art from January 2020

flight rising art from December 2019

Ever since I first subscribed to Adobe way back in 2016, I’ve been entertaining the idea of leaving the Adobe ecosystem. As a college art student, my biggest gripe was with the expensive Photography Plan. It’s only recently that they started offering a cheaper version of that same plan in exchange for much less cloud storage, which basically makes using Lightroom Desktop useless. Until they make the Local tab of Lightroom Desktop function like Lightroom Classic, it’s lost on me for now.

After having just finished migrating my entire collection of photos and videos I had stored in the cloud, I hear that Adobe updated their user policy to allow the company to "access your content" through "manual and automated methods". Since we’re just customers, we consent to this change simply by using Adobe’s products. This pissed everyone off and they eventually backtracked and clarified they won’t access or own your art, or train their AI on the artwork you create without our consent.

I hate how Adobe has become synonymous with the photography industry as a whole. While’s there’s plenty of competition on the hardware side of things (Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, etc), there’s no such competition when it comes to software. You either pay for Photoshop and Lightroom, or perish as a photographer.

Don’t get me wrong. Photoshop and Lightroom are powerful tools. I just wish the situation was different. I wish there wasn’t a monthly subscription.

Things have changed a lot over the years and there seems to be a growing movement toward kicking Adobe to the curb. So while I’m not alone in these feelings, what lies beyond is pretty new to me.

What do I actually use?

I use Adobe Lightroom extensively in my photography practice, from editing and tagging photos to creating albums of finished projects ready for publishing. I even use it to edit old family photos so they look their best.

Second only to Lightroom is Adobe Fresco, which is a digital painting app made by Adobe that functions a lot like Photoshop, except I actually understand how it works. For most of my life I’ve drawn on either an iPad or an iPhone screen using my fingers so that’s what comes most naturally to me. Art made in Fresco syncs to Adobe Creative Cloud for further editing in Photoshop or Illustrator.

By contrast, I rarely use Adobe Photoshop. I never really learned how to make use of it. Not even after years of photography classes in college. It just never became a major part of my photography practice, which is perfectly valid. Apparently Photoshop has some powerful healing and cloning tools, but so does Lightroom. Especially nowadays.

I also use Adobe Portfolio to host my photography website. The templates on offer are pretty dated and the interface is quite janky to work with. The only reason I use it is because it’s free with my Photography plan. I’m all for trying a free or low-cost alternative.

What’s out there?

I stumbled across this GitHub page showing all sorts of alternatives to various Adobe programs. While none are perfect replacements, they’re definitely worth considering.

For Lightroom the obvious choice seems to be Darktable, an open-source image editing and organizing application. It isn't a perfect replacement but it's the best I've found in terms of its feature set, speed, reliability, and user friendliness (which still needs some work). Images are edited using a downscaled version of the original RAW file rather than through a proxy.

For Photoshop, a combination of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape seem to be the obvious choices for desktop use. I have had some experience editing images in GIMP and SVG files in Inkscape but I have a lot to learn.

For Fresco, what to choose is a lot less clear. Long ago when I had an original iPad mini I used the original Autodesk Sketchbook for my digital art. It still exists so that's an option, though I'm not all that familiar with Autodesk's business practices. Procreate Pocket seems to be a good choice, but that's based solely off of brand recognition. Still mulling over my options.

Closing thoughts

If y'all have any advice I'd love to hear. Note that I'm still subscribed to Adobe and would prefer options compatible with Linux over just macOS and Windows. Windows isn't doing itself any favours right now.

some art from November 2019