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Is Adobe's Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good? (vice.com)
Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs. Which means that, despite the fact that I'd certainly love to see what life is like outside of the world of Adobe, it looks like I'm stuck in that ecosystem for a little while longer. Don't get me wrong: Adobe's software is great, if a bit expensive. But I do think that its business model highlights just how consolidated its power actually is -- and it's not talked about nearly enough in the creative space.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
Is it too powerful? I dunno I stopped using around the year 2000. I use tools like GIMP and Krita for GUI based editing, but most of my editing is done on the command line with tools like ImageMagick or custom python scripts with the Pillow library.
It's all just surveillance bullshit anyway,
If all you want is Animated GIFs, lemme tell ya. I make them using Paint Shop Pro 5. It came out in 1998. It still works perfectly well on Windows 10 x64. It is also so small, it loads instantly on modern hardware. It is amazing for quick simple tasks.
If you care about animated GIFs, you're not who Photoshop is aimed at.
Personally I use Pixelmator - it easily covers anything I need. But again - my needs are reasonable simple and I'm simply not who Photoshop is really targeted at.
Somebody is offering animated gifs as “proof” that Adobe’s Creative Suite is “too powerful”?
Adobe is able to ignore the competition because it’s been able to purchase and absorb every meaningful competitor out there. The corporation itself may very well be too powerful, but it’s got little to do with its CC suite - that’s the end result, not the cause. A number of those applications weren’t created by Adobe anyway.
#DeleteChrome
I'm of the age when I remember GIF's from the 90's as a "cool" way to animate things, before Flash was a big deal. Flash has gone the way of the dodo, and so should gifs. I'm not sure what everyone's fascination with making animated gifs are when we have much MUCH better technology today with web-purposed video formats, like WEBM, instead of using clunky formats from the 80's.
It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's.
That's not Adobe's strangle hold, that's MS Window's strangle hold. Adobe has no reason to stretch beyond Windows because Windows as ensured that nobody else would be worth stretching for. I'm sorry that it's an inconvenience to you NOW. It's bothered many of us for decades.
What idiot thought it would be a good idea to take a perfectly good video segment, drop the audio and convert the video to a series of slow-to-load, badly-dithered 256-color images, resulting in a doubtless considerably larger file?
I really like Adobe as a company, but I think its suite has become so costly and unavoidable for the average creative consumer that it needs to be a little bit smaller
No. You like the software. All of the things in your article are reasons you should NOT like Adobe as a company.
Side note: hard to take the criticisms about usability very seriously when they are posted on mobo.vice. Talk about a bloated.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The author forgot one super-important thing, though: if you don't use Adobe's products, then you don't have any of these worries. Adobe exemplifies the power of Just Say No to trivially solve problems.
Honestly, who actually pays for Photoshop? I'll tell you who: professionals. If you aren't paying for it but you are still using it then you are pirating the software. Honestly, there are enough applications out there for every platform to do image manipulation that anyone crying over Adobe is unlikely to even be entitled to use the software in the first place.
these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs
Sure... but last I checked either was Photoshop. Also, who is paying for Photoshop to make animated GIFs? Nobody. Crying about a lack of alternatives not existing when you aren't even willing to pay for it in the first place is just pathetic.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Looks like grandpa has a case of the mondays!
mac fullscreen mode is trash. its a trash feature on a trash os that is trying to copy a trash feature from windows 8 that even microsoft has realized is complete garbage and was removed in windows 10.
I'm sure of it.
It's the new Mac!
The summary reads like nonsensical whinging about things that have nothing to do with Adobe.
Animated GIF not being supported is a good thing. We almost killed that crappy thing until bloody Facebook decided to create a GIF keyboard that allowed you to reply with animated memes. What good purposes outside of this still remains for GIF? Leave it in the 90s along with Zip drives, floppy disks, and computer cases without any style. You complain that Adobe carries itself like it's the only game in town while acknowledging that it's the only game in town and that you can't get away from it. *golfclap*.
As for not supporting an OSX feature, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you think Mac is as relevant as it once was. Once the platform of creators has for so long rested on its laurels, provided no good incentive for consumers to favour it and its expensive non-customisable hardware, and repeatedly shat on developers of it's own platform to the point where it's x64 migration was managed poorly enough that an entire major version of Adobe's suite wasn't released on Mac in 64bit variant at a time where > 4GB of memory was actually relevant to the industry. OSX has a native fullscreen feature? Cool, the couple of percent of the market may be disappointed that Adobe doesn't support it, instead it rolled it's own fullscreen feature for the far more popular (almost by an order of magnitude now) windows platform.
