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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."
Now, let's be honest: there's no such thing as an alternative to Adobe's creative suite.
There's nothing out there that can compete in ease of use, or power. Someone mentioned superior tools to web design (notepad, for example) and I can agree there. But for the rest of the products mentioned (among them, photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.) there's nothing else that can hold a candle up to Adobe.
My page.
I'll get flamed to a crisp for this but there's no alternative to photoshop. Gimp is clumsy and underpowered.
/.? I doubt it.
Get flamed for bashing gimp on
Gimp is an alternative for photoshop in much the same way Openoffice is an alternative to MSoffice or linux is an alternative to OS X.
It depends on the job at hand. Sometimes the OSS tool is better for the job, at other times the proprietary tool is better for the job.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
This one really is a no-brainer -- you get what you pay for. Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc. etc. are best-of-breed pieces of software. They're actually quite good, and probably worth the exorbitant license fees you will pay in productivity improvement, quality of output, employee frustration (lessened), support, usability, compatibility, you name it. They're standard for a reason, and Adobe is a fairly good company in that they haven't taken that for granted.
"!"
But that's like comparing a Civic to a Ferrari.
A reliable, economical, easy to drive car compared to something that's beautiful, but too powerful & expensive to buy & maintain for 99.99% of users?
Is that really the sort of analogy you wanted to make?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Hm, that's slightly ignorant -- in that case, shouldn't they be designing web pages and not coding them? Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but seriously--designers will be designers, some will work best in a WYSIWYG environment where design--not code--is the focus. I would say these people should learn as quickly as possible how to code the designs they make that way, but for some, they really are most interested in the design. Good design tools like Dreamweaver that allow you to ignore the code in most cases are fairly good for that purpose.
"!"
1.) Someone suggests an open source alternative to [graphics-editor/word-processor/audio-management]
2.) Someone comments on the sheer mediocrity of aforementioned $ALTERNATIVE.
3.)
a. Someone brings up $ALTERNATIVE good points
-or-
b. Someone disses $LEADING_PRODUCT's management, pricing system, ethics, etc.
4.) Someone mentions that aforementioned is irrelevant to the quality of the $LEADING_PRODUCT, then complains more about $ALTERNATIVE
5.) Someone runs out of retorts, says "Go code it for yourself."
6.) Someone comments on how they had sessions of lengthy, drawn-out fornication with your mother; alternatively, your sexual preference.
Hopscotch - an online comic.
It sounds like you are contemplating buying one copy of the entire premium suite for everyone. Probably overkill. Find out which apps they need and buy only those. If you can get the price down you will quickly cross the "unproductivity and training for poorly-documented apps exceeds the cost of commercial apps that have great resources available at your local book store" threshold.
"I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite."
You've said it yourself, use older versions. Your marketing colleagues don't need the most recent versions. On ebay, you could probably pick up a few training videos and training manuals real cheap too, since the training stuff for old software loses its value as quickly -- if not quicker -- than the software it supports.
If the cost is still prohibitive, you could probably buy an old PC (or an old Mac), and have your coworkers share the station whenever they need to use the software. That's the thing with this kind of software, since it's not their primary job to do graphic design -- they may not all need to use the same graphic design software at the same time.
I realize you may just be looking for a place to complain, and perhaps my unsympathetic suggestions were not what you were looking for, but really -- look around some other businesses -- many businesses are still using Windows 98 -- and they're doing fine.
More like a Model T to a 2007 BMW M5.
The BMW drives in style and fast, gets full service for free (4 years of 50,000 miles), has touch-screen interfaces and 8-point surround audio that plays all the formats, and gets you where you need to go quickly and elegantly. Did I mention it's a brand new model, just out this year?
The Model T drives you places, but it takes 3 times longer and sometimes you have to go to the back and crank the handle, or even open the hood to fix that loose sprocket yourself. Plus the stereo is just a boombox and it's pretty hard to control and skips when you run over bumps. But hey, it goes. Practically the same!
Though there is still the question, would you take a free Model T over a BMW at full price?
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The GPs statement statement comes from web programmers who have to then take that design and make it work in a complex web application and it often times involves (1) re-creating images so they work with multiple backgrounds instead of the one background the designer drew it on, (2) re-coding the entire page or even site so that you can actually read the excuse for HTML that has been dumped out by those programs, (3) removing all the redundant tags and replacing the others with proper CSS, (4) renaming style1, style2, style3, etc ... to actual proper decent style names so they actually describe what they are representing (top_menu_text, for instance), (5) fixing the pages so that fonts can actually be resized without completely messing up the layout of the page (and breaking image alignment, etc).
Gah, I can go on and on about the crap that frontpage and dreamweaver spit out as an excuse for HTML, and don't even get me started on XHTML. Designers who use those tools can do great creative things with it and it looks great on one or two browsers that are configured they way most browsers are configured. Unfortunately in my line of work I have usually take what the designer has done and completely rewrite it. If designers were actually forced to write in HTML or at least look at the HTML output of the programs they used, then I wouldn't have to do that nearly as much.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
GIMP and CMYK support for The GIMP
It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP.
GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.
The closest I've seen to Photoshop is Pavel's Pixel editor. It works on any OS you can imagine, from DOS to OS/2, Windows, MacOSX, Linux etc. It's very cheap and it's basically a clone software of Photoshop in many regards.
Other than this, there's Corel's Paintshop and Painter, but Painter is more oriented towards natural media art, not synthetic design or editing photos. Yes, neither of them are free, either. That's because people who have a clue designed them, and people who have a clue in the design industry don't work for free.
You could skimp on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, but you won't last long without Photoshop, even if when someone sends you PSD next time and you realize that when GIMP advertised "importing PSD" they actually meant more like importing Photoshop 4 level PSD and losing everything else in the design, thus wrecking it in the process.
Comparing Photoshop-GIMP to MS_Office-OpenOffice is extremely unfair. GIMP is really a toy, it has few interesting plugins and crude tools, while OpenOffice is actually quite usable, even if it lacks some features, it definitely has the basics right, and working.
I have both OpenOffice and GIMP installed here, next to MS Office and Photoshop. I use GIMP only to run the texture resynthesis plugin when I need a tileable texture.
But I actually said:You see, Linux is not an equal to OS X and OS X is not an equal to Linux. They're completely different beasts. There are some uses where OS X will absolutely not cut the mustard. There are some uses where Linux won't be adequate. Everyone but clueless partisans can see that.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
No, we should just recognize that helicopters are not appropriate for most transportation (too expensive and too difficult to fly) and help the submitter of the article explore free or low cost alternatives such as walking, driving or "hosted" air travel.
...but is not a helicopter.
It's more complicated than that - the submitter wants particular high-end features (like CMYK for professional print output).
In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:
- transport several people / several tons of kit
- rapidly (>100mph)
- to / from endpoints without infrastructure (ie. no roads / runways etc.)
- over inhospitable terrain
Good luck searching. Most people just accept that they need a helicopter to do this job, and therefore you have to pay what a helicopter costs (or a V22 if you're feeling lucky / suicidal - IMO).
And I notice that some people say that GIMP is nicer for programmers and people with that mentality. Which is fine, but Photoshop wasn't created with primarily that market in mind. I took the latest PhotoShop Beta for a spin recently. I couldn't figure out how to do the most basic things like use a line drawing tool. What were you expecting to get out of it? You do realise that Photoshop isn't- by reputation- a pick-up-and-go package, and isn't meant to be?
Adobe released Photoshop Elements for that market. You may think I'm demeaning you by suggesting the lite "consumer" or "beginner" version- but you were the one you expected it to be easy, and criticised it for failing in that respect. The full Photoshop is designed to be powerful, not easy. Elements is still quite powerful for something easy to use.
Actually, I'd suggest that Photo Deluxe (Elements' predecessor) was even easier to use- but that was very cut down and wizard-based, and has been discontinued. I'm sure with professional training I'd be doing all kinds of amazing things, but seriously, for the hefty price tag I'd expect a UI that made things easy enough to figure out on my own. No, the reason Photoshop is expensive is that it's a serious tool with a large number of features, priced for the professional market it's aimed at. You're paying for the power, not the ease of use.
You can only go so far in making something easy to use without losing flexibility.
I don't know Photoshop well enough to claim that everything "hard" in the interface can be explained as an intentional move by its developers to choose power and flexibility over immediate ease-of-use and intuitiveness (as opposed to bad interface design). But I do know that it's generally accepted that Photoshop is *not* aimed at the casual user.
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Education may just be where pirated software is most appropriate. If most corporations are paying full freight for applications, and an employee skilled on an application is the best salesman for that product, software vendors shoot themselves in the foot for NOT providing their products free to students. Maybe a hidden watermark that says "academic" would prevent them from using it once they land that good job.
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?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Predominantly, you guys aren't designers. You are engineers.
Designers don't give a damn about open source, free software, EULAs, software patents, etc.
Designers care about getting a tool that allows them to complete their workflow in the highest quality, in the shortest amount of time. If the tool they are given has some fucked up interface where they can't find anything, that prevents them from getting their work done, and they get pissed off. They see no benefit to using GIMP over Photoshop, because they have been using Photoshop for years, and know exactly where everything is.
I managed to ramrod through a transition from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign at the company I work for three years ago, and the only way I could make that transition was to set InDesign to use Quark keyboard shortcuts and menus - something Adobe added because they knew it was necessary to match functionality and ease transition, because no one in their target demographic is going to take a couple weeks out of their advertising schedule in order to learn new layout software.
In the real world, billboards and newspaper ads need to be produced, and fucking around with the flavor-of-the-month OSS version of layout or editing software impedes that for most people. Paying Adobe's price usually ends up saving a lot of time and money in the end.
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