> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Yeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that).
Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.
Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.
The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
All the various "cloud" apps suck in various ways (one drive, I've a pitchfork for you; Box Drive, you're maybe the best behaved of a horrible lot) - but Creative Cloud was always the worst.
> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model
The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically
the company should care
enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support).
That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.
I am part owner of a plain SaaS company, and our financial motivation is very very strongly to keep our business customers happy. Churn is highly expensive for us.
Churn is even more expensive for growth SaaS companies, due to equity multipliers.
I remember working for old-school software companies and the incentives were drastically misaligned in the past before SaaS. Existing customers were treated awfully - new customers or updates were where the money was.
Your opinion is a tad too cynical. Although perhaps warrented for twilight products like Evernote getting sold to Bending Spoons. Or the VMware/Broadcom debacle.
I suspect large companies vs. small companies is another big part of the problem. What I mean is that in small companies, there's usually only one or two layers between the owner(s) and the lowest-level employees. Which means that usually, everyone making management decisions is well aware of the needs of the company and where the company's profits actually come from. It's (usually!) only in large companies with half-a-dozen (or more) layers between the CEO and the workers that you can end up with the kind of empire-building, turf-guarding management that turns a company sclerotic, and makes decisions like selling off / discontinuing a service that was a key part of what their clients needed.
My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.
Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.
The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
It’s better than a lot of modern software. One reason I stick with it is I have a hobby of printing smaller formats like 4x6 cards and Photoshop and Epson Print Layout are the only programs that I have 100% control of all the printer and color management settings and exactly where the image winds up on the printer (e.g. managing the mechanical uncertainty). I don’t send work out to people who have better printers because I don’t trust them to get it right.
Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..
I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.
Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.
It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.
When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.
Never did understand why gimp's ui isn't a Photoshop clone, or more broadly, why there isn't one canonical Photoshop clone like libreoffice is to Ms office.
There's a community of folks maintaining some WINE tweaks to make it work! Thankfully, it's mostly just config options so nothing additional to install/run beyond WINE. I tend to use the V2 suite and on a mac, but I've got Affinity V3 installed on my ubuntu dev machine and had no issues with it when I've needed it.
Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.
Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop
But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe
If you were an honest company, you'd have the current version available for $subscription, and past versions available for some amount more - and use that to see how many people still subscribe but refuse to upgrade.
That’s why I love the Nova.app model. You pay for a year of releases, but if you unsubscribe you keep the latest version when your subscription was active.
The rot started with Flash in 2009. Then it hit Illustrator and Dreamweaver. By 2014 everything was an unstable mess. It coincided with their buyouts of a bunch of competitors including Day, Demdex, and Nitobi. They hit "big enough" size and stopped caring.
With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.
Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.
They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).
Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?
I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.
I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).
There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.
The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.
It does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).
Author here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar.
The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.
OP is using Apple so maybe that's why? I use PS weekly and I've never seen it (or anything else) touch my hosts file on Windows. I just verified - nothing beyond my own entries.
Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.
I'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop.
Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.
A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
It was all of the Adobe app's caches that kill me. I kept a copy of DiskInventoryX around for a long time for the specific purpose of showing how large those folders could get.
This software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2
V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
Eh, using resolve for photo editing seems a bit like using blender for video editing. It can be done, and it isn't that bad, but there are so many better options
I've been happy with Photomator (now owned by Apple).
It's Apple-only, with versions for iOS/iPadOS and Mac. It integrates seamlessly with the Apple photo library.
It's only "gotcha" (which I don't find to be a problem) is it leverages Apple processing where possible (ie the Apple RAW engine). That doesn't bother me, but if you're a pro-level photog and need some special sauce for your RAW workflow, it might not work.
BMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve
After ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.
I did an insane amount of pixel-perfect editing in Acorn 1.0 free trial when I was a kid in 2007, always with the shareware banner blocking part of the canvas
Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
I have a cure-all for difficult-to-cancel services ... cancel the credit card. I have done it before, and I will do it again if need be. And, I absolutely refuse to give any, ANY company my debit card number or bank account number. I want to be in charge of when my money leaves, and to whom it goes.
