Slashdot Mirror
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
You mean people actually buy photoshop?
I'll get flamed to a crisp for this but there's no alternative to photoshop. Gimp is clumsy and underpowered.
I'm sure there's got to be cheap/free classes/lessons on the internet for this stuff. If you are teaching this software to the students and they can't afford it, then what's the point as they will never actually be able to use the software? If they are going to use the skills at work, then why won't your company purchase proper licenses for them?
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
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.
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.
People that don't understand HTML and CSS shouldn't to webdesign in the first place.
If you want to learn webdesign you should learn to design webpages, not learn how to use a program.
I teach Website Development at a TAFE and I have found Notpad++ to be pretty good. It is still a simple text editor, but it's free and it colour-codes your text (useful for finding those unclosed tags or quotation marks).
Dreamweaver does more, but it depends greatly what you are doing. I use Dreamweaver a lot, but I spend nearly all my time in code view anyway. The only major problem I have with Dreamweaver is it's inability to handle frames properly. but frankly, no WYSIWYG editor does. You're better off setting frames and framesets in text editors anyway, if you are using them at all.
Leg Godt!
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 really hope anyone feeling the urgent need to do marketing for money will have to pay $2500 before being able to do it, frankly.
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.
My dad was a programmer and thanks to pirates like you now he give homeless men blowjobs on the street in broad daylight for crack and meth. You ruined his life!
The one that doesn't support more than 8 bits per channel.
Oh yeah?
The first rule of The GIMP is you don't talk about The GIMP.
:P
Watch how many moderation points get blown stifling any suggestion that The GIMP isn't up to the level of Photoshop.
Watch how many moderation points get blown on this here comment
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.
We can't all be web designers. Besides, I thought one of Web's strongest points was freedom of expression. Gotta lower the technical bar if you really want anybody to be able to express themselves on the Web.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Let's add jEdit (http://www.jedit.org/) to the list... my current favorite editor.
"!"
"People that don't understand HTML and CSS shouldn't to webdesign in the first place."
Why should someone learn to program HTML just to make a webpage? With a WYSIWYG editor, it's unnecessary. Sure, those editors don't make the most beautiful code, but it's HTML for God's sake!
I think that statement's equivalent to saying someone shouldn't make documents unless they learn LaTeX, or should only use a computer if they know the command line - but then there are probably people who believe that too.
I think that some people have an overinflated sense of their own importance... but good for you if you know HTML.
It's an unfair analogy, the GIMP isn't economical or easy to drive.
--- Do you believe in the day?
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.
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
I am not a design expert to know about its CMYK support - but I can tell you Xara rocks as a substitute to Illustrator. It is one of the best designed software ever. And it's blazingly fast.
Here it is: Pixel http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12. And it is developed by one person. And it costs 1% of Photoshop price. And it does have a sensible UI, very similiar to Photoshop. Try out the demo. I've bought it and it was worth every cent, even if its still in beta version.
And yes. It does run on Linux. And on BSD. And on Mac. And on BeOS, and dozen other OSes.
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.
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?
"!"
Don't you mean http://www.getpaint.net/ Anyway, Paint.NET is a good program.
Serif has some good stuff www.serif.com and some cheaper/free stuff (mostly older versions I think) via www.freeserifsoftware.com
At least for mac users, there are quite a few very well designed and maintained products that are shareware and rival Adobe's offerings in both features and pizazz.
RapidWeaver is an industrial-strength alternative to Dreamweaver which includes an SDK, full drag-n-drop designing interface, coding panel, Flash integration, and site maintenance. Currently it's $49.
Coda is the newcomer on the block, built by one of the best Mac shareware coding companies. As with the others, it allows for drag-n-drop designing and fully supports XHTML. Panic Software's tagline "shockingly good Mac software" is evident here cause they integrate the features of Transmit (their excellent FTP utility) including site/filepath synchronization, drag-n-drop uploading from the Dock... Coda also includes a console that's integrated into the app window that allows for split terminal shells for SSH and other functions. Coda includes a GUI CSS editor and comprehensive HTML programmer's guide in the application itself. $79.
TextMate is the Mac's premiere enterprise-level, yet shareware price text editor that does... pretty much anything. It can handle just about as many language bundles as jEdit but is purely Mac. It integrates well with Transmit, the shell, Subversion, and has a fully customizable code snippet library for full programmer control. I can't even begin to summarize all the features that sets this editor apart from the others, but it easily shames Dreamweaver's code window. Just watch the screencasts on the website. It costs 39.
CSSEdit by MacRabbit is a GUI-powered CSS editor which has a snooping mode called X-Ray that can analyze a website's design similar to Firefox's 3rd party Web Developer addon, except with style, polish, and features that you've come to expect from Mac applications. It includes a CSS "builder" workflow that allows you to use some natural language and object-oriented programming (in the most basic sense) to build CSS effects. $29.95
There are many others including Apple's own iWeb (which is included with every new Macintosh, is VERY easy to use, and puts out bloated-yet XHTML compliant code) and BBEdit by Bare Bones Software which is very comparable to TextMate in many ways.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seconded, as strongly as I can...
