Creative Cloud?
More like a Creative Cudgel, to bludgeon users into overpaying to rent apps they don't need in order to get the handful that they do.
Adobe has introduced a beta of Creative Cloud Web at its virtual Max event, which kicked off today. When Creative Cloud was introduced in 2011, it was something of a misnomer. There was a cloud storage element, but the core applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro remained desktop applications for Windows and …
This is ripoff by Adobe taking advantage of their market dominance. Too many creatives are told they must use Adobe whatever or they can never be a professional, which is rather smelly load, in school. As an amatuer photographer I avoid their ripoff 'services' by using cheaper alternatives that get the job done, some are free as in beer.
It is a factor of both power and integration, sadly. With both InDesign and Acrobat being the de facto industry standards in their respective media creation fields, using anything but Photoshop and losing UI/UX integration, not to even mention the coordinated colorspace handling, multiplies your workflow beyond what can be considered a reasonable tradeoff.
And that's just two media, print and PDF. For video, as I mentioned several times before, the only true competition in the field is [now] DaVinci Resolve (which is why I use it); After Effects with Premier Pro is pretty much the industry standard and has [I am sure] an excellent integrated workflow.
Adobe has been pushing Photoshop's "AI" abilities as of late, increasing value in terms of reducing time and effort involved in doing some previously complex edits.
When your creativity is not on someone else's dime, you can spend more time working between two disparate UI's that do not talk to one another in order to make shared media work as necessary in the applications (been there, done that, in the old PageMaker days for example).
We use Adobe because (again, sadly) the competition is behind when both features and cohesive workflow across multiple fields is taken into account. Adobe is smart enough to know that, if for example Photoshop and Illustrator didn't work seamlessly with other CC apps, there would be much, much less reason to stick with them as a professional where time is money.
Surely no different to Apple or Microsoft then? It seems to be the accepted way most tech vendors operate these days.
I'm not condoning their behaviour, and I've always been able to use alternatives to get my work done, so it doesn't really affect me. But most of my non-techie acquaintances behave like boiled frogs and just pay up without so much as a murmor.
No, not "no different" at all. Apple doesn't even do software rental, their monthly charge stuff is all things like video streaming and extra storage. And at least MicroSuck offers a purchase option for their terrible office package, even if they do try to hide that it exists.
Adobe only does software rental now, at an exorbitant $50/month.
While Microsoft does offer a purchase option for Office, they intentionally make this difficult in assorted ways - e.g. shortening the period for which it is guaranteed to be compatible with their online services, and only officially supporting it on the latest version of Windows Server at the time it is released (used to go back to all supported server versions) - this is very relevant if you use terminal servers.
Microsoft appears to be trying to go the same way as Adobe, but didn't quite think they could get away with it in one step so are doing it incrementally, whereas Adobe clearly thought they could just go for it, and did so.
Funny that no-ones complain they are often told they need to use Apple too. What's the difference, Apple is fashionable, while Adobe isn't?
Like it or not, there are many tools that become some sector de-facto standard, for good or wrong reasons, and you'll have to be able to use them or you won't go far. And schools are right when they give students the right chances to find a job, and not just to assert some ideology.
As an amateur you're free to use whatever you like, when your income depends on on a given set of tools, and you're not in a position to force others to adapt, you're the one who needs to adapt.
Also, what's a "rip-off"? For example I find any mobile phone above 200-250 euro a ripoff, for my needs. Still, it looks many buy them, maybe it's not ripoff for them? While I may not find a 2500 euro tilt and shift lens a ripoff... maybe it's what you can and you can't do that is important?
Joe Christina on YouTube has a series called 'Cutting the Cord' where he goes over alternatives to Adobe for all OSes (including Linux). Some are free as in beer others are commercial with a perpetual license. Many of the alternatives were suggested by the viewers. This series was mostly aimed at photographers.
I don't feel the need to "cut the cord" just because Adobe. I weight advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not interested in promoting some kind of ideology.
I was using Paint Shop Pro, but Corel turned it into an unusable mess. So I switched to Lightroom.
I still use Lightroom 5 - it's a perpetual licenses and as I don't change cameras and lenses following du jour fashion - it does support my gear fully. I tried a later version, but I also don't need nor like much post-production so most of the newer features are not of great use, and can do without. I don't feel "diminished" if I don't use the "latest and greatest". What matters, after all, it's what you're able to achieve...
Yet switching tool would need a lot of re-processing. Lock-in? Well, with any non-destructive editor you end locked-in some tool. Maybe one I retire I will have time for it - just hope by then AI will do everything itself <G>.
I also print (on a Canon Pixma Pro), and that's something that still rules Linux out. Inks and papers are too expensive to attempt to find the right software stack and calibration. With macOS or Windows is much simpler.
I also use other tools when LR is not enough. Nik Collection, for example. I do panoramas with Hugin, and stacking with Helicon Focus. Sometimes I use Canon Digital Photo Professional and Canon Print Studio Pro for their specific features.
Maybe one day I'll upgrade to a later version of Lightroom. Maybe I'll switch tool. Just I'll try to understand what is better for me - regardless of what I think of Adobe.
Still, if I had to work in a professional environment where everything like it or not is far too often Adobe-based, I won't spend much time trying to be "different" for the sake of it.
Joe's series was not that you have to 'cut the cord' but that there are very good options to Adobe you could use. These options, for many, are as good or even better than Adobe (use case being the big variable here). So if you get fed up with Adobe, you might have some viable options to explore.
As I detest the subscription model, the fact there are many quality packages available gives me options to at least review and try which are available on commercial terms I find reasonable.
“ And schools are right when they give students the right chances to find a job, and not just to assert some ideology.”
