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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."
Yeah, pirated software is really appropriate for education....
How 'bout GIMP?
GIMP
and
CMYK support for The GIMP
In addition to the gimp (linux / mac / win ) ... check out scribus which does a pretty good job of reproducing most of what indesign does, and is quite stable.
I'll get flamed to a crisp for this but there's no alternative to photoshop. Gimp is clumsy and underpowered.
Free Alternatives:
Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape
InDesign -> Scribus
Web Design -> Kompozer, which is a bugfix release of Nvu (there's actually a lot of these, I've also heard Microsoft Visual Web Dev Express, which has a lot of praise from various people)
Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...
I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.
He say 1 and 1 and 1 is 3, got to be good lookin' cause hes so hard to see...
I tried Scribus about a year ago, and it was nowhere near as good as InDesign or QuarkXpress. It included only the most basic features, and even lacked some of those. Also, it was far from a professional-level interface - I had a hard time finding the functions I needed, and the interface was far from intuitive. I would put it maybe on par with MS Publisher, but it was nowhere near being in the same class as InDesign and QuarkXpress.
As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.
other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/
ZDNet has an article on that very subject.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I run 100% on Linux except in this domain. CorelDraw suite is dirt cheap compared to Adobe, has both vector and bitmap (Great CMYK support) and is a solid worker. My graphic artist friends describe it as a production tool instead of a creative tool, but they got work to pay for their copies of CS3. I cannot wait for Xara to finish their Corel import filter - Or for Corel to get back into Linux app market (Yup, I'm a dreamer!). Newer versions with new MS installer isn't working under WINE yet, so I run a copy on XP inside Virtualbox.
But I increasingly create alot of my artwork in Inkscape as vector exported to target size in bitmaps (like glass looking buttons...) that I used to do 100% as bitmap. Makes custom art soooo much faster.
Krita in the KOffice suite has CYMK, nice controls, but lacks the vast the plugin library we have become accustomed to. It will come I am sure.
1 Dachshund + 1 Dachshunds = A Paradox.
The one that doesn't support more than 8 bits per channel.
Oh yeah?
Raster Graphics (Photoshop alternatives): GIMP - although I only use this for web design which it does a good job of. The aforementioned CMYK plugin looks interesting if you're in a print environment.
:)
Vector Graphics (Illustrator alternatives): I prefer Xara Xtreme (which has an open sourced version available) over Inkscape.
Desktop Publishing (Indesign alternatives): Scribus looks the business, can anyone tell me if Scribus can import RGB Tiff's (for example) and colour separate them for print?
Video Editing (Premiere alternatives): Cinelerra - A pain to install, crashes like a madman and exporting video is trial and error; but it beats all the other simple video editors hands down.
Web Design (Dreamweaver alternatives): There's a few out there, but none as good as Dreamweaver by far. I do most of my web design using PHP and hardcoding the websites with xhtml and CSS. I personally use Eclipse with a few choice plugins for this purpose.
Cinelerra and Scribus only run under Linux (although there may be MacOS versions?). This may not be suitable for your situation, but heck, how much does it take to install a dual boot system on a computer nowadays?
All these apps are pretty good for educational purposes. I wouldn't dare argue they're any good for production purposes, as the closed-source products are simply miles ahead in every way. If you're starting out and can't afford the full packages though, or are only interested in learning the concepts/creating a portfolio etc. then they do the job just fine and dandy
And just for the heck of it, a good 3D modelling/animation program is Blender.
Let's add jEdit (http://www.jedit.org/) to the list... my current favorite editor.
"!"
As a designer, I've been working close on 10 years in Photoshop (on a daily basis), and nothing gets close to it, everything else seems clumsy.
There are many alternatives, but none of them offer what Adobe's products offer. Some may argue that many applications are closing in on tools like Photoshop, but I firmly believe that the support for these programs is what makes it so dominating.
I am a professional Photoshop user and have become one thanks to the vast amount of tutorials and discussions that relate directly to Photoshop. I know Gimp and I know Paint Shop Pro, but aside from the fact that none of these tools are quite as extensive as Photoshop, you still want that large community to back you up when you need help.
To answer the question of the main article, I would say that the best alternative to Photoshop is yet another Adobe product: Photoshop Elements. It's a capped version of Photoshop at some $100 in retail stores. This is fully comparable to Paint Shop Pro, which is about the same price.
Full Tilt
They don't.. but if they want to make a dynamic webpage, for a company, for money, they better know HTML. When a page is dynamic, the page needs to be designed with that in mind. You're not designing a flyer, you're designing something that can change drastically depending on what flows into it.
Basically, a web designer who doesn't know html is going to have a hard time finding a job.