/. use DreamWeaver to dream up new and brilliant layouts? Would Google use FrontPage to make their front page? Does Yahoo even look at GoLive for their new content?
Design and implementation are two different things.
Let a graphic artists/designer/whatever *design* the pages, but get a real web engineer to actually implement them. Do you think the editors of
HELL NO
Any company worth its salt and with a web presence that matters to them will have some kind of artistic person draw a pretty picture and then LEAVE IT ALONE. From there a web engineer / code monkey / webmaster will actually implement the page as given to them, taking into account all the stuff that one has to account for on the web. Probably more than half the time if they are given HTML they will rewrite it.
Design tools give absolutely, utterly horrendous HTML as their output. Nearly any simple page you can imagine will end up as a bloated chunk of HTML with tons of cruft. Just getting a webmonkey to rewrite your HTML from one of those things could save you half of your bandwidth costs! Nested tables-within-tables are insane to manage, even when they're properly designed and not randomly slapped anywhere you need an extra 16px. Forget about CSS, XHTML or JavaScript/PHP/other dynamic content in a design tool, they're useless bastard-children at best, and are usually just ignored wholesale.
If you want to be respected as a web developer, you won't use WYSIWYG. You'll find yourself a decent syntax-hilighting text editor that handles Unix + MSDOS linebreaks and will work with UTF-8 content. Anything beyond that is gravy, but only to a point; if you have some magic one-click-homepage button in your editor, you probably have something that's trying too hard and will hold you back more than it will help.
Personally, I used notepad for a long, long time. At one point I switched to Dreamweaver because it did syntax hilighting, but it was just way too much to deal with and it kept trying to "fix" things that I knew weren't broken or which were "broken" in a particular and useful way. Nowadays I use either vim or emacs with a decent set of syntax rules - they do everything I need, and I can write scripts to interface with them if there's something extra I want to do.
In our office a few people have raved about TextMate, but apparently it's a Mac-only application. AFAIK it does the same thing - plain text editing with syntax coloring, and a couple of plugin-type scripts that make life just a little easier.
Agreed, if the 'web designer' doesn't know enough css and html to code everything by hand, he should just create something in Photoshop/The Gimp and let a skilled coder write clean css and xHTML. Using any kind of WYSIWYG editor will resuult in crappy code.
A multiplatform clone of Photoshop for $38??? Is this some kind of joke, or the best deal in picture editing ever?
How come these kinds of things never get found
Maybe his marketing is terrible...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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
You misspelled "pornography site"
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
Right So the CMYK press should print in what colors? Oh RGB but RGB doesn't fit the same color Gamut as CMYK. SO Uh WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. but what would I know I just have a masters in Digital pre-press from RIT.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
your CS can dynamically make pdf from any source. If you have a targeted audience of specific content, then use pdf. Html shouldnt
be enhanced beyond design to achieve something else.
You're joking, right? You say you shouldn't enhance HTML to do something it's not designed to do, and what are you advocating, Building websites with PDF? PDF files are huge compared to HTML. It is slow, and the available browser plugins are extremely bloated. Your browser has to load a plugin to display PDF files, but it displays HTML natively. PDF is designed and well suited for cross platform print documents, but not in anyway suited for making websites with. Trying to design a website with PDF is the very definition of "enhancing" a file format to do something it wasn't designed to do.
HTML was designed from the ground up for displaying web pages and web sites. It's been extended so much and in so many different ways that it is rather Frankenstinian in appearance, but it still works amazingly well and I have yet to see a file format that can replace it effectively, ceartainly not PDF.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
"... 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."
Go look up additive and subtractive color systems and the circumstances under which each is used. Then come back when you have something not unimaginably dumb to contribute to the conversation.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Parent post modded off-topic, sure, but pirating Adobe software is advice that, given this situation, doesn't necessarily hurt Adobe. Look at it from the perspective of this "business-model". Your co-workers don't know how to use any of Adobe's products, and can't afford to buy them. They can, with limited technical knowledge (or knowing someone with that knowledge), pirate the full versions and pay nothing. They play around with the software and get comfortable with it.
Now your company CAN afford to buy the Adobe Creative Suite (after all, it's ideally an investment that will make money). After the individuals pirate the software for home use, another marketing department has people with experience in Adobe software, and Adobe gains a paying customer (without losing any, as your co-workers aren't going to buy it anyway).
Or so the "model" goes.
