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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

And now all of the Figma users are saying "Oh [crap]... now I need to find a new tool to use." When is the last time Adobe acquired something and it improved? They destroyed Fireworks and Dreamweaver when they acquired Macromedia (which they only did because they wanted Flash). At this point I'm tempted to swear off Adobe products entirely -- except that the combo of Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard for photography.

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I'm not enough of a power user to use a lot of the more advanced & unique features of photoshop, but a few years back I switched to Gimp & Inkscape for managing product photos & wire diagrams of things I need to laser cut. It's a bit more clunky and too a few weeks to learn the differences enough to get done what I needed to, but by now I have no need for any paid product much less one from a corporation that was a nightmare to deal with.

For anyone looking for an alternative I'd highly recommend checking out these alternatives. Especially with the devoted communities that provide a wide range of plugins it's possible to map a lot (not all) use cases onto these alternatives.

I'm not sure there are similar alternative to things like lightroom & after effects, and it may be that Adobe's ability to have a tight integration of the production pipeline through these produces can't easily be duplicated. But if your needs a little simpler, check these out.

Premiere and After Effects are also industry standards for video, Illustrator is the industry standard for illustrators, and I'm sure there's more I don't know about. As far as producing industry-standard products in the creative sphere, who is better than Adobe?

Davinci Resolve is quickly eating up Premiere/After Effects in VFX/film. Currently getting popular in small studios, but that's how it starts. Just like Blender is now a real competitor in 3D.

I prefer Affinity Designer a thousand times.

After Effects was one of the best pieces of software ever made around the CS6 era, it was insane how powerful it felt and how solid it was to work with while being so modular.

It's a shadow of its former self now and can't even play the timeline without the audio cutting out and pitch shifting. My Core 2 Duo laptop could do that a decade ago, my M1 Max and high end PC can't because Adobe broke playback years ago and never fixed it.

I try to avoid them like the plague. Affinity while not nearly as supported and feature rich....it doesn't stab and bleed me monthly for the privilege of bloatware...

How is Affinity Designer less feature rich? It has great features like corner rounding and interactive path offsetting that I cannot find in Figma? Also, Last time I looked Figma did not even allow skewing of objects.

Well, for a start, you can't set a stroke width less than 0.1mm, which may sound like a useless edge-case, but makes it useless as a single-point tool for designs to be sent to Lasers or CNC machines that run off a print driver.

Also, the workflow's quite clunky.

Still, I've bought it and Photo, just because I want them to one day better Illustrator and Photoshop.

- ed Sorry - 'less than 0.1pt', not 0.1mm. Samediff ultimately.

I agree. It depends on what you do with the program as to how it compares to Illustrator. From a prepress perspective where I would use it to rip apart and fix graphic files so they print properly, Affinity Designer has a long way to go. For designing it's not too bad and slowly catching up. It is also the only one I have found so far that supports Pantone....

No line trace.

On the audio side of things: Cool Edit Pro 2 became Adobe Audition, which was single-license but of course has since been SaaS-ed. It was never as popular as Pro Tools, Cubase, etc but it was my goto DAW (as a hobbyist) for a long time.

Apple's work in last few years on Logic Pro has it lightyears ahead of Audition, and I wouldn't even call Apple the most popular product in that space right now (oh hi, Ableton)

They have continued to let frame.io flourish since they bought them. I wonder if this will follow a similar model. Let's hope.

I give it a year before they dip their toes into Creative Suite integrations.

While it's true that Gimp can't compete with Photoshop, Lightroom has some very stiff competition in Darktable, RawTherapee and ART. In fact, depending on how you look at it, Darktable may actually be the better/more powerful raw editor.

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