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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."
GIMP
and
CMYK support for The GIMP
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 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
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.
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.
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.
...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.