Ok, maybe I am too tired, got back from work, but I don't understand anything on that post. The highlights I got:
- Not many programs handle animated gifs. Who cares? OK, those who care could use PSP or something?
- There some sort of annoying window movement when dragging a photo from a web browser to Photoshop? What???
- Photoshop does not support OS X full screen mode. Okayyy, hadn't actually noticed that, as I actually don't do serious work on the laptop display and full screen works really bad on a 3 monitor setup. Maybe it is a feature some people would like? Definitely not the major issue with Photoshop.
And all these inane points suggest "Photoshop is to 'powerful' for it's own good"? How? Why?
Dear god, is our post quality going to reduce even more?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Next thing you'll tell me is that they don't offer a standalone purchase option!
I'm sure Elizabeth Warren would agree and break it up for you.
Pay once, own the license for that software version forever?????
ACC has used the network effect to get and stay on top. A manager for a graphics department wants to spend as little money as possible on software. ACC has made a one-stop-shop pretty much. You buy/rent ACC and you get the vast majority of what you need to make and manage graphics.
While there are competitors, they are not as complete as ACC, meaning you have to buy and/or learn yet more software to get the missing features. And orgs also don't want a learning curve for newly hired graphic artists. If your shop uses a mish-mash of tools, finding employees who are a ready fit will be harder. Orgs want plug-and-play employees.
It's similar to Microsoft: an org buys Microsoft not because it's the best, but because everybody else knows it, and they cover the gamut of most business needs in a good-enough way. IBM used to occupy that niche, but MS knocked them off the hill.
It's a winner-take-most economy. Enjoy.
Table-ized A.I.
Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla of the digital graphics market. Whenever any application achieves dominance, it jacks its pricing up to as much as the market can bear. Remember Word Perfect? It used to be the dominant PC word processor (and was priced accordingly) until it lost out to Word as the world switched to Windows. When Word and the MS Office Suite achieved dominance, their pricing also pushed the limit of what the market can bear. You see where I'm going here.
Adobe and its graphics troika Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have dominated the industry for far, far too long and Adobe is in need of serious competition. Corel has been content enough with being a distant #2 that I don't think they'll ever aspire to push for the #1 spot (their pricing is better than Adobe, but is still too high for the solo graphic designer operating on a shoe-string). Fortunately, Serif's Affinity line with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (and the upcoming Affinity Publisher) may just have a clear shot at Adobe. Their pricing is insanely aggressive ($50 with free upgrades) and their feature sets gives you about 80% of what Adobe has. Because Serif is a UK company, I hope it can avoid getting bought out by Adobe when it becomes a perceived threat to Adobe's cash cows.
I was looking into it because I wanted to use photoshop, after effects, perhaps learn premiere pro to get away from apple and fcpx. (Although now I guess I would go for davinci resolve).
For the 5 years I have used my iMac, I paid for FCP X once. And so while the iMac is expensive, I have saved a lot of money in licences towards a new machine if I donâ(TM)t switch back to pc.
I can get by with The Gimp, not perfect but ok for my personal use. After effects I donâ(TM)t need as such and I can do what I need to do with Motion 5, Iâ(TM)d like to try media encoder again to see if it can stitch my raw photos from my drone time lapses but I use ffmpeg and converts jpgs into ProRes video instead.
So all in all, the are alternatives to being locked into a minimum 1 year license. Had it been for work, Iâ(TM)d had work pay for the licensing.
Cheers.
L'Idiot
Go look at this submitter's profile - all are from vice.com. And the submissions are direct lifts from the articles themselves.
So while it seems this "person" was out looking at image editors, they weren't. They are just copy/pasting from articles into a slashdot submission form and the editors are doing nothing of the sort.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Yes, certain elements are kind of a pain in the ass on the Mac. But the Mac hasn't been the best platform to run CS apps on in years. Windows is. Hell, Photoshop runs better in Windows than it does in OS X *on identical hardware.*
Since the 90s, to maintain an Apple product, Adobe has had to: Port from 68k to PPC, then from Classic MacOS to OS X (Photoshop 7 SUCKED on the Mac, but it ran in both operating systems), then they had to adapt from OS X PPC to OS X Intel. Apple jerks their developers around constantly, while Windows just isn't the same kind of moving target.
While I'm sure you'd love it if Adobe conformed completely to Apple guidelines and played nicely with comparatively recent (I know 10.7 is "old" but the move to Intel is older than that) features that have no Windows equivalent, keep in mind that the more hassle the Apple market is to develop for, the less likely they are to develop for it. Remember when they stopped releasing Premiere for the Mac for awhile because it couldn't compete with Final Cut Pro?