>I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one.....
>It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013,
I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old.
I thought the Creative Cloud was a fairly recent thing. May be 2018? I mean 2018 is still 8 years which is a fairly long time. Turns out it started 13 years ago. I had to double check on Office 365 which is even further back to 2010.
Which I got another question in my mind. Has Photoshop really improved that much? There were still lots of improvement from CS1 ( 8.0 ) to CS6. Has there been that many new features since then?
I've been using Gimp since the mid-late 1990's. The first time I used it, I got it running was on a Sun SPARCStation 20 --- which was running Red Hat 2.0 Linux!
I still reach for that on the rare occasion I have to do some image editing. There are some alternatives in the FOSS image editing landscape now worth checking out.
World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.
I share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.
I think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :)
GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
> it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group
This feels like it would behoove the project to pick a lane and tell the users which one of these it is supposed to be. You have a worse experience for all by trying to keep both camps happy, and also ceding one of these verticals would open up mindshare for another open-source project to step in and cover that instead
We do - we state exactly what GIMP is and what we aim for. That doesn't stop people from having their own conceptions.
The "more like MS Paint" group tends to be longtime users who often prefer the destructive editing approach of GIMP 2. We try to respect people who currently use the software, while also trying to implement new features as intended on the roadmap.
Given the number of great open source art programs today, I don't think we're keeping anyone from doing anything. :)
> We do - we state exactly what GIMP is and what we aim for
Respectfully, I just re-read the gimp.org homepage, about page, and FAQ. The only relevant passage I found is the FAQ where it states that GIMP is not trying to be a photoshop replacement (but that people regularly misinterpret it as such).
The first section after the recent news on the home pages says "High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, the only limit is your imagination."
That seems clear enough to me about our focus, though one thing I've learned since I've started contributing is that whatever you think is clear enough, probably isn't!
(Hopefully that doesn't come across as sarcastic - I mean it sincerely. I've helped out with writing news posts and been amazed at seeing how people interpret sections I thought were perfectly clear. It's been a learning experience!)
For what it's worth, there's been a lot of turnover in developers in the last 20 years. I've read some comments on older issue reports, and it made me understand why people think GIMP developers are abrasive (even though that hasn't been my experience with the current developers)
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)
> World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative.
Wow, that's a wild statement. I think you might be right. Though GIMP was responsible for GTK, which is now a critical part of most linux systems. I wonder where we'd be if not for GTK? Qt everywhere maybe?
There's good reason why people are annoyed with GIMP/GIMP developers.
For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.
Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.
GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.
Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.
Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.
Hi! I dug through issue report archives to try and learn more about Fade. From what I understand (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/3558#note_7...), it seems like it was reimplemented as "Blending Modes" directly in the filters themselves.
If you're willing to test, is that comment correct - do the blending modes for filters work for you like Fade use to? If not, I'd be interested in learning more about what is lacking in the current version. Thanks!
GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs
What a dreadful memory to resurface. I had the exact same errors when I tried running the Creative Cloud uninstaller program, so I hunted through all of my /library and ~/library subfolders for anything containing "adobe", "photoshop", "creative cloud", or "CC". I'm very confident that I didn't delete anything unrelated to Adobe, and I'm equally unconfident that I deleted every single file related to Adobe.
Photoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.
I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.
I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).
> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Yeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that).
Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.
Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.
The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
All the various "cloud" apps suck in various ways (one drive, I've a pitchfork for you; Box Drive, you're maybe the best behaved of a horrible lot) - but Creative Cloud was always the worst.
They're weirdly sticky clouds.
> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model
The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support).
Churn is such a measurable figure.
That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.
I am part owner of a plain SaaS company, and our financial motivation is very very strongly to keep our business customers happy. Churn is highly expensive for us.
Churn is even more expensive for growth SaaS companies, due to equity multipliers.
I remember working for old-school software companies and the incentives were drastically misaligned in the past before SaaS. Existing customers were treated awfully - new customers or updates were where the money was.
