An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

I cancelled mine this year too after having the subscription for maybe 10 years (and using dodgy copies previously for many many years). I used it mostly because it's the only professional tool remaining that can handle palettised formats and can reduce colours with a bunch of dithering options (I do a lot of retro computing projects and sometimes need/want to manage palettes in there). But it was just infuriating. It was getting slower and slower with every release. Constants updates with AI features I didn't want or need. Etc etc. None of the alternatives do what I want, and I don't want something like Asesprite or GrafX2. I want something like Photoshop