I still use Photoshop on a Mac but only occasionally - I've moved my entire toolchain to Windows, and while it sucks in some ways the Mac experience doesn't I've gotten used to it. I'm looking at expanding my line art production software, as there's a few options in that space, but for graphical heavy lift Adobe has effectively cornered the market.
Importantly, I've been using it since 1997 - any alternative has to be featureful and intuitive, and it's competing with 20+ years of muscle memory and needs to be able to correctly read ~15 years of files.
Just got an invite to stream the upcoming Adobe keynote, titled "The customer experience is always right." As someone who's dealt with their crazy ever-changing institutional licensing schemes for too many years, I can't even....
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Adobe is doing what software makers do, ignoring nuanced chrome changes which seem to come out every 2 years.
Having done just that for multi platform commercial software development, our team could not customize the user interface extensively for the look and feel of each OS. If we did go 100% towards the look and feel of each OS, we'd have no time to actually develop the product features.
Chrome, UI layout, icons, shuffling menu commands around, gestures are not what I'd call actual new features for a mature commercial software product.
Don't describe the orchrestra conductor's tuxuedo, describe the quality of the music played by the musicians.
My advice is for this guy to grow up and quit playing with pictures and "gifs". Get a real job that actually helps society, and makes the world a better place to live. There is a real world out there beyond your "Mac", a world with real challenges and needs. And yes, real people. Put down the mouse, roll up your sleeves and do some real work. It's time to grow up and be a man, not a boy playing with his toys.
No, and that's a stupid question, and vice specializes in outrage porn. It might be too powerful for YOUR good, but more powerful is good for Adobe.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot: Whining for Nerds, Shit That Doesn't Matter
If you aren't paying for it but you are still using it then you are pirating the software.
Pretty hard to 'pirate' cloud based software. If you're 'pirating' Adobe, you're using an old version.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Amateur level moron uses amateur level tools.
Adobe has gone downhill ever since PS 5.5 and Flash MX 5.5, which was a fraudulent product IMHO And if missing animated gifs in affinity are a dealbreaker for you, I'm sorry, but you're smoking crack or something. Gimp costs nothing and will do animated gifs just fine. Better than any other tool in fact.
As for image editing I'm very glad affinity is pissing in Adobes soup just now and that Adobe is losing ground to them. Adobe needs to die in a fire ASAP as far as I am concerned.
BTW, of you're on Windows there still is the Corel Draw suite, a way underestimated powerful design toolkit.
Bottom line: stay the hell away from Adobe, there are way better alternatives these days.
My 2 cents
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sometime it pays to use pricey software, like at work where I am using it to make wages, and my employer has a reason (usually production efficiency, but sometime other reasons) to bur the pricey software.
At home I use Gimp, Open Office, and a number of tools that can be just as good for my use case, and the cost matters to me.
It doesn't matter if you're into music creation, video editing, photo editing, or just working on spreadsheets. The software applications market has trended towards consolidation. mergers and the little guys becoming niches or irrelevant.
I'm not an artist, but I work for a company full of creative people who do use software like Adobe Creative Cloud. I really don't believe they NEED it to get their work done, but it's much more an issue of what they learned to use back in school, or with previous employers. We still battle constantly with people demanding we buy full versions of even the Adobe Acrobat software, when plenty of shareware PDF editing solutions already exist that cost FAR less. Since Adobe invented the PDF document, it stands to reason they're the most comprehensive editing solution for the file format. But there's no way we really have dozens of people employed here who fully utilize the esoteric features you only get with the "real" Adobe branded software!
I've been able to do pretty much everything I needed to do with a PDF file using the Preview app that comes with OS X on my Mac. It lets me selectively remove pages from a document, annotate it, add a saved signature to it, re-order pages or insert pages .... all the common stuff.
But yeah.... the times when I wanted to do some graphics work for a web site or what-not? I always found great solutions with little freeware or shareware tools out there. You don't get everything in one application, under one set of menu choices though. Maybe for a lot of professionals, that's the deal-breaker? But I think I'd rather shuffle my drawing or photo in and out of 6 or 7 different tools, as needed, vs. paying month after month to keep my Adobe applications properly licensed and running. Clearly though, there are plenty of people making enough money with their creative works so they'll pay Adobe's prices.
That's the thing... it's *not* "cloud-based". It's still just plain old desktop software. The only part that is cloud-based is that the software constantly phones home to Adobe's cloud servers to assure itself that you still deserve to use it. There are some extra bits like stock photos and some shared storage bits, but the majority of the suite is just as hackable/pirateable as it used to be. You just have to somehow bypass the phoning part.
I think the saddest part for me is the fact that the marketing is winning, and people actually think Adobe's software has this special sprinkling of fairy cloud dust rather than what it is... Adobe forcing everyone to a rental/subscription model because "Eff the consumer, we need bigger yachts!"
