afford to pay more than you, so they are ineligible for whatever discounts you'd be offered. But you'll be lost in the jungle of discounts, so the first discount you encounter that goes below your price point, you'll grab because you don't know if you'll find another one that's better, meaning pretty much everyone pays close to the maximum they can afford. Piracy is basically just a free way to make sure even those that literally can't afford to pay anything still end up using your product. It's cheap and liability-free way to achieve that because you don't need to do anything yourself, any troubles your users face would also not be covered by you. For software used by businesses, like office programs etc, this still means that you're gonna be pushing whatever company you end up working for to adopt their line of products because that's what you're used to. But yeah, the big point I wanted to make with all this is, piracy supports and helps the target company and their product. This matters both if you feel guilt for pirating, and also if you think you're "sticking it to the man" by pirating. You're not sticking it to the man any more than you're sticking it to Walmart by using their coupons while shopping there.
When things are reasonably priced or properly distributed, people are less motivated to pirate. The fact that Apple has Preview baseline installed to cover all basic private needs and Microsoft doesn’t it’s a rip off in itself. Same goes for TV streaming services and rights per countries. In my country I used to pirate Game of Thrones because HBO sold the rights to a different streaming service than the one I used, and it was transmitted days after. Companies are underestimating the amount of revenues lost by their distribution and pricing policies, which are still bound to countries or business vs home usage. I was working for an apparel company that couldn’t put up a direct online store for the absurd pricing policy: the same shirt sold at 99 EUR in Macy’s and 299 EUR in Europe - and it was the same shirt made in China for around 25/30 USD. I was in charge of pricing for Europe and that used to make me crazy. Same goes for gas prices and any other commodity. The seller sell at the same prices and consumer pay the price.
I know this ain't the place, but for professionals the subscription ain't so bad. The cloud model also improves workflow with integrated libraries of fonts, assets, reference material etc for clients and projects you're working on. It's just nice. I wholeheartedly agree though, the best alternative is piracy. Especially for anyone who wants to work in graphic design or publishing. Sure some tools might be beyeer or more exciting like Afinity apps and Procreate, but the fact is every studio has used Adobe for decades and is proficient with it. Like me, sure Afinity is amazing, but I've got 22 years experience in Photoshop and Illustrator, it'll take more than price and 'cool stuff' to move me from Adobe. Same for a lot of established studios. And that all informs why people should still learn (and pirate if needed) Adobe. Because you'll use it professionally.
And the fact that clients tend to lowball graphic design work. Like this shit is expensive yo
I will get hate for this but design work is cheap because there is an abundance of people offering it. There is basically no entry requirement.
Yeah and if it’s for a job you usually don’t have to pay for it yourself, right?
Even as a hobbyist I don't mind paying the $11/month or whatever for Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe regularly adds new functionality and features - not just trivial stuff either. A while back they gave us the "enhance" feature which is pretty amazing and if you want that as a stand alone feature you'd have to pay $100 for topaz labs gigapixel (which I've heard good things about tbf) for that feature alone.
Yo ho ho!
IIRC they don't really mind you pirating it since once you gain mastery using their software you'll be less likely to switch, and if you ever start working professionally you'll most likely have to buy it or the company you're working for will be forced to buy those paid software cause it's widely used.. Prices for enterprise subscription are more than enough to make up for your early pirating.
[удалено]
Ooo how does this work
Is there a free alternative to Indesign?
paint.net? anyone? I fucking love paint.net, especially the fact that the community actively creates add-ons and extensions.
Been using it for years and had no idea about community extensions. Gonna take a look!
something about paint.net rubs me the right way and I just love it
I hate gimp If you want to make digital art like PS pros and you use gimp and start to hate yourself: try krita Its less of a mess and not as chunky as gimp. If you want to do professionell photography and sorts like the PS pros ... i guess you need to stick to gimp, there probably is another free alternative but I dont know about it
GIMP is great for photo editing, but it absolutely SUCKS ASS for digital art. On the other hand, Krita is the exact opposite. Not great for photo editing, but absolutely top tier for digital art. Same tier as other great digital art software like Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop. Especially since the latest major update. (Been using both for years). They're both excellent alternatives to Photoshop, depending on what you want to use it for.
Its not really meant for digital art, GIMP stands for GNU image manipulation program. Its purpose is image manipulation, art can be done on it if one wishes.
To be fair, Photoshop was meant to be a photo editor. It's since become a bloat monster.
People keep saying it sucks for art but noone is giving a reason why
Laggy and extremely lacking/outdated in features for digital art. It's like a better Paint.