I don’t think it’s an ideological thing. Schools (along with other educational establishments) should be teaching fundamental concepts not training people on a specific tool. If you teach students that there’s one way to do a thing and it requires one specific feature of one specific tool (with the result that even quite minor UI changes can leave them at sea) then you’re short-changing both the students and ultimately the prospective employers.
Don’t teach people how to edit pictures using Photoshop (or produce documents with Word, or crunch numbers with Excel), teach them how to edit pictures, produce documents, or construct spreadsheets using multiple products to illustrate different ways the concepts are implemented so that students can work with whatever is handed to them or choose their own tools as appropriate…
Sure. But you also need to use a tool to explain it, and you don't use one nobody uses. You don't teach music using recording of your neighbor singing under the shower. Maybe you use top artists recordings?
Teaching them fundamental concepts using GIMP would be utterly stupid. They would just need to re-learn how to do it with Photoshop immediately. Nor you can ask arts people to develop and code their own sharpening algorithm.
If you're teaching photography now you don't ask people to build a cardboard camera and give them a piece of glass to cover with some photosensitive material. Nor you ask them to get something they have to ditch immediately because it's of no real use for their job.
And not all schools are universities when you can go deep into fundamental problems - some schools are exactly there just to teach people a job and let them find one quickly. You're not going to explore deeply the theory behind color perception and calibration.
The problem is some people are totally fixated with a tool brand and the "development philosophy" behind it and make it a kind of religion. Others see a tool for what it is - a tool - and don't care where it comes from and if it developed following some anointed procedure or not.
They would also ditch the tool quickly when they can find something better to perform their work faster - and then enjoy both their work results and their free time.
I'm left wondering if the Canvas API was the greatest things or worst thing to happen to browsers. Yes we now get some new tools that are cross platform and new ways of interacting with the web, (Figma has become the standard in web UI design so just the new Adobe). But I now wonder how bloated the browser is becomming and how much JS is being made to do.
Can't imagine the pain one would go through if you had a problem with your browser caching bad JS and you just want to get on with work.
Next stop Premier in a web app rendering a 2 hour long clip made from hundreds of hours of footage interpreted throguh JS bet that thing would be a new level of slow. Then will come the new Electron version of all Adobe desktop apps to unify their code base......
Canvas is HTML5 and arrived between 2008 and 2014. Although PS need it, I don't think that's the killer feature that allowed them to port PS to the web. I think it would be web assembly with the Emscripten compiler that lets you take C++ and compile it to web assembly that runs natively (not Javascript) in the browser. As for bloat - browsers are mini operating systems now but web asm is like coding against the metal again, albeit with the browser sandbox.
Bloat? Surely you mean "more functionality"? As you just described that this sort of thing didn't used to be possible, and due to new capabilities such as Canvas, now is... So, it isn't really bloat if it is actually useful is it?
Also, caching bad JS isn't particularly hard to solve either... Clear the cache. Done. Seems you're trying to find problems here really.
I suspect people posed similar supposed problems when computers moved away from mainframes and terminals to individual PCs.
Ok yes more functionality - I guess you took my post as a negative and that's possibly due to how I worded it.
I'm actually a fan of the new capabilities modern standards have bought. I do however also believe that some sites take the use of those too far and things like SPA that can be great can also be a real pain when one bit of JS won't work correctly. Over use of animations can make navigation difficult of even impossible for accessibility users. The point was more about the browser and it becoming a mini OS, ChromeOS points to this but isn't exactly a future I would want either.
As for your clear cache comment, no I'm not trying to find problems. Clearing cache can to be a challenge these days in itself at times depending on how a site is built and what local features it uses along with how much of your browser life you want to reset. Your comment however doesn't need to be utterly dismissive that tends to be the real problem with the web these days.
I'm sure people did fret about change back then my point was more about how far we push platforms that never had any of this in mind at conception and if it might be time to re-evaluate that. Like we did for IPv6 and are now doing for TLS and HTTP and so on.
The other half of me however also recognises that the web is ubiquitous as it is not tied to companies anyone could setup a webpage or a server and serve content. I hope we don't re-work standards/protocols so far that the only options to publish content is to have a skilled team or use a giant platform like Squarespace etc.
I hate their strategy as well. But honestly they're better than the competition (I'm not sure if Afinity is better nowadays for pictures). I rarely do vectorial drawings, but I'd imagine that iPad with the pencil is more appropriate than using a mouse in general (using procreate there). At the moment Adobe is so large that I'm surprised their buy off of the frame.io collaboration system was approved. Soon they'll have to break Adobe, if you ask me.
Anyway, quite stoked with DXO PL 5, still not quite same level as LR but got a lot closer. Using Pixelmator Pro otherwise and I'm quite satisfied.
There are two obstacles that I would need to overcome for me to move from Adobe - I'm on the £9.95 per month photography plan, doing all of my work on a 12.9" IPP.
First is I would need something that works as well as Lightroom when it comes to image management. I've looked at some of the possible alternatives for my use-case and they're all somewhat lacking - ON1 in particular came close but image editing wasn't stellar on the iPad which brings me to point second.
Second, I would need to re-learn all of the editing techniques that are so familiar to me from ACR and LR, things that I do without needing to really focus on until it comes to refinement. None of the alternatives, including Affinity Photo, work the same way as does LR which makes for me, any level of editing both painfully slow and hit or miss.
One additional point, the current version of LR CC on iOS has just gained some powerful mask selection capabilities as part of the rolling upgrades the cloud versions get. If I'd been on the perpetual licence I'd likely have had to buy a new version of LR to get it - Adobe being Adobe. That and the fact my plan includes 1TB of storage makes it far better value to me than any of the alternatives. As ever, YMMV.