Your opinion is a tad too cynical. Although perhaps warrented for twilight products like Evernote getting sold to Bending Spoons. Or the VMware/Broadcom debacle.
I suspect large companies vs. small companies is another big part of the problem. What I mean is that in small companies, there's usually only one or two layers between the owner(s) and the lowest-level employees. Which means that usually, everyone making management decisions is well aware of the needs of the company and where the company's profits actually come from. It's (usually!) only in large companies with half-a-dozen (or more) layers between the CEO and the workers that you can end up with the kind of empire-building, turf-guarding management that turns a company sclerotic, and makes decisions like selling off / discontinuing a service that was a key part of what their clients needed.
My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.
Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.
The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
It’s better than a lot of modern software. One reason I stick with it is I have a hobby of printing smaller formats like 4x6 cards and Photoshop and Epson Print Layout are the only programs that I have 100% control of all the printer and color management settings and exactly where the image winds up on the printer (e.g. managing the mechanical uncertainty). I don’t send work out to people who have better printers because I don’t trust them to get it right.
Have you tried Affinity Photo?
Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..
I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.
Does it still work when you block all outgoing connections?
Yes, but I don't want to start tweaking my firewall to run it.
Not only this, but it's like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all mixed up into one super-app. This beats Adobe's cross-app functionality by miles.
Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.
Agree. Affinity is better than nothing, but has some really really stupid design choices.
Agreed, too often you would search “how to do x photoshop thing but in affinity” cause it was so unobvious
It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.
I paid for the entire Affinity suite in one shot, was worried when Canva took over, but glad to say everything's working together just fine.
When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.
The legacy apps have been receiving minor updates along with the new Affinity app.
"Everything is working" was meant to imply my legacy flow as well as the new flow haven't broken at all.
I'm sure that in a year or so Canva will move to a subscription model. Then we'll see.
Did they ever get the renderer on par with Photoshop? Every png I rendered with Affinity looked like shit but this was years ago.
Free (as in beer). There's always a catch.
Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well
I read on Twitter this week that someone made such an interface on top of GIMP.
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
Yeah, there have been similar things before it as well. I was thinking more of a ground up photoshop style editor with GEGL as the backend
Never did understand why gimp's ui isn't a Photoshop clone, or more broadly, why there isn't one canonical Photoshop clone like libreoffice is to Ms office.
> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?
Presumably though Canva subscriptions?
Shame it's only Mac/Windows compatible. I'd kill for a Linux build.
There's a community of folks maintaining some WINE tweaks to make it work! Thankfully, it's mostly just config options so nothing additional to install/run beyond WINE. I tend to use the V2 suite and on a mac, but I've got Affinity V3 installed on my ubuntu dev machine and had no issues with it when I've needed it.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux
Awesome. Have starred the repo and will have a look through it later tonight when I'm done with work.
Maybe use WINE or similar to run the Windows build?
True, that's an option, but a native build would be optimal
> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
Not true since it requires you to sign in with Canva account.
Which is entirely free.
Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
Pretty clear marketing killed PS when they went to a subscription model.
A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.
Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop
But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe
Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)
If you were an honest company, you'd have the current version available for $subscription, and past versions available for some amount more - and use that to see how many people still subscribe but refuse to upgrade.
That’s why I love the Nova.app model. You pay for a year of releases, but if you unsubscribe you keep the latest version when your subscription was active.
It’s the best/worst of both worlds!
Same with most (all?) JetBrains products, and for the first 3 years every year gets cheaper!
You also can't stick to the older version, so the choice is can you afford to do your job without any Photoshop or are you stuck.
The rot started with Flash in 2009. Then it hit Illustrator and Dreamweaver. By 2014 everything was an unstable mess. It coincided with their buyouts of a bunch of competitors including Day, Demdex, and Nitobi. They hit "big enough" size and stopped caring.
With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.
Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.
It looks like they can take their customer base for granted:
https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-r...
True, but the subscription model is what allowed them to stop caring. Subscriptions will likely kill more software companies than AI in the long run.
They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).