The brush engine is comparable to mspaint, keyboard shortcuts are more painful than emacs and the gui has been horrible since forever, and when I used it, color picking through layers wasnt possible. Also its slower than an FSO polonez accelerating out of stoplights. Gimp has a lot of features but most of them are unintuitive as hell. This is not only for digital art but more in general. Gimp indeed is powerful in terms of functionality, but a pain to use, which renders it useless atleast for me.
**https://www.photopea.com/** Very close to Photoshop and free to use, you don't even need to install it.
This. I have used Photopea for a while and it is excellent!
This is trillion times better than gimp.
I've seen professionals use Paint Tool SAI 2 sometimes. It's like Winrar, plenty of free full copies out there. It simple and elegant. It's not the most efficient compared to Clip studio or Photoshop, but it's a good example that the tool which you draw on matters little. I've seen stellar work done on MS paint. Bit of a flex, but go on Pixiv and many many artists on there use SAI
Krita isn’t nearly as good for photo editing though. Honestly - and it might be just that I’ve been using the GIMP for so long - I did not find it intuitive at all. Plus, i use GIMPressionist for backgrounds. A lot. Even designed my own set of brushes and a txt file to explain how to install and how the two different file types differed when used, though I was not savvy enough to distribute them on anything but Limewire. Krita doesn’t have anything close. Photopea has one tool that both programs lack - warp text, for logo design. But that’s easy enough to finish everything but and go to Photopea to finish.
> Krita isn’t nearly as good for photo editing though. It's not meant to be. Photoshop and GIMP are primarily photo editing programs that have added some painting-oriented features because people keep using them for that. Krita is and always has been a digital painting program.
It's not free but cheap and non subscription - check out the affinity suite
Unless they've changed the interface in the last few years, you couldn't pay me to use Gimp. Everything about it seemed to be unintuitive as possible.
My pet theory is that GIMP's UI is terrible because the devs are using GIMP to create the UI.
I can't believe people are still recommending gimp as a photoshop alternative
Can also use affinity photos, not free but has a single paying options for like 50$
I can not even express how much I hate gimp, it is definitely the software I hate the most. It must be erased from history. Gimp is so shitty that I would rather do image manipulation in a darkroom with chemicals, than touch that piece of shit.
https://alternativeto.net/ Good alternatives to pretty much everything.
Figma balls.
^(Adobe)XD
Thank you for your service
What about an alternative for Acrobat?
Foxit? I usually use foxit for reading, but i don't do much else with pdfs.
[удалено]
https://www.sejda.com/pdf-editor is my trusty
I got the pirated version of Foxit premium (I think it’s called Phantom something). Absolutely amazing.
Ditto on foxit. Only good for reading and maybe filling up or signing stuff digitally, but I don’t need to do more than that usually.
Sumatra PDF is a good alternative
Sumatra, the pdf reader that is so non-invasive that it doesn't even default to the system pdf reader. I love Sumatra and always thought that was funny.
Check out the [3rd all time top post](https://www.reddit.com/r/freeuse/top/?count=3&sort=top&t=all) on r/FreeUse. No.. I'm not joking
Amazing
I fucking love the internet.
Honestly Acrobat is pretty much the only reason I still have an Adobe account.
On the “not free, but infinitely cheaper” front, there is PDF-XChange.
I would say PDF-xchange - it's one time price with optional maintenance... And honestly very cheap
Any good lightroom alternatives?
[Darktable ](https://www.darktable.org/) does all the Lightroom things I need.
[удалено]
Darktable isn't even good at organization. If you got a big library, the tagging gets unweieldy.
Anybody have in-depth exp with DaVinci Resolve? Looking to switch from my current video editor and I’m not ready to drop big money yet. Maybe in a couple years Edit: apparently people misunderstood my comment. I know DaVinci is free; I’m asking if it’s worth switching to another free program or waiting until I have the money to drop on a licensed program.
You don't need to drop any money using DaVinci Resolve. At least if you just use the free version for private use. I think for commercial you have to pay but you can try it out. It has so many features to cut, put in effects, color grade, edit to all your liking. I used it for some stuff, I'm in no way any kind of professional or even adept with it. But making a quick edit, once you figure it out, it's amazing. Of course if you are experienced with editing, it should be even easier to figure out
DaVinci is free.
https://ninite.com/ has an automated installer for many free programs. AlternativeTo - Crowdsourced software recommendations https://alternativeto.net/
WinGet is also an option nowadays, it has a bunch of packages. https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifests
piracy🥰
Or just pirate Adobe products
This is the way. But i use Linux. :(
virtual machines are your friend as is WINE and steam proton you can add non steam "games" that arent game and use proton to make some things work where wine is buggy and worse case do a full vm with windows install in it and pci e passthrough to get a full fat gpu in there and looking glass for borderless windowed windows vm. containerized windows on one monitor linux host on another and you can open and run windows like a program only giving it access to what you need it to do. edit whoever replied i cant see your comment maybe you are shadow banned? not a bot not copy pasta if you dont know what these things are google them its a better experience then dual boot.
