this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Some brilliant people invented photoshop
It was a good product but expensive
Some asshole coke head CEO decided to make it more expensive and worse.
Fuck adobe.
GIMP 3 FTW
And they bought Macromedia’s suite and destroyed it.
I miss macromedia flash so bad, actionscript for life
I once built a website preloader that was so large that I made a pre-preloader for it. Good times indeed.
A flash preloader was my first real tech job! As I recall, they stiffed my last paycheck and went under later.
But it was incredibly fun and I made connections that steered my career to a new direction for the next decade.
Agreed, the wildest of wests.
Fireworks for me. I miss that whole suite though.
RIP Fireworks...
Fireworks had so much potential as a web design app and they threw it away.
Illustrator and InDesign were too focused on print media and Photoshop could barely comprehend anything unless it was rasterized.
That's what big tech companies do, they buy small and promissing companies they think that once can become a competitor and then.... destroy it. The young startups just take the money and can retire early.
And they bought Paintshop pro and destroyed it
GIMP 3, Krita, Darktable, Inkscape, Kdenlive
Blender
The people editing their images in Blender are the same people who edit their videos in Blender lol.
You say that like it’s a bad thing lol
Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn't. It's amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I'd use it for CAD too.
FreeCAD for CAD as others mentioned.
I believe i recall there being an update specifically to the video editor within the past year or two, but don’t quote me on that. They have done updates to post processing, the timeline functionality, grease pencil, and i believe some other things that would apply to video editing, so i imagine it would be easier to work with. There are cad and measuring add-ons as well, i believe some free within blender itself.
I bought Davinci, so I'm happy with that, but I'll still check out the Blender version. I can't really complain about it, it does so much and is free.
As far as CAD goes, they aren't really usable to be fast in CAD. It's super cumbersome. You should be able to move things 1" to the right or left, put things at certain heights and move around the space in an easy way. I haven't found anything that can do that for imperial. Also, the tools for making dimensions is really bad and I don't think there's a way to make a blueprint unless you come up with something yourself. That being said, it's free and it's not their focus. They concentrate on the 3D portions.
I've started using FreeCAD for CAD work, I've used Fusion 360 for 5 years before trying FreeCAD (again, I tried it a few years ago) and it works pretty good.
It's different and it's taking some getting used to but it's working out quite nicely so far.
If the units are set to inches for length. You can just type G (grab), X (or Y or Z), and 1 to move an inch in any direction. I think it used to be worse.
It doesn't do it natively, but it does have plugins for CAD features
Maybe I'm doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that's saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.
FreeCAD (for less-organic modeling)
I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn't exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.
Adobe isn't selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.
GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven't been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.
Krita is awesome with a drawing pad
And I'm not like even good at doing anything
I use GIMP, but you can't compare it to Photoshop. GIMP has a horrible GUI and it has very strange design choices.
The Affinity suite is comparable to Photoshop, but it's a paid product.
Photopea represent
Affinity Photo for me!
I'd prefer FOSS but...GIMP ain't it.
Have used Photopea in* a bind in the past, it's also pretty good especially the clone GUI.
I moved to Affinity early this year, and it has been amazing!! I was expecting a long adjustment period after decades with Photoshop, but it's so similar that I picked it up super quick!
Another vote for Affinity. Excellent Adobe alternatives 1-time reasonable price. Such a breath of fresh air after so many subs.
Just an FYI that you might want to get some practice in with some Affinity alternatives, because they've been purchased by Canva, and so enshittification might set in any time.
Bought out by Canva, I also currently love it, but I don't expect that to last.
FUCK.
Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).
So much of Krita is great and then there is the text tool which is still a heap of trash.
New update coming for that soon!
I still remember when they bought Macromedia Flash and all my animator friends and I simply couldn't stand Adobe Flash CS3 or whatever it was called. It used more resources, crashed more often and didn't exactly bring anything revolutionary to the table in terms of new functions.
So the real question is whether Photoshop might ever have become successful, if Adobe hadn't bought it.
I feel like I should have switched to GIMP a decade ago.
The best time to switch was 10 years ago. The second best time to switch is right now.