Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps?

Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good. I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."

Comments

Re:Don't bother

[WilyCoder]

works, fine.

supported, no.

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

I don't get it

[rudy_wayne]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?

If such applications existed, Adobe wouldn't still be in business.

With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

Re:I don't get it

[erroneus]

Alternatives to expensive commercial apps exist but it requires relearning and retooling. This is not something that individuals or companies are interested in. And when it comes to data sharing and data interchange, these proprietary apps' file formats are defacto standards.

The F/OSS community has been making progress on this though. SVG format is becoming more commonplace and if GiMP were to come up with a similar "open standard format" that would be awesome. (Yes, I know GiMP format *is* technically and open format, but it is not a standard in any larger body of standards for information transmission or interchange such as ISO or W3C.)

Furthermore, there are PATENT roadblocks standing in the way of competition to Adobe Creative Suite. One of the most significant patents are those surrounding CMYK implementation. So the patent system, often cited as the motivation for creativity and innovation, is a big part of why Adobe doesn't have much competition at the moment. Once the patents expire or software patents are outlawed or otherwise brought into more reasonable terms, we will see a lot more competition.

Your ignorance is forgiven, but what you are seeing is largely the effect of vendor lock-in, and not evidence of any superiority of quality.

Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

Lets put it this way. Your OS does not make you productive, the applications do. If you rely on certain applications then you should not be an early adopter of an OS, you should wait to see if people have problems. With that being said, what have you heard about CS3 not working in 10.6, personally I have been using it for awhile and I have not seen many incompatibilities, just a couple of issues with parts of CS4 that I don't use.

Oh and the speed boost is not all that drastic. The OS feels snappier, but applications in general feel like they run out of memory after awhile. 10.5 felt like it had better memory management. This goes for Adobe, Office, and all my games (Prey, Sim City, Homeworld 2, etc).

On a side note can they fix the damned text entry fields in Slashdot my mouse only works on like half of it,

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

yup.. shouldn't this be "I'm an Apple fanboi who is going to install the latest operating system update come what may, even if the software I use for a living doesn't work, because Steve Jobs says I should. I don't want to pay to update these other apps, so could the community recommend a whole bunch of open source apps that aren't up to the job, even after installing/trying the 20 or so on recommendations from the community. At no point will i address the fact that trying/learning all the holes in this new software will have a time penalty, which is a cost in itself. And I can't be bothered to weigh that up against the cost of a CS4 upgrade license. I also fail to acknowledge that if there was a FOSS program even nearly as good as photoshop, I would have damn well heard about it by now from a million blogs going 'ZOMG! THROW YOUR PHOTOSHOP AWAY' "

apart from that, its pretty accurate.

Anyone bought CS3?

[Brian Gordon]

SafeCast overrides operating-system security and safeguards and writes directly to the boot track of the local disk as part of its operation ... Adobe also uses a version of SafeCast for its CS products, and has had similar but less frequent problems, particularly with certain types of disk configurations (RAID, multiple-boot), but continues to use the technology for copy protection.

Photoshop should not be in the boot track of my local disk.

Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[Sycraft-fu]

If you think it is, well that tells me you don't know a whole lot about what people do with their computers. There are many reasons why it isn't, a major one would be that not all the apps people need have Linux versions. Supposing Linux was a true replacement for Windows, in that you could take any person using Windows and get them on Linux doing the same thing, no problems, well you wouldn't see so much Windows out there any more. Hard to compete with free.

So while I'm sure you can find apps that are in roughly the same market as the Adobe ones, they aren't replacements. GIMP is an image editor and thus in the same general area is Photoshop and Illustrator, but it isn't a replacement for them. It is not as capable, not as easy to use, not as well documented, and not as integrated with other prepress products. So while GIMP may work if you need an image editor, it will not work if you need Photoshop.

Re:Don't bother

[node 3]

works, fine.

supported, no.

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

In that case, you can buy CS4.

Solutions:

1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3
2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem)
3. Move to 10.6 and CS4

It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.

If you're a Pro and you really want to use 10.6 and really want the peace of mind official support, then you can fork out for CS4.

On the other hand, moving from Photoshop (Illustrator, etc.) to some Open Source program is going to be, for most pros, worse than any of the three options listed.

I don't mean to say that the GIMP or Inkscape or whatever are bad, just that the switchover is going to be more jarring than any of those three options.

Been there

[clarkkent09]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?

Short answer: You can't. I might get modded down by open source zealots, but the truth is the sooner you forget about the whole idea the better. Using CS3 on an unsupported OS, or indeed switching to a supported OS, not to mention using the latest version (CS4, hello!?), are all infinitely less trouble than trying to do "professional" work with currently available open source tools that could replace it.

Re:Don't bother

[im_thatoneguy]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

First of all... when have you EVER gotten support from Adobe?

Secondly, if getting official 'Adobe support' is critical to you then a topic titled "Alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite 3" probably isn't going to be very useful.

Re:Respectively:

[Kjella]

Because it has so many forks, it needs another. The truth is that it doesn't need a fork, it needs a full workthrough with a new pixel format and workflow abstraction. At least the latter GEGL was supposed to be since 2000 or something now and support for other color spaces than RGB like CMYK, Pantone etc. that is used for printed material is still vastly lacking. If your target is the web alone then GIMP is just fine, but then so is many tools for that job...