Serif has some good stuff www.serif.com and some cheaper/free stuff (mostly older versions I think) via www.freeserifsoftware.com
On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.
Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.
I'm a keen photographer, and any processing of digital photographs that I do is done using PaintShop Pro (actually quite an elderly version now...something like 7.2).
I'm a member of a local camera and photography club, and just about everyone there who uses digital phot editing software uses some version or another of Adobe Photoshop. It's very good, very capable and is the de facto standard.
I've sat with people and watched them do manipulations using Photoshop and I have to say that so far I have seen little if anything done in Photoshop that I couldn't replicate in PaintShopPro (for general editing - Photoshop can do some pretty way out things with filters, but that's not really my thing)
If you're serious that CMYK printing is one of the goals you want to accomplish, you've really no choice but to pony up for professional applications. Printing is not cheap, you'll spend hundreds of dollars per job at the printer, any money you "save" on software is guaranteed to be paid many times over to the printer for fixing your files and getting them ready for press. Making software that works for prepress requires spending lots of money on paper and ink experiments, money that GIMP and Scribus simply cannot spend unless a sponsor steps up.
If all you're trying to do is educate the users about CMYK, then of course you can use pretty much any software that works nicely with a desktop inkjet printer that can do CMYK proofing (in a pinch Photoshop can be used as a RIP for this purpose assuming you have one copy of it). Of course no proof is ever the same as a real print, so eventually people will hit a wall in their real knowledge until big $$$ is spent on real jobs that you get back from the printer and realize were not quite as good as they thought they'd be.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I would start it with nvu, which is a WYSWYG html editor, not just an ordinary text editor.
There's also bluefish and quanta.
Cinepaint is certainly worth a look if you need something for simple operations on high bit depth imnages (e.g. retouching, levels, scaling sharpening etc) It's not photoshop, but it does work. Although there is a new design in the works (glasgow), the original gimp forked version is still under development and has become quite stable. I have run several hundred raw 16 Megapixel images from my Canon 1Ds through it without a burp. What has happened to the gimp is truly a shame. Once one of the leading Linux applications, it is now 10 years behind the hardware. Whether by contribution or by fork, imaging on Linux needs a lot of help.
No doubt that I would agree with the parent 100%. GIMP may be acceptable for casual doodler or cropping photos, but it ultimately a complete waste of time for any professional accustomed to a plethora of serious tools and a myriad of features used daily to make a living. We don't even have to discuss its' intolerable user interface because GIMP's graphic capabilities are not even in the same ballpark as Photoshop.
However, one may be able replace some of the other software depending on how you used it. The original poster framed the scenario as tools for the marketing department to use, which clearly lowers the bar in terms of expectations as to what level of competency will be applied. Marketers are not designers, so it would appear as though if Software X does a reasonable job approximating most tasks of Adobe Y, then one can adopt it.
Photoshop - You're unlikely to replace that one. Although, someone else mentioned Pixel which could possibly cut the mustard depending on your needs. Otherwise, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop.
Illustrator - Definitely have a strong look at Inkscape. I've toyed with it for 2 or 3 years to keep tabs on its' development, after being fairly impressed during my first run through. These days it has continued to advance and I'd suggest it's ready for the professional world. You can create substantially complex pieces with Inkscape which will probably far out-pace the ability of your Marketing department to bother learning in the first place. While it might be missing a pet feature or two, the bottomline is that Inkscape is ready to be taken seriously as a replacement for Illustrator (and, previously, FreeHand).
InDesign - Professionals already use Scribus to handle multipage full color layouts sent directly to commercial print houses, so it's gotta be worth your time to look at. CMYK separation, PDF generation,and much of the toolsets you'd expect to see in Quark or InDesign; certainly more than enough power for your Marketing department.
Acrobat Pro - If you're heavily using features like annotation, collaboration, form creation, et cetera, then you probably won't be replacing Acrobat Professional. Nothing can touch it. However, if all you need is to be able to allow your Marketing droids to generate PDFs from documents they create in other software, then you can slap PDFCreator on their little Windows boxen. Remember that OpenOffice already has the ability to turn any of their normal documents and spreadsheets into a PDF at a click of a button. Surely, you've dumped MS Office by now.
Dreamweaver - This is a tough one because you should probably rethink your environment to realize you most likely don't really want Dreamweaver to be used. Unless you're just using Slashdot to conveniently survey the geek mindshare, the odds are that WYSIWYG is an old paradigm no longer needed by most scenarios. What you probably want is some kind of content management engine which your key tech person(s) can administer such that your Marketing department can monkey with the website(s). One engine could be adapted to various websites, if you proposed such a need. If I were to suppose someone was trolling Slashdot, then I would mention Quanta Plus before realizing Marketing droids would be helplessly confined to Windows and thus I'd point to Nvu as your capable hero.
