I dunno, I still find m365 family a great deal. 5TB cloud storage for less then 100 euro a year? And get the best most complète Office suite as a bonus?
If you compare that to the competition it's a slam dunk. I need cloud storage. I need an office suite.
Same goes for prime here in NL by the way. Unlimited photo storage, free games monthly, streaming, Luna, free shipping for less then 6 euro.
I dunno, the cloud storage part is quite easy to make at home. Granted, the initial price will be steeper (since you need to buy the physical drive). But in two years time, it will have paid for itself and your data will still be yours.
As for the office suite, while I understand that MSOffice is advanced, for the regular user that I am, OnlyOffice is more than enough.
Frequently paying any amount of money for anything will always seem like a good deal to anyone who always depends on others to do everything.
There's no shame in needing each other, though. We should strive to be self sufficient but can't be skilled or resourceful in every field.
Abusing the needs of others on the other hand... All these huge companies should burn to the ground for that.
Just wanted to give an idea for pricing of a self hosted alternative:
5-6TB drive is around 100 EUR
Intel NUC as a server is around 200 EUR
My personal power consumption is 6 kWh per month at 24/7 operation, here that costs 10 EUR per year
You can chose other parts, you may already have some parts, Im giving my own example here.
Keeping in mind you need to be a bit tech savy to set this up, keep it updated, data secure, things may break down the line and require maintenance, etc.. The upside: the data is yours, you are reliant on yourself, it can do more than just store files.
But obviously: to each their own!
I really hope it's not like goog where if you ever want to download that data your download speeds are reduced to a crawl and everything about the download is convoluted.
Newer versions of Krita now come with G'mic built in, which add so many incredible tools, including a content aware fill that works incredibly well, and a really nice edge detecting cropping tool called foreground extract.
Shoot, krita has content aware now? Other than non-destructive editing/layer styles that's one of the big things keeping me on PS.
It doesn't even need to be amazing, it just needs to be good enough. I think the weirdest thing about krita for me was how you type text in a dialog box instead of on the canvas.
AFAIK, krita has had non-destructive editing for a while now (while gimp just got it with the 3.0 release).
The text tool is a pain point still, though thankfully a new from the ground up text tool over 6 years in the making is soon to be released for Krita this year, likely making it the most capable open-source option.
I've always been a fan of getpaint.net - it's like... idk, half-way between microsoft paint and photoshop, but you can install plugins to add functionality that the vanilla version doesn't offer.
Until you cross into advanced manipulation or outright image creation, Paint.Net can do almost everything you want from it. Tbh the only feature I miss is the plethora of user guides and tutorials that are Photoshop specific, or said another way;
I don’t miss their software, I miss the community
Up until they started adding AI features it's pretty similar. I'm ambivalent about those features. They're handy as hell, but the SaaS model eats dead donkey asshole, and they're tied together. I always find a client who will just pay for my CS subscription for me, so it's not really like I've suffered much, but what a stupid fucking tax just to get CA-delete.
The new mest features that i use the most at work are straighten when i have do do a wuick and dirty scan, and CA-fill when customers send me print files without bleed. But I don't have to pay for the Adobe subscription, and if it makes my boss happy, then i am happy
I actually checked it out last year because I was curious about the whole AI autofill in Photoshop, where you can give it a cropped art piece and it'll fill out the remainder.
If your experience with Photoshop is from CS5, you'll hate this new version. They removed a lot of the tooling that I was used to. Maybe they simplified the toolbar and everything is tucked into different things. I struggled to modify my art piece and remove the background.
I found myself going back to Photopea immediately.
As for the AI autofill thing? It's a shit gimmick. It barely works most of the time. And honestly, if I was to use a tool, you're better off using a AI art tool and then "Photoshop" them together. Then use whatever the hell Adobe cooked up.
I think Photoshop CS5 is still a better product than Gimp will ever be. I think this person needs to upgrade to Affinity. While it’s still available to buy, that is.
