An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

EExMachina73 about 3 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on anderegg.ca

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

70% Positive

Analyzed from 1923 words in the discussion.

Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

yardie•about 1 hour ago

> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.

Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.

So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?

amelius•about 1 hour ago

> A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes.

Holy moly.

3form•29 minutes ago

I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).

stronglikedan•23 minutes ago

It does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).

silon42•20 minutes ago

Maybe it's another excuse to not have a Linux port... ("licensing would be impossible")

exe34•18 minutes ago

Read only root for the win. Or rage really, because then it won't work.

pauldoerwald•about 2 hours ago

Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.

JKCalhoun•about 2 hours ago

Pretty clear marketing killed PS when they went to a subscription model.

pauldoerwald•about 2 hours ago

A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.

anonymars•about 1 hour ago

Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop

But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe

Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)

kccqzy•10 minutes ago

They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).

XCSme•about 1 hour ago

With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.

jfyi•about 1 hour ago

Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.

AlexandrB•14 minutes ago

> A subscription model isn't needed to kill software.

It's not needed, but it sure helps!

sghiassy•34 minutes ago

I despise their subscription model, but I bet it’s minting them tons of money.

Individuals leaving them (including myself to Affinity) is a drop in the ocean to them

mft_•about 1 hour ago

A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].

Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.

[0] https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ [1] https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner

dylan604•11 minutes ago

It was all of the Adobe app's caches that kill me. I kept a copy of DiskInventoryX around for a long time for the specific purpose of showing how large those folders could get.

dtagames•about 2 hours ago

Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

trembolram•16 minutes ago

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..

I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.

S0und•10 minutes ago

Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.

_fzslm•about 1 hour ago

Not only this, but it's like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all mixed up into one super-app. This beats Adobe's cross-app functionality by miles.

kccqzy•about 1 hour ago

It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

Free (as in beer). There's always a catch.

Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well

wsc981•about 1 hour ago

I read on Twitter this week that someone made such an interface on top of GIMP.

https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, there have been similar things before it as well. I was thinking more of a ground up photoshop style editor with GEGL as the backend

throw0101d•about 1 hour ago

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?

medwards666•37 minutes ago

Presumably though Canva subscriptions?

Shame it's only Mac/Windows compatible. I'd kill for a Linux build.

skeledrew•23 minutes ago

Maybe use WINE or similar to run the Windows build?

SanjayMehta•about 2 hours ago

I paid for the entire Affinity suite in one shot, was worried when Canva took over, but glad to say everything's working together just fine.

d3Xt3r•about 2 hours ago

Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.

[1] https://www.photopea.com/

maxwellito•about 2 hours ago

I'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop. Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.

geenat•28 minutes ago

Photopea is only good for smaller edits/files otherwise it starts lagging like crazy.

That said, Affinity is quite fair fast even on huge files. You can bring over like 80% of your Photoshop muscle memory.

Honorable mentions depending on your needs: Figma, Penpot, Krita

f4c39012•about 2 hours ago

One hallmark of poor quality software is the existence of a separate cleanup tool in case the uninstall doesn't work

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

The installer skipped the in part, and is now just a staller.

whywhywhywhy•about 1 hour ago

This software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.

giwook•about 1 hour ago

There have been some good alternatives mentioned in the comments here, like Affinity or Photopea.

Does anyone happen to know if there is a similarly good alternative to Lightroom?

Pseudomanifold•about 1 hour ago

Darktable (https://www.darktable.org/) has become very good and continues to be my go-to solution for digital photography.

alistairSH•35 minutes ago

I've been happy with Photomator (now owned by Apple).

It's Apple-only, with versions for iOS/iPadOS and Mac. It integrates seamlessly with the Apple photo library.

It's only "gotcha" (which I don't find to be a problem) is it leverages Apple processing where possible (ie the Apple RAW engine). That doesn't bother me, but if you're a pro-level photog and need some special sauce for your RAW workflow, it might not work.

Goofy_Coyote•about 1 hour ago

Capture One.

Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2 V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

Eh, using resolve for photo editing seems a bit like using blender for video editing. It can be done, and it isn't that bad, but there are so many better options

Goofy_Coyote•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, I agreed, though I’m secretly hoping maybe Davinci enters this market too

dsego•about 1 hour ago

Rawtherapee, CameraBag Photo.

Forgeties79•about 1 hour ago

BMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve

donaldihunter•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, Adobe's annual paid monthly plan that auto-renews and locks you in is pure evil.

whywhywhywhy•about 1 hour ago

you can get out of the lock in by switching your plan then theres a two week window you can cancel without a fee.

Not that you should have to do that, I'm just letting you know that you can so they don't get a fee from you.

harvie•about 2 hours ago

GIMP.

How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.

whywhywhywhy•about 1 hour ago

World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it.

If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.

1313ed01•33 minutes ago

Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.

freedomben•30 minutes ago

> World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative.

Wow, that's a wild statement. I think you might be right. Though GIMP was responsible for GTK, which is now a critical part of most linux systems. I wonder where we'd be if not for GTK? Qt everywhere maybe?

dsego•about 1 hour ago

I share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.

cmyk_student•32 minutes ago

I think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :)

GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

Here, here. I wish Blender would just grow an image editor, with pie menus and visual programming nodes. It already has a video editor!

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs

nextaccountic•3 minutes ago

Just use https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp in this case

InsideOutSanta•about 2 hours ago

After ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.

frollogaston•about 2 hours ago

I did an insane amount of pixel-perfect editing in Acorn 1.0 free trial when I was a kid in 2007, always with the shareware banner blocking part of the canvas

janfoeh•35 minutes ago

Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.

I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.

t1234s•about 2 hours ago

Photoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.

DemocracyFTW2•about 2 hours ago

> Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file

This has indeed things like "!!1! MALWARE !!!!" written all over it.

cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago

one of the ways to run pirated Photoshop was to blackhole all of Adobe's license servers; so they probably learned from watching their competitors.

NietTim•about 1 hour ago

> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted.

I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)