2 Years After Leaving Adobe - Update

Adobe's currently ripping its users off with pricing, illogical subscription plans and recently they added a hidden clause in their TOS saying they own certain licensing in users works. Shameless. Affinity seems like a good jump for me.

I made the switch too in 2020. I'm professional graphic designer. I've worked with adobe, quark, corel, freehand since 1995. Now I'm Adobe free with Affinity suite, Davinci, Blender (3d and 2d animation). The lack is on the PDF side, but I use PDF studio from Qoppa and Packzview for accurate color separation proofing. It's not the price that bug me, it's the renting concept. Like my mechanic, I want to own my tools. When I retire, I want to be able to do little job for hobby or help friends and not have to pay monthly fees all my life.

Affinity are halving their prices right now.

There also some Open Source Alternatives that some may consider... 1. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program): Alternative to Adobe Photoshop 2. Inkscape: Alternative to Adobe Illustrator 3. Scribus: Alternative to Adobe InDesign 4. OpenShot: Alternative to Adobe Premiere 5. Synfig Studio: Alternative to Adobe Animate 6. darktable: Alternative to Adobe Lightroom 7. Natron: Alternative to Adobe After Effects 8. Ardour: Alternative to Adobe Audition 9. Master PDF Editor: Alternative to Adobe Acrobat [Non-FOSS]

Thanks. I scrapped Adobe, because there is no reason for a hobbyist to pay that much money without a return. Resolve and Affinity seem really great - I will give them a try.

Here in India, Small businesses are really struggling to pay for year on year cost increase and subscription to Adobe. We are trying for alternatives to adobe and we sure replace it.

As an Affinity evangelist, I gotta say they constantly run sales. I bought Affinity V1 in 2017 for less than $100, and then 5 years later upgraded to the V2 apps for $120. The value is just incredible when compared to Adobe. If V2 lasts another 5 years, that'll be $120 compared to $3,300 if you paid for Adobe for that period. People can complain about 'missing features', but I'm not sure the Adobe features are worth $3000 for most users.

3 years here. 🎉💪🏻🙌🏻

I love the fact that I got an Adobe AD on this video! 😁 Thanks for video, always interesting to hear about peoples experiences leaving Adobe! I am still connected to them due to the fact that I teach some of their software. But teaching is drying up, so I am getting more and more serious about dumping them, hard!

I'm so happy to see the market re-fragment. I am curious to see when Resolve will become the new "industry standard" with all these new editors learning Resolve because it's free nowadays. Hopefully they don't get too comfy and we see a video editing arms race!

Thanks for making the comprehensive list! I will have to go through this list later today!

Great overview! Thank you for the list Michael!

Great video! I am stil using Adobe as my current student license still goes till November this year. But I already bought Affinity Suite during the 50% sale and installed Danvinci Resolve. After that I'll switch fully to Affinity and Davinci.

Incredibly helpful. Thank you!

I'd switched from Premiere to Davinci a while back BUT was missing After Effects... So I jumped into forcing myself to learn Fusion for this upcoming motion-graphics heavy client video. So far, it's a stellar replacement to After Effects once you wrap your head around the node system!

Resolve has made so much progress over the last two years. They did add a multi merge node in the Fusion page. It is not perfect but you do get more flexibility when arranging the layer order of images in the composition. Color grading is really the best because you can do it in a group. Affinity Photo is about to make it back into my pipeline.

My alternative for Photoshop is Clip Studio Paint. It's a paid software with focus on drawing illustrations, comics/manga and animating clips and gets updated and new features on a nearly regular basis and is on its way to become an industry standard in Japan for Animators and Mangakas.

Regarding After Effects: if you can get a hold of CS5 or CS6, that'll allow you to own the last decent ish versions, have access to many of the filters, etc., and it won't come with CC bloat / cost.

Moho is an animation software which might be useful for parts that need to be animated. I've switched over from Adobe a while ago as well, and I love it. Between Davinci Resolve, Affinity and blender I've pretty much been able to do whatever I want.

I left Adobe over 3 years ago. I have no regrets and miss none of their programs.