Apparently there's a tutorial to make a thing in docker that actually does run it. It's a whole-ass process though and my friend who uses Linux for most stuff was working on it a while back. Damn shame it's not a thing, out of the box.
But since I can easily install Gimp on my linux system it is clearly superior to any proprietary windows exclusive software. I'm so glad I never even bothered with Photoshop in the first place.
I own the CS6 Master collection. I still play around in Flash builder on occasion and play my old animations. AE is still useful but has been mostly replaced by Blender. Still love Photoshop as I have been using it since my gave me a cracked copy of 7.0.
Have no intention of ever giving adobe another dollar.
Mac users should take a look at Pixelmator if you’re doing light work and Affinity if you’re doing studio-grade work.
Pixelmator feels like something Apple developed to be a part of the iWork suite, and the Affinity apps are literally Adobe apps with sane price points.
(Pixelmator was recently purchased by Apple so its future is uncertain, but the original software is still for sale as it was before the buyout for the time being.)
I'm an artist, and I have that version too, running it under qemu/Win10 (it won't run on Wine), under my Debian-Testing main OS. However, I have actually moved to Gimp 3 recently for all my work. I use it to make collages ( https://www.instagram.com/eugenia_loli ) and edit my scanned watercolor paintings: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli The only problem is that Gimp can't read my old PSDs that have adjustment layers correctly, so I load them first either on that old Photoshop, or online on Photopea, and then export them as TIFFs, to load them back to Gimp. For my newer work, I just use Gimp all the way.
Your work is really good! I particularly enjoyed the person in the bath tub with the ankle monitor and the mice sharing a clothesline between their plant houses.
I'm still using CS3. It's the only software on my pc at this point that doesn't have dark mode. I also found out recently that it should run perfectly on Linux using wine, so I intend to try that soon.
I too still have the cracked installers for CS5 and CS6 but... I switched to Gimp and Krita a very long time ago.
I remember doing an animation internship on the pilot of a TV show most here have heard of (Not gonna dox myself) and CS5 was definitely available at the time, but the studio was still using Flash MX because that was the last version available that Adobe hadn't fuckin wrecked.
I mean honestly, the old model was kind of dope. You pay a fairly high price for the software. Updates for that version are free. When they come out with enough new features to release a new milestone version you got to choose whether you upgrade to the milestone or stay on your existing version. True critical security patches were released for At least the last couple of versions.
But you get to decide when the features warrant you buying again. You got to choose with your wallet and the companies had to deal with that.
If they would have put a bunch of crap in about having the rights to AI scrape all of your content in the old version people would have just said fuck it I'm not upgrading it. But as it stands, if you don't like it you have to not use the software at all.
If you buy software at a version point, (vs the subscription model), why would you expect an update for it? Particularly for free? You chose to buy at a frozen point.
Because it's beneficial for the software company's reputation. People are more likely to buy the software when they know that it's not going to get a permanently unpatched zero-day the moment the next version comes out.
That model always had the tacit agreement that the company releases early, and the users accept that they are part of a large testing base with one or two major updates to come. Further to this, continued support in the early life drives more sales. There's a spectrum of users from bleeding edge to 4 versions behind. Some will hold out and never upgrade if key bugs remain, so updates make business sense. Software of this complexity has to be this way to strike a balance to move new features forward.
I hadn't used my CS6 for years but recently needed Premiere Pro. I hauled out the discs, installed it using an external optical drive, and searched old Outlook PST files for the serial number. It installed on my Win 11 laptop, and it activated when I typed in the serial number.
Long live CS6! Adobe won't get any more money from me.
I did get lucky when I bought it, though. I ordered and paid for CS5.5 Education version, so that was about AUD$450 instead of AUD$2200, and what turned up was CS5.5, a free licenced copy of CS4 "to help with 32-bit to 64-bit transition" and a download code for CS6, as I'd ordered 5.5 after 6 had been announced. I ended up with licenced copies of CS4, CS5.5, and CS6 for AUD$450
For illustration work at least. Photoshop is not the best for illustrations either, almost all illustration-focused apps easily blow it out of the water.