But, really, if an evaluation of your technical needs leads you back to WYSIWYG, then you've made a logical error somewhere. The days for that hobbled solution are definitely over.
There you have it! Free and open source software is up to the challenge is most regards. Where there are shortcomings, there are adept proprietary solutions for far, far less than the onerous cost of Adobe
Yep, lack of CMYK is a significant limitation in the GIMP, and it has some issues. I wouldn't characterize it as a "toy" by any stretch, however, and I've found it quite capable for much of the work I do. The biggest day-to-day complaint I run into is its' inferior performance and previews as compared to Photoshop.
I don't consider lack of 16 bit RGB support a crippling problem for all workflows. Certainly, along with limited RAW support and lack of any sort of ICC colour management it's a problem for high-end photography work, but it's not really a killer for many uses. In fact, the newspaper I work with uses 8-bit colour all the way through its workflow at the moment - and while we'd probably benefit from moving to 16-bit colour for image archival and manipulation, it really doesn't make that much difference for many uses.
I have a much bigger problem with the lack of ICC colour support and CMYK support. You need at least one or the other for a print-targeted workflow, with both strongly preferable. If you only have ICC colour support, you'll need DTP apps that can do the right thing with tagged images, and you won't want to be working on really difficult images that need fine-tuning after colour space conversion. And if you only have CMYK support you'd better have a decent external tool with ICC colour support to the RGB->CMYK conversion, or the result will be muck.
It's exciting to see all the work going in to GEGL (the core for the new GIMP revision with much-improved support of ICC colour, multiple colour spaces, higher bit depths, non-destructive workflow, etc) and I can't wait until some of that starts appearing in a reasonably usable form. Their approach to non-destructive editing & history is the first thing I've seen in GIMP that makes me sit up and take notice when working on Photoshop.
It really depends on what you are doing and what your requirements are. Everybody will say that for serious prepress there are no alternatives. If you are really serious about prepress I want to see your hardware calibrated monitors otherwise you are just pissing in the wind.
There is no doubt that Adobes tools are good and that there is little in the way of serious competition. The reason for this either you earn enough money that the asking price doesn't really factor into things or you pirate it. Lets face it - piracy of this sort of thing is rampant. The effect of this is well little in the way of serious competition.
Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia also hurt competition quite a bit. Macromedia was leading Adobe in the web based field and was the most viable compeditor in a few other markets.
Anyways there are alternatives. First stop is to check out the Corel Suite - I personally don't recommend it, But I know plenty of businesses who use it to make real money and employ real people.
On the OSS side there is Scribus for DTP/PDF Creation. Its fairly fast moving - I recommend version 1.3.4 which was just released. It is capable of professional work and has been used to that end. It may or may not have everything you require for prepress - for me bleed setting is the one thing I need which hasn't been implemented yet. One thing to note is that scribus lets you create scripted pdf documents.
Inkscape is another very worthy tool - While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Illustrator.. I find it has all the functionality that I would use on a regular basis. Again this project is fast moving at the moment
so try and get the latest version.
For photo editing there is Krita & the Gimp - you won't have access to krita yet unless you are running on free OS (I think) but it supports a lot of the things that the gimp does not including HDR and CMYK colour spaces. the main area it falls down is performance. The gimp is not so bad or good as people make out. It has a its own logic on how to do things (unfortunately this logic is typically alien to somebody who has spent years using photoshop)... When you are used to it can be quite smooth (I had this pointed out to me by somebody watching me work) - but this is all a moot point if the Gimp does not provide all the features you need. It may not.
The webdev I am sure has been covered elsewhere - In the OSS world there are good programmers editors and good basic WYSIWYG environments. Nothing that gives you the mix of power and convienience that Dreamweaver does. Still there are alternatives depending on your requirements.
1) If you are working in sRGB you have constrained yourself to a very small gamut. Yes, it looks better on the screen, but it will look clipped and posterized in print. 2) TIFF is not a good archival format. But if you work in JPEG, you end up getting a degraded image. Every time you close and reopen the image you are recompressing the file. With a TIFF, this is not a problem since the compression is lossless. Since JPEG is lossy, opening and resaving the file degrades the image. 3) You are correct in saying that CMYK is not device independent. However, most folks know the kind of press they are using. That being said, working in RGB is a much better call--you can always convert to CMYK at the end of the process.
--Sam
The site Open Source alternative may be of some help here. It lists open source alternatives to many commercial pieces of software. In this case:
Photoshop > Paint.NET
Illustrator > Inkscape
Acrobat > PDF Creator
Flash > Open Laszlo
Dreamweaver > Nvu...or a good text editor
and so on. I urge everybody to check it out though if you're looking for some more bits of software to play with.