Maybe Adobe doesn't spend a lot of time catering to Apple products because the Mac OS has such a small share of the market. You pay more attention to who butters your bread. I'm no economist, but if I was at Adobe, I would say, "spend as little time on Apple as possible."
Adobe could have cut the prices of all their graphics software in half during the 90's and probably more than doubled their sales while drastically reducing piracy.
The CC subscription scheme is a consumer-hostile money grab designed to combat piracy and further trap users in a walled garden. Semi-regular users simply stick to the pre-CC versions.
Adobe forcing everyone to a rental/subscription model because "Eff the consumer, we need bigger yachts!"
CONSUMER users have never really been relevant
PROFESSIONAL users actually don't care about the rental model. They were (probably) paying just as much for upgrade rights anyway, so rental simply saves them the initial capital expenditure.
ENTERPRISE IT: Gets annoyed about it, not that they have any real beef with the idea of rental; just get annoyed at the managment overhead of it. (Setting up accounts on Adobe's platform, on AutoDesk's plattform etc etc. At least on the Microsoft platform, they have AAD Connect and I can set up the licensing in bulk.) As an enteprise IT person: PLEASE consider SAML authentication for your licesning portal! I'd love to simply add the user to an AAD group and when program.exe connects to license.com, it can use SAML authentcation, get the right claim from my SAML server and automatically grant a license. Also, please consider a timeout - a license unused in 60 days can be reclaimed somehow -- or SCIM integration so I can automatically reclaim licenses for departed staff members...)
Err, yeah, Enterprise IT isn't against the concept; but simply grumble at the extra work the execution causes.
Print professionals have been asking Adobe to remove the stupid canvas size limit from Illustrator for years.
For 'professional' software it sure has a lot of features that actually hampers professional users. And the kicker is, Adobe doesn't give a crap. They're more interested in obfuscating the UI even more, than fixing usability.
Then again, kinda sounds like Microsoft in that regard.
Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's.
Mozilla chooses to ignore it, too. Here's the relevant Bugzilla entry, in case anyone wanted to vote, not that it's going to do any good. Their game plan seems to be "wait until everyone who cares about this bug changes OSes or browsers so they don't care anymore".
I went to an organizational dynamics course years ago. One question from the audience prompted the instructor to share the following:
When dealing with any type of negative situation, you have just 3 choices:
1). You can change it. If you cannot change it...
2). You can accept it. If you cannot accept it...
3). You can leave it.
Sounds to me like the OP is at Stage 2 and flirting with Stage 3. However we need to be clear: There are alternatives; this isn't a captive market. No matter how much you believe, today, that you are held captive, you are not. There is likely some price to change holding you back. It's your choice whether or not to pay that price.
I'll not judge you no matter how you choose.
since 1997
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's still just plain old desktop software.
Well, that's good to hear! Gonna download right now!
You just have to somehow bypass the phoning part.
Trivial!
I've been using the photography bundle. WAY cheaper than the stand alone version, and it's always up to date. Guess I'm just too old to try something different.
STOP USING ANIMATED GIFS...
Move to Animated PNG. Please for the love that is all holy. Do the world a favor and let GIF die already.
I’ll have you know I paid for my copy of Creative Suite 6. Dammit
...That the "creative market" is "dominated" by Adobe? And we should all be furious on behalf of OSX users??
Sorry, Linux guy here - nobody ever gave a toot for supporting products on our platform so we made the commercial products mostly irrelevant.
if you don't have the time or energy to understand basic HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, and most important of all SVG - then you're not a computer graphics designer, you're a spoiled lazy artist that wants to complain about imported designer canvas being too expensive..
Commercial products are designed to be expensive - that's kinda the point my friends...
Free software gets developer contributions and becomes better free software - but someone needs to ask for it, and someone else needs to have the time to do it.. it's not about money. With Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, et al ... you're getting what you paid for: a receipt. Their software may or may not work and the price may go up, but you will have no way to fix or improve it if you need to - and so all you can do is complain ... complain... complain... ;)
There is only ONE decent program to animate GIFs - ULead GIF Animator 5. Luckily for me, I bought a copy a while back (I can't remember how many years), and it has been incredibly useful to me when designing websites.
until almost 8 years ago? That's a joke, right?
The irony of someone complaining that any company should be as powerful as their beloved Apple! Both companies have produced amazing products, with a price tag to match. I muddle by with Gimp but it's just so unsatisfying - a click to apply a filter or change a value and then a short wait to see the results... PS applies the filter and let's you adjust the values with instant feedback (Gmic as an example). Seeing PS intelligently remove objects in a photo is an absolute revelation!