Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite?

jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."

Comments

Re:CYMK TIFF is a backwards tradition that must di

[segedunum]

You can't leave the conversion from sRGB to the printer's CMKY profile to the printer. Your sRGB image might contain colours that are impossible to print on CMKY.

That's why he advocated ditching CMYK, because it isn't device independent. After all these years, and especially in the digital age, this sort of thing should have gone the way of the dodo, but I rather suspect that CMYK has persisted because it makes people think that they look clever and to get people to hand over cash for something that now shouldn't exist.