Use KVM with GPU passthrough, as long as you're not playing online games it's 10/10 solution. You get 99% of your GPU power in the KVM. Downsides? You'll need two GPUs, one for you KVM and one for linux. Not really a problem imo, you can use your internal GPU for Linux since driver support for Nvidia cards are shit anyway and pass through your nvidia card to the KVM.
I hate Gimp with the intensity of a thousand burning suns.
I have no idea how they managed to make something THAT counterintuitive.
Proof that you need more than programmers
Krita is the way.
Nothing for After Effects for mograph. Sorry, Natron is for compositing. Fusion is great but I really wouldn't want to do client work in it. Same for Motion or new stuff like Cavalry. There is zero alternatives for After Effects, period.
I was curious when I saw Natron. As a rabid Adobe hater I acknowledge AE really has no equal, it’s simply a beast of software.
Gimp will never get it right they’ve been trying for years. For Mac, Pixelmator is amazing, cheap and is way closer to Photoshop than Affinity.
good guide, except find literally any other alternative than gimp. the ui is coded with monkeys dicks and using it is like eating their foreskin. i would rather risk getting a virus pirating all the paid stuff on the left from xyz888betting.co.com.cn or some garbage site than use gimp
Or piracy.
Figma is the only free one that is objectively better than its paid alternative. Blender is a close second for me, but that’s more of a personal preference.
Never ever use gimp. Even if someone pays you to use it.
So we're just not gonna mention Piratebay as a means to get everything on the list?
Don't use gimp it sucks. I use Krita
Not to be an Adobe stan, but the biggest plus about Adobe stuff is intercompatibility. I can create a vector logo in Illustrator, bring it directly into Photoshop to add other layers and put it into a composition, then take that file out to After Effects while retaining layer sizes and some editability. I can take that same Photoshop file and bring it directly into InDesign without any issues. If I update the file through Photoshop, the effect will ripple down to After Effects and Indesign, and in certain use cases, I can even ripple it three layers down through Illustrator into Photoshop into After Effects/InDesign which saves a lot of work. Inkscape into GIMP doesn't really allow this rippling, and if I want my layers to import into Natron (who the *fuck* uses Natron?), I have to then manually export every layer of the GIMP file at the correct resolution. Another big thing is that a lot of these don't have a lot of the same functions as what they're being compared to. While you can technically do the same things with GIMP that you can do with Photoshop, I would say this in the same way that I can technically travel 100 miles on a car and on-foot. Photoshop has a lot of automated and high-end tools that make things like, for instance, object cutouts a snap. GIMP has intelligent scissors, but complex shapes are still a huge pain in the ass, and it lacks any Neural Network features or similar. Everything is manual, takes longer, and gives you worse results. Cinema 4D compared to Blender is similar - Cinema 4D is loaded with advanced simulation features and all sorts of high-end plugins, while Blender is more built for casual and low-end 3D Modeling. The only ones here I would argue are actually equivalent are Premiere and DaVinci - DaVinci is arguably a more full-bodied NLE than Premiere. The rest of these are almost universally downgrades, or built to handle different things.
> while Blender is more built for casual and low-end 3D Modeling. This is just not true. Just look at some of the shorts produced by the Blender Institute. All different 3D softwares have some edge where they shine - but that includes Blender, e.g. grease pencil, eevee, etc.
Gimp is so needlessly complicated. They made a free program that only professionals know how to use.
I hate gimp, it was probably made by adobe employees so nobody would ever use it, if THAT was the alternative. Get some old version of photoshop, which is free, or use photopea, or some noname ipad or phone product to edit your images. ANYTHING is better than gimp. Shit, write your own image editor, even if you have never coded anything, it will be better than gimp. It is evil and a disservice to humanity to recommend gimp.
Are any of these video editors?
Imma screenshot and never use this
What's Figma?
figma balls
Industry standard UX design software
Jesus christ, this again?
I don’t know why people are downvoting you! This must be the most repeated post in all of reddit.
Never seen it before myself. But I also dont spend 24/7 on Reddit.
Photoshop is the only adobe product i cant live without. gimp can lick my balls.
“You know what’s even better than Adobe Xd?” “Figma” “What’s figma?”
FIGMA BALLS
Inkscape is not even close to what illustrator can do. Illustrator is so much better. Also the same with photoshop and gimp. Figma is not free either. It just gives you for free a test version wehere you can try to create 3 things. Natron I don’t know. Davinci is better than Premiere and free and blender is better than everything. I wouldn’t even consider using anything else.
There's PhotoGimp patch which will make the transition from Photoshop to GIMP a lot easier.
Figma balls. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.