GIMP 3 RC 1 is soon here and it actually looks like it can finally replace Photoshop for me. Nondestructive editing is there.
The learning curve was steep, but I managed to replace Lightroom with darktable a couple of years ago.
That is why open source products are important: they add a constantly growing baseline of quality which the likes of Adobe have to be above of if they want to be able to sustain themselves.
Creative cloud products which can now be replaced:
After Effects with Blender, which is even more powerful
Premiere with kdenlive, Openshot, Shotcut or Davinci Resolve (not open Source, but free and with a superior color engine)
Photoshop with Gimp, Krita (Photoshop is still superior tho)
Illustrator with Inkscape, Graphite or other SVG editors
InDesign with Scribus
Many of these tools are not there yet (I sorted roughly from best replacement to worst), but this is certainly a space to watch.
And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative.
I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.
I got quite annoyed earlier this year that Lightroom 6 couldn't be installed anymore. Have been using it for many years but now it cannot be activated anymore and thus won't work. I'm not happy to pay a subscription for a hobby I only manage to do a few times a year anymore, though. Overall I guess they won't care, as they have a large part of the professional market willing to pay monthly.
If GIMP and Krita would just offer really smooth user interfaces in addition to capable backends, maybe now could be the time...
With some effort you can get Lightroom running if you've still got an activated installation somewhere. It's not just activation, but apparently a time-limited license on the facial recognition software Adobe used. On MacOS the remaining 32-bit code sprinkled about (beyond just the installer) means it won't run on 64-bit only operating systems.
I wonder how the justification for all this will go when people will have enough NPU processing power in their computers to do these operations and not need to have the work done on a server?
“You need to pay to do it on our servers for safety issues and so we can pay the Adobe Stock creators”
This is why local models are so important, only chance we have to be freed from this cycle.
However, I am also very confident next year they'll just release a V3 and we'll have to buy it again of course, but no worries we'll get a discount as previous owner!
I'd still prefer a fixed perpetual license with a usage based fee for AI features though.
I don't agree at all. Just because you want to push a specific feature and charge a subscription for it, that doesn't mean the seller is entitled to defraud it's paying customers.
If their feature is so good, wouldn't you be seeing paying customers form a line for it?
We are going to see permutations of this question over and over in the coming years concerning AI.
Desktop class, you can render AI stuff locally on a $1,500 computer. Phones and tablets are building in neural processors. That will change. But the licensing thing won't change back.
Glad Adobe waited for the founder to pass before doing all this junk, it'd probably kill him.
Adobe is fully aware they have the industry by the balls. I doubt that this inertia can be curbed no matter what they do, including it seems granting themselves a license to everything you open using their products; which while a direct violation of our partnerships: has been deemed acceptable by my CEO because it's "impossible that nobody else is having this problem" and "we are not the vanguard of defending IP law"...
... If I'm not willing to be the "someone" who stands up, then it's more likely that "no one" will be that "someone" either.