> A subscription model isn't needed to kill software.
It's not needed, but it sure helps!
Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?
I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.
I despise their subscription model, but I bet it’s minting them tons of money.
Individuals leaving them (including myself to Affinity) is a drop in the ocean to them
> A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes.
Holy moly.
I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).
There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.
The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.
It does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).
Author here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar.
The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.
OP is using Apple so maybe that's why? I use PS weekly and I've never seen it (or anything else) touch my hosts file on Windows. I just verified - nothing beyond my own entries.
Maybe it's another excuse to not have a Linux port... ("licensing would be impossible")
Read only root for the win. Or rage really, because then it won't work.
Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.
[1] https://www.photopea.com/
Photopea is only good for smaller edits/files otherwise it starts lagging like crazy.
That said, Affinity is quite fair fast even on huge files. You can bring over like 80% of your Photoshop muscle memory.
Honorable mentions depending on your needs: Figma, Penpot, Krita
I'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop. Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.
A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
[0] https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ [1] https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner
It was all of the Adobe app's caches that kill me. I kept a copy of DiskInventoryX around for a long time for the specific purpose of showing how large those folders could get.
Hazel, the folder watch automation tool, also supports this
This software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.
One hallmark of poor quality software is the existence of a separate cleanup tool in case the uninstall doesn't work
The installer skipped the in part, and is now just a staller.
Yeah, Adobe's annual paid monthly plan that auto-renews and locks you in is pure evil.
you can get out of the lock in by switching your plan then theres a two week window you can cancel without a fee.
Not that you should have to do that, I'm just letting you know that you can so they don't get a fee from you.
There have been some good alternatives mentioned in the comments here, like Affinity or Photopea.
Does anyone happen to know if there is a similarly good alternative to Lightroom?
Darktable (https://www.darktable.org/) has become very good and continues to be my go-to solution for digital photography.
The delete button is labelled "delete (trash)"
Never change, FOSS UIs
Capture One.
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2 V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
Eh, using resolve for photo editing seems a bit like using blender for video editing. It can be done, and it isn't that bad, but there are so many better options
Yeah, I agreed, though I’m secretly hoping maybe Davinci enters this market too
I've been happy with Photomator (now owned by Apple).
It's Apple-only, with versions for iOS/iPadOS and Mac. It integrates seamlessly with the Apple photo library.
It's only "gotcha" (which I don't find to be a problem) is it leverages Apple processing where possible (ie the Apple RAW engine). That doesn't bother me, but if you're a pro-level photog and need some special sauce for your RAW workflow, it might not work.
I didn't find one but it heavily depends on your use case
Rawtherapee, CameraBag Photo.
BMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve
After ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.
I did an insane amount of pixel-perfect editing in Acorn 1.0 free trial when I was a kid in 2007, always with the shareware banner blocking part of the canvas
Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
Rember when Adobe tried to stop people saying images had been “Photoshopped”?
Well, be careful what you wish for Adobe!
Now everyone just says an image is AI, and something being Photoshopped is a distant memory.
RIP Photoshopped Images.
I have a cure-all for difficult-to-cancel services ... cancel the credit card. I have done it before, and I will do it again if need be. And, I absolutely refuse to give any, ANY company my debit card number or bank account number. I want to be in charge of when my money leaves, and to whom it goes.
>I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one.....
>It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013,
I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old.
I thought the Creative Cloud was a fairly recent thing. May be 2018? I mean 2018 is still 8 years which is a fairly long time. Turns out it started 13 years ago. I had to double check on Office 365 which is even further back to 2010.
Which I got another question in my mind. Has Photoshop really improved that much? There were still lots of improvement from CS1 ( 8.0 ) to CS6. Has there been that many new features since then?
>> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013,
> I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old.
Don't worry, while 13 years seems long enough to make you feel old, you're not old. You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent.
> You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent.
Arggh...
I've been using Gimp since the mid-late 1990's. The first time I used it, I got it running was on a Sun SPARCStation 20 --- which was running Red Hat 2.0 Linux!
