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

To edit, or create

[Hadlock]

Are you using these open source apps to edit, or create new files in the native adobe file formats? Creating typically requires more features than a simple editor.

Re:To edit, or create

[Gilmoure]

Sorry about the late reply; I'm not using them but have some designer friends. One's just willing to check out new apps for new projects while the other was wondering if other apps would be able to open Adobe format files. From reading down below, it looks like there's some compatibility but not enough to totally ditch Adobe stuff without redoing entire projects.

Also, seems the rumors about CS3 not playing nice with 10.6 are overblown and this entire question didn't need to be asked. Ah, well.

Don't bother

[kryptKnight]

I've been using the Snow Leopard developer preview for the past couple months, and Adobe CS3 is working fine.

There's a difference between not working and not being officially supported.

Re:Don't bother

[WilyCoder]

works, fine.

supported, no.

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

Re:Don't bother

[ColdWetDog]

I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products. They have KB articles which occasionally have something to do with an issue you are having. There are user supported forums which are often useful. But calling Adobe? Writing Adobe? Perhaps if you're some large shop with "Gold Support" (as in you give them the gold) it's more useful. But for normal end users Adobe has been just as unhelpful as everybody else in the business.

There have been dozens of bugs in every version of Photoshop that aren't fixed until the new version comes out - then the come out with NEW bugs.

Re:Don't bother

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Agreed, well maybe it's worse than you state. I found a cross platform bug in InDesign. It would consistently crash on Windows or OS X and made one of their lesser known but advertised features completely useless for a large number of shops. I reported the bug multiple times, in detail and it still persisted through three versions. Heck, it's probably still there, I haven't checked the latest version because I have not bothered to upgrade.

Re:Don't bother

[MidnightBrewer]

Perhaps it depends on the professional involved. I've been using Adobe since 1993 and the only time I called up their support was because their DRM had locked me out of running CS2 on a new system (the old system was destroyed in an accident so could not be manually de-authorized). Besides that, I can't think of one reason why I need support from them beyond such unforeseen installation issues. As others have mentioned, if you're using it for business then there's no real necessity to upgrade to 10.6.

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.

Re:Don't bother

[node 3]

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

What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?

Having someone else to blame.

Re:Don't bother

[orasio]

I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products.

I don't agree with you.
I had to call support for an Acrobat OCR product, and a girl with a beautiful CostaRican accent got to read the same manual page for me, several times.
Of course, I ended up just using another product with a less recognized brand, but that did resemble support. Shitty support, but support nevertheless.

Re:Don't bother

[mtmra70]

No kidding. I once called Adobe to activate my new version of Premiere on a machine that wasn't connected to the internet. The person that was on the phone kept telling me to go to a website and do XYZ. I kept telling her over and over again I didn't have internet access on the machine. I eventually just hung up on her because she kept repeating the same script over and over and over.

Re:Don't bother

[stephanruby]

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

Support comes at $120 an hour, and their support people are clueless. I guess this means you've never used Adobe in your career.

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:Don't bother

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

That could be because Adobe support is required to replicate a bug before they are allowed to even enter it into their bug report system.

I gave them detailed instructions. This was not a hard bug to replicate. It happened every time you tried to use a feature in a specific way. As I said, it was even cross-platform because I tried using the Windows version as a work around. Adobe was, and probably is, just horribly unresponsive about fixes in some of their projects.

Respectively:

[bcmm]

Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus*, Nvu.

*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.

Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).

Re:Respectively:

[smartr]

I'm a big fan of GIMP. I just set up the GIMP on OS X... It's a mess and since X11 treats the separate windows like separate programs so you have to set up options for X11 to enable click-through (then again X11 is already pretty much violating everything under the sun in terms of how OS X user interface works). I'm surprised it doesn't mention on the front page in big letters to enable this setting. If the GIMP was already inaccessible to those new to it given all the right clicking (a mac favorite), the automatic behavior of click to focus, click to draw, click to focus, click to change to gradient tool, click to focus on layer window, click to add a layer, get a window slightly off the screen, move it, click "ok", click to focus on the drawing pane window, click to draw a gradient... If you aren't knowledgeable enough to realize that this extra clicking isn't normal behavior, then figure out to fix it, the GIMP looks like a flaming piece of junk on OS X. If you have used the GIMP significantly, it still makes for an obnoxious hurdle.