...while GIMP was quite useful for resizing and retouching photos for the web site, we ran into serious limitations as soon as we tried to produce material for printing (biz cards, trade show banners, etc.).
GIMP does not support Pantone(tm) colors, so we cannot use it for accurate color matching. This means that, even when we get the color exactly the way we want it on our screen and printer, it is likely to come out way different on a professional printer, i.e., the one your printer will likely use to print biz cards, letterhead, trade show banners, etc. For example, some of the professional HP printers are notorious for rendering what you think as blue into a purple-ish color. We end up squandering everyone's time in a guess-the-actual-color game to get even close to the color we intended.
With Pantone support, the problem is solved because we'll select the EXACT colors we want using the standard color swatches from their kit, and our printer will be able to reliably print these EXACT colors.
Since the info I've found indicates that GIMP does not even plan to support Pantone, we must switch, probably to Photoshop, if for no other reason that it is the industry standard, and we'll have a greater level of exchange and collaboration with our printers.
So, I'm sorry to say that my open-source bias has again bitten me in the arse. I knew better than to have skipped past my product research, but I just went for the OS solution. Now, I've squandered valuable time in a startup biz learning the quirks of software that will now be replaced. There, I've said it, so mod me down.
It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?
It's an even bigger shame to see people use software from companies that created and perpetuate that "intellectual property" model. Every person trained to use their tools is a vote for their software and model. Scribus, inkscape, GIMP, bluefish and many other tools make good replacements for non free software.
Getting all of it to work on XP is another matter. It there is really something XP has that he needs, dual booting or Parallels should be used. Like all software, free tools are much easier to install and maintain on free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you are looking for an IDE replacement to Dreamweaver, check out http://www.evrsoft.com/, and pick up 1st page. I have used them off and on for a lot of years. I mainly use Dreamweaver, but I find it very easy to switch between them.
Serious problems with CorelDRAW in a real (pre-)press environment:
1) Custom shading effects that can't be represented correctly in any format other than CDR, although it pretends to do so with PDFs.
2) Crashes more than PageMaker on complex (> 8 pages with 4 elements per page...) documents (even on the recently updated X3)
3) A confused sense of colour management where colour spaces aren't simply unavailable, but misrepresented, often to the point that it looks like someone sent a l*a*b document through the RIP...
4) Horrible object frame rendering, such that contents only appear on certain zoom levels, even though clicking or selecting the objects will highlight the conents...
5) Poorly implemented file backup strategy that decides to randomly automatically backup a 100 MB file without warning, by saving a complete copy of it under a different name
5a) Poorly implemented file recovery strategy such that it locks itself into a repeating crash/recovery cycle after crashing to multiple borked files
6) Poorly implemented file structure which borks an entire document if some kinds of external linkages/files aren't immediately available
7) Poorly implemented typeface/font substitution strategy which does not appear to know about TTF/ODF hinting
8) Files not previewable at more than 96x96 DPI by any non-Corel app
9) Exported EPS files that are somehow neither postscript, nor enhanced postscript
10) Poor handling of latin-1, especially j/k on glyphs outside of those in common use in Western Europe.
I would have to disagree that it's "very high quality, at a quarter of the price", especially when poor software design/implementation choices would cost me as much in lost productivity in one day as purchasing CS3.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
My short answer is: It all depends on what you need.
My long answer is:
When looking for an affordable alternative to CS, you need to look at different things. First, the feature set. You mention that you're looking for printing and CMYK output, which tells me that you look for a package that does photo-editing, vector illustration and page layout, all this with with the capability to output for professional printers (e.g. color separation and more). I guess you're also looking for color management and potentially also for spot color support such as Pantone.
The second aspect you should consider is the actual user of the product. As you mention, you look at a product that can be used and learned by people who are not necessarily trained in graphics, and who might also not be the most power-users when it comes to computers in general. If the software could help them a little throughout the process of "discovery" it, that would certainly help you with your training.
In addition, as you're talking about your company, the IT department might have a say in the software you use. According to your post, you're mainly in a Windows environment, so I guess the IT team uses a tool such as SMS to manage the desktop software. They will be looking for a package that is network deployable and easy to maintain on multiple computers.
Now, if you're a CS user, you are certainly also looking at a package that is compatible with your product (PSD, AI and PDF file formats) and potentially also that is not to difficult for you to get used to, so that you can have both side by side.
If this matches what you're looking for, I would recommend you try out CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 and see for yourself. If you have any questions about the product, a great place to go is http://coreldraw.com/.
And to add a little disclaimer: I am part of the CorelDRAW product management team, so some of you might consider this comment biased. I understand that and all I am saying is that you should find out for yourself and get your product questions answered by Corel of the CorelDRAW community.
Gérard