I still reach for that on the rare occasion I have to do some image editing. There are some alternatives in the FOSS image editing landscape now worth checking out.
Nobody has mentioned Krita which is quite good.
Krita is excellent for painting (specially its brush engine). The problem is Photoshop is also used for other things
Krita could refocus into a more general photo editing software, but I think they want to focus into being the best painting software instead
GIMP.
How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.
World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.
I share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.
I think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :)
GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
> it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group
This feels like it would behoove the project to pick a lane and tell the users which one of these it is supposed to be. You have a worse experience for all by trying to keep both camps happy, and also ceding one of these verticals would open up mindshare for another open-source project to step in and cover that instead
We do - we state exactly what GIMP is and what we aim for. That doesn't stop people from having their own conceptions.
The "more like MS Paint" group tends to be longtime users who often prefer the destructive editing approach of GIMP 2. We try to respect people who currently use the software, while also trying to implement new features as intended on the roadmap.
Given the number of great open source art programs today, I don't think we're keeping anyone from doing anything. :)
> We do - we state exactly what GIMP is and what we aim for
Respectfully, I just re-read the gimp.org homepage, about page, and FAQ. The only relevant passage I found is the FAQ where it states that GIMP is not trying to be a photoshop replacement (but that people regularly misinterpret it as such).
The first section after the recent news on the home pages says "High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, the only limit is your imagination."
That seems clear enough to me about our focus, though one thing I've learned since I've started contributing is that whatever you think is clear enough, probably isn't! (Hopefully that doesn't come across as sarcastic - I mean it sincerely. I've helped out with writing news posts and been amazed at seeing how people interpret sections I thought were perfectly clear. It's been a learning experience!)
For what it's worth, there's been a lot of turnover in developers in the last 20 years. I've read some comments on older issue reports, and it made me understand why people think GIMP developers are abrasive (even though that hasn't been my experience with the current developers)
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)
Knowing how much open source likes to fork or reinvent the wheel, I don't think gimp is any reason of the mack of viable alternative
> World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative.
Wow, that's a wild statement. I think you might be right. Though GIMP was responsible for GTK, which is now a critical part of most linux systems. I wonder where we'd be if not for GTK? Qt everywhere maybe?
> Qt everywhere maybe?
As someone who picked the KDE side decades ago, I have to say that would be for the best.
Here, here. I wish Blender would just grow an image editor, with pie menus and visual programming nodes. It already has a video editor!
GIMP haters needs to be studied. The amount of extreme petty vitriol that project gets is completely out of proportions.
There's good reason why people are annoyed with GIMP/GIMP developers.
For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.
Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.
GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.
Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.
Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.
Hi! I dug through issue report archives to try and learn more about Fade. From what I understand (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/3558#note_7...), it seems like it was reimplemented as "Blending Modes" directly in the filters themselves.
If you're willing to test, is that comment correct - do the blending modes for filters work for you like Fade use to? If not, I'd be interested in learning more about what is lacking in the current version. Thanks!
GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs
Just use https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp in this case
Unfortunately, Photoshop is easier to use than GIMP, it's ergonomically more functional. This is lost on GIMP's developers (see my other post).
What a dreadful memory to resurface. I had the exact same errors when I tried running the Creative Cloud uninstaller program, so I hunted through all of my /library and ~/library subfolders for anything containing "adobe", "photoshop", "creative cloud", or "CC". I'm very confident that I didn't delete anything unrelated to Adobe, and I'm equally unconfident that I deleted every single file related to Adobe.
Photoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.
> Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file
This has indeed things like "!!1! MALWARE !!!!" written all over it.
one of the ways to run pirated Photoshop was to blackhole all of Adobe's license servers; so they probably learned from watching their competitors.
You don't need anything newer than CS6.
Just opened it and Bridge updates are unavailable due to incompatibility: Windows 11 only. Of course my hardware is Windows 11 incompatible.
I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.
I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).
> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
They'll send you to collections, probably.
Oh, duh, of course. One of those "how did I not think of that" moments
words cannot describe how much i hate the new adobe