Re:Respectively:

[NaCh0]

Interesting post. I've never noticed all of the clicking because I use focus follows mouse.

Re:Respectively:

[gnud]

Oh, and it still uses X11.
I figured it would use something like http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ - that seems like a much better resource.

Re:Respectively:

[pwnies]

Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively.

Be careful with this. While inkscape does a better job than gimp, both can't import the files fully. Gimp only has VERY basic interpretation of photoshop files. It will import layers, raster layer masks, layer effects, and some layer styles. Beyond that you're SOL. If you use any vector based maps, hue/curves/contrast/etc layers, smart objects, perspective, etc, then gimp will interpret the file incorrectly.
Inkscape is a bit better with .ai files, but you'll have to do without any gradient meshes and some other advanced styling.

Gimp needs a lot of work still. It's great for quick fixes, but for larger scale projects/companies it just isn't worth it. Inkscape is fantastic though. It has some VERY nice vector capabilities. I've used it extensively for icon work, and I have to say that for making straight .svg files I prefer it over Illustrator.

Re:Respectively:

[Kamokazi]

Inkscape can have a LOT of issues aith AI and even many EPS files. We have a lot of people who need to view artwork from customers where I work and I tried like hell to get rid of Illustrator...but we had a majority of files that wouldn't work with it.

Other than that, it's a great vector art program.

And if I was doing something wrong witrh Inkscape, please tell me, I would love to give Adobe the boot.

Re:Respectively:

[Fallingcow]

Gimp

Note that if you need to open old PS files or deal with new ones from other people, Gimp does not support all of the features of the .ps format. Notably, it's lacking support for some (all?) layer effects, like drop shadow. They'll just disappear when you open the .ps in The GIMP.

Re:Respectively:

[Miffe]

It's 16 bit per channel, ie 48 bits per pixel.

Re:Respectively:

[gullevek]

and PC changes what? If eg cs3 does not work in windows 7 for example, he has the same problem. If you are a professional designer, you are very much locked in to Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, etc. There are no alternatives.

And the biggest Problem is the versions, We have have all possible version of everything here at work, from old school os9 photoshop, to cs, cs2, cs3, cs4.

And why does he need to upgrade to snow leopard if he doubts cs3 will be supported there? And as written above, what support? And cs3 works (see here: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/).

And if he thinks he can replace any of the Adobe tools with some open source thing, good luck and happy failure. Gimp will not replace Photoshop at all, not even close. Especially on OS X it is not only a mess, but dog slow. I don't use Inkscape a lot, so I can't say how it holds up to Illustrator, neither can I say anything about Scribus because I have not even tried it.

But when you need to deliver a document to be printed on a offset printer and you tool does not support CMYK and the connected tools for it, you are pretty much very much ultimate screwed.

Re:Respectively:

[CAIMLAS]

Clearly, GIMP needs a complete fork. There are sooo many different partial enhancements, revisions, face-lifts and the like, and none of them actually work all that well/universally. Something like, say, inkscape, which works identically on all platforms (natively, without any hosery) or OpenOffice.org would be pretty damn useful for bitmapped graphics. We've got gimpshop, gimp.app, GimpPhoto, and surely a handful of others I'm not immediately familiar with.

Most of the major functionality is "there" in GIMP, as I understand things. I understand there is (or was until very recently) some problems with it's "professional" color rendering precision or some such thing, and a handful of other things. I'm surprised there hasn't been a concerted effort to fork things to something "new" and more universally accessible instead of the arcane, cumbersome menus.

Personally, I'd love to see a "Photoshop Pro" type UI, or for that matter: I'd be quite happy to have a working Paint.NET or similar.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvu is old and unsupported.

Which is why he should use its fork, Kompozer.