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 downside of this model is that it eliminates much of the competition. Which is a good thing for the MSes/Adobes of the world I guess.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Someone below I think summed this up best, you don't need the whole creative suite for everyone. Just get the parts you need. As for alternatives, you can't use The GIMP for a lot of professional work. Its text layers (and complete lack of layer options), CMYK support, Color Management, etc. are just not there or good enough. Now I get on The GIMP's case a lot. But we have to keep in mind that its version 2 of the software and being done for free vs. Photoshop which is at version 10 and has paid R&D. Given that, The GIMP is pretty good, but its got its limits. As for using FrontPage, do your web site readers a favor, and have your staff learn HTML and use a text editor. No "WYSIWYG" editor, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage produces HTML that is solid. All of them produce excessive markup. They don't separate the content from the markup (presentational markup vs. semantic markup). For example, if your site uses semantic markup, then people with disabilities can easily scale the fonts or use readers, pages are much lighter weight, work with a wider range of browsers, makes it easier for a site like google to index the pages etc. There is a very good book, called "Bulletproof Web Design" that goes over all of these issues. And the visual page designers are all bad. FrontPage is by far the worse offender. There is an HTML tag called that Microsoft's IE ignores. FrontPage fills a document with these tags since compliant browsers pay attention to them. The result is the page only views correctly in IE and is rendered pretty much completely unusable in other browsers. If you have to use a WYSIWYG editor, go with either Dreamweaver or GoLive, but bring an end to the intentional evilness that is FrontPage.
Rob Miracle http://www.robmiracle.com
TIFF is a way to waste disk space. It's used by people who think "300 dpi" (used in place of pixel dimensions) is meaningful for a digital image, and by people who think that abusing CMYK makes you a Real Professional.
Yea! Idiots. Everyting today uses RGB! Why use CMYK, when you can use what everyone uses. You have CMYK printer? Get a RGB printer!
Be modern and smart, CMYK was very popular around Januari-Februari 1994, but then peopel realized this is very old, and no longer used it.
And I hav to completely agre about "300 dpi": what has "300 dpi" to do with dots per inch and print density?! LOL. Peopel who think "dpi" has anyting to do with dots per inch are morons!
For example this print shop I used few monts ago: I go there and tell them, please print this at 1024x768. They say "wat is this: A4, A5, A6?". I tell them: "Are you morons, I want you to print it 1024x768". I mean how much more cleer could I possibly tell them that?! They look at me as if Ive fallen from the sky or someting. They now absolutly about modenr printing!
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.
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.
Yes. Gimpshop is better than gimp. But what about Pixel32? Pixel32 is MUCH like Adobe PS and it's available for multiple-plattforms, too. Check out http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 or http://pixel32.box.sk/
How is an academic version of software the same as a pirated version? That doesn't make any sense at all.
I'm all for academic licenses for the reasons you mention--such as being able to learn the software before one has a corporate affiliation. But if the company is sending it out free to students, this is far from pirated. Pirated means downloaded illegally, cracked, stolen, etc. It wouldn't be appropriate for a school's tech person, for example, to install 35 copies of CS3 in the high school computer lab just so the kids can learn.
...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.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
My company's WinImages offers most of what Photoshop does, plus a considerable number of features that Photoshop does not, particularly in the area of layered image editing. WinImages is about $50, starts and runs faster, has a smaller footprint, and offers UI methods that can save a step for every application of a filter or effect, particularly helpful when you're doing extensive image repairs or editing, for instance. The $50 price is a discount that applies if you have any Adobe, Corel or JASC product, so for instance, if you have Adobe's free PDF reader, you're eligible, meaning, anyone is eligible if they want to be.
WinImages is Windows-only, though it runs perfectly under Parallels on OSX. Not aware of how it might behave under Wine, though I would think it should do ok; we're not "deep-dippers" when it comes to OS features, preferring to create our own in-program solutions.
Slashdot inhabitants should also know if they put "slash" anywhere in the second line of the address, we'll apply a 25% discount to the overall order.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The latest and greatest software is always tempting, but what are you really getting? I must admit, I rushed to buy CS3, but I use the tools professionally and needed the new stuff.
I strongly suggest buying older copies of Adobe products if you can. After years of use, I really haven't found the changes to be that drastic. A beginner would hardly notice any difference, and there are some serious benefits aside from the cost.
Old Adobe products run with excellent performance. Opening up Photoshop 7 side-by-side with CS3 makes me wonder why I'm even using CS3. Each upgrade gets slower. Unless you absolutely need the latest & greatest feature, not likely as a beginner, then prior versions will do just fine.
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.
Buy used versions. The precursor to Creative Suite was Design Suite. All of its apps--Acrobat 6, InDesign 2, Photoshop 7, and Illustrator 10--do a fine job. Sure, the newer versions have the most up-to-date improvements and bell-and-whistles, and no doubt added features that make life easier for designers (we hope), but the older stuff still has plenty of gumption. Their output is fine for production work.
And used copies are cheap. I say all of this by way of saying that I think of a realistic alternative to the Adobe products.
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