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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."
I'll get flamed to a crisp for this but there's no alternative to photoshop. Gimp is clumsy and underpowered.
Want something really photoshop like I'd recommend gimpshop http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294 instead.
Or maybe try out paint.net? http://www.getpaint.net/
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...
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!
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.
Ah, so you're the guy who bought a Photoshop copy and therefore covered the entirety of the development costs of the current and the next version. Thanks!
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
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.
DOT GAIN: Dot gain is the amount a dot of ink expands on paper (because paper is porous) which makes it appear larger. There is far more dot gain on, say, newsprint than on magazine paper, because of the porousness of the paper. There is a pretty good graphical representation of this here. The first gradient represents the information sent to a printer or press. The second gradient is the printed output from that printer or press. Since the dots expand on paper and appear bigger, or more densely packed, the output appears darker than intended. By inputting the actual dot gain from a particular press (which can be affected by dozens of variables), Photoshop is able to compensate, adjusting the values sent to the printer so that what we see onscreen more accurately matches what we see in print.
INK PROFILES: Cyan ink isn't always really Cyan ink...especially when it's printed on off-white paper. (In other words, nearly all paper.) There are several different ink manufacturers and their inks differ visually, and there are thousands of different papers each with their own color. The SNAP test will actually measure the color of the paper itself, and the values of 100%C, 50%C, 40%C-30%M-30%Y (a neutral gray) and Photoshop is able to use these numbers, again, to adjust the information sent to press to best compensate for the weaknesses of the ink and paper.
Now, I haven't used GIMP besides casually opening it and getting confused by the interface, but I just looked in Preferences and apparently you can't even use CMYK colorspace AT ALL, let alone the custom inks and paper settings that are completely NECESSARY for any serious designer / publisher. Just supporting CMYK colorspace is NOT good enough. Without support for custom profiles there is not a snowball's chance in hell that print professionals would use this program anytime soon.
Given Adobe CS's ability to coordinate these ink profiles throughout all their programs, IMO there is no other viable option for someone who will be sending their files to press. Not if they want accurate color output.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
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"
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.