Re:Respectively:

[Anne Honime]

It's not a question of eye, it's a question of maths. As long as digital photography will create colours by interpolation between RGBG values of a matrix, you'll need empty 'holes' to re-create colours and avoid sampling artefacts. Applying filters (sharpening, border sharpening, USM etc.) also needs room to do their magic, otherwise you're accumulating errors that ultimately show as noise. When your postprocessing is done, then you can downgrade to 8 bits / channel without too much loss for printing or display.

Believe it or else, there's a real difference between a 8 bits and a 16 bits workflow; you'd need to try for yourself to be convinced, but for a pro, it's the difference between work or joblessness.

Re:Respectively:

[fatmonkeyboy]

I've never used Illustrator, so I may not know what I'm missing.

I love Inkscape though; what is it about the SVG files it produces that makes them so shitty?

Re:Respectively:

[RiotingPacifist]

mac supports PAE in 32bit versions so the 3.4gb limit is a windows only limitation!

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...

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

[casualsax3]

Yes, because Linux has put Microsoft out of business.

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.

Re:I don't get it

[rudy_wayne]

No, but Adobe is. They have a long history of doing stupid things, then waiting until the actual consumer release to "discover" that their product has a problem and not fixing it until the next major release thereby preventing their users from upgrading OS.

Since I have Windows apps from 1995 that run just fine on 64 bit Windows 7, I guess I just don't get the concept of a new OS version that breaks existing apps.

Re:I don't get it

[turbidostato]

"Can you *guarantee* that the app you writing now will run smoothly on a new OS after 5 years?"

Surely not. But if I, as a VAR, am testing the new OS releases when still alpha, beta and "for limited distribution only", you can bet I'll be able to anticipate if my programs will run or not on them prior to their public launch.

Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[godawful]

I'd read about them not supporting CS3 in 10.6 as well, but I believe they just didn't test against it.. has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work? I guess I'd wait a bit and see if there are actually any problems before giving up ones workflow to try new apps that may or may not work in 10.6.

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[horigath]

John Nack, on his blog which is the original source, says:

[Update: No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.]

And also things like:

I'd frankly be shocked if people at Adobe & Apple really hadn't tested CS3 on 10.6. I *think* it's just some corporate conservatism at work here, and Adobe doesn't want to over-promise anything.

So all in all: No Big Deal

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[MachineShedFred]

I have 10.6 (build 10A421a) and Adobe Creative Suite 3 installed on this MacBook Pro. It works just fine.

Much ado about nothing.

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]

Lets put it this way. Your OS does not make you productive, the applications do.

Which is why everyone uses Windows. Thanks for clarifying that.

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.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[stokessd]

Well, we have photoshop...

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

but I also have a windows box so that cancels out my shiny shiny

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[im_thatoneguy]

Your OS most certainly DOES make you more productive.

Many applications use the OS for file management and browsing. Finding that photo from a previous project that you need is the task of the OS.

Also most people run more than one app simultaneously unless you're using a turnkey system like Flame. It's the OS's job to manage the various applications you have open and enable the user to exchange data easily.

An application in a bad OS is like a sports car without any wheels. It might have an impressive feature list but interfacing with other applications and data is a big component of many applications-- a component which many applications rely on the OS to make fast and effortless.

Nothing to see here, move along.

[MachineShedFred]

I am posting from a MacBook Pro running the latest seed of 10.6, and I have Creative Suite 3 installed and running on it.

"We don't support it" â "It doesn't work, ever." My guess, is that they don't support it now as 10.6 is still a beta until Friday.

Re:Nothing to see here, move along.

[BitZtream]

Like it matters. CS4 still doesn't work on case sensitive file systems, and getting anything that could be considered 'support' from Adobe is slightly easier than walking too the sun.

Try these

[nielo]

Hi,
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com.

Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP or GIMPShop or Krita
Illustrator: Inkscape or XaraXtreme
InDesign: scribus
Dreamweaver: KompoZer or Aptana or seamonkey or Amaya or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU

I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com

Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop
illustrator
indesign
dreamweaver

Re:well

[Swampash]

Dreamweaver: I prefer Coda. No WYSIWYG editor, but I've stopped using Dreamweaver completely.
Completely agree. I couldn't live without Coda now.

Photoshop: Acorn. If you're a power photoshop user, it won't suffice... depends on what you're doing. There's also pixelimator
Pixelmator is very good for what it costs, which is something like 5% of the sticker price of Photoshop. But like Acorn it won't satisfy you if you need all Photoshop's functionality.

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.

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:Been there

[risom]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? Short answer: You can't.

It all depends on the stuff you do. I earn money using Inkscape and Gimp on Debian and have no problems at all. Still, I wouldn't blindly advise anyone to do the same (which is sometimes hard, because I am one of those open source zealots ;)). I suppose the poster should have told us the type of work he does to get a more precise answer.

Good luck if you are a professional...

[bashibazouk]

And go beyond the web. The problems with good CMYK implementation has been talked about quite a bit but what I rarely have seen mentioned is Pantoneï. Corporate art departments live on pantone colors and swatch books for anything printed, painted or applied. If the program doesn't have Pantone it's too limited to be a professional app in the print arena. Pantone charges for it's technology, therefore is unlikely to be in Open Source apps.

Now if someone would come up with an open source alternative with printed swatch books...

I prefer it this way

[Anne Honime]

It's helpful when dealing with serious fonts that come in several subtle variants (like bold oldstyle nums) to reduce the included fonts count. Scribus is not a word processor. The adobe counterpart is no better in this light, as far as I can tell, because I had a helluva hard time dealing with a print shop that insisted on re-creating in InDesign a rough I submitted them in pdf. I had to dig the F* manual on internet to teach the typographer how to switch some caps into the alternate glyph of the face.

Keep an eye on developments here...

[double07]

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/ I used a few early betas of this and although not free is probably the closet thing to photoshop out there. From the news it looks like a publisher has picked it up and it will be available 'real soon now' in Linux, MacOSX and Windows flavours.

The price is only right...

[coryking]

it can't hurt and the price is certainly right

The price is right only if your time is free. The price of the entire adobe suite is less than a few days of billable work.

Pixelmator

[Confuzzled]

Why has no one suggested Pixelmator?

It's not a complete PS replacement, but it does have enough tools to get the job done most of the time.

Flash flash flash flash

[JimboFBX]

What a coincidence, I've been just very recently trying to design a HUD for Crysis, which uses flash for the HUD element. Without pirating flash CS3 is there any free tools out there that is even remotely helpful? I mean, surely someone said "action script is free, and in theory I could create a graphical application that lets you place pictures on a canvas and then generate action script code for it", and then went out and did that? All i've found are some very basic code samples, a LOT of incomplete code samples that assume you already have flash (i.e. place this object, then click on it and change these options rather than telling how to change those options in action script), some inconvenient documentation that spreads out the info too far, and a GUI online app written by a 14 year old that you would hope would make flash only to find out its for the most part barely functional.

I'm making progress using http://www.actiontad.coms/ samples and FlashDevelop, but its very slow process. For example, I can add a picture, but when I try to resize it, it disappears without any errors to indicate why. Then after doing some development, I find out Crysis needs AS2 and not AS3, which is quite a bit different than AS3. Finding documentation and code samples ("pure code" samples) is even harder for AS2 than AS3 it seems.

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

sK1

[tonk]

sK1 is an illustration program http://sk1project.org/ that supports CMYK and can import files from Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard

[alfredo]

Here's the link: http://www.macrumors.com/2009/08/26/photoshop-project-manager-clarifies-position-on-creative-suite-3-compatibility-with-snow-leopard/ Earlier today, we reported on comments from Adobe Principal Product Manager for Photoshop John Nack pointing to a new FAQ document noting that only Creative Suite 4 will be officially supported on Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system, with Creative Suite 3 and earlier versions reportedly not having been tested on Snow Leopard. Nack has now posted an update after investigating the CS3 situation in which he reveals that Adobe and Apple actually did do extensive testing of at least Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard and found that it is in fact compatible with the new operating system. It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard. Now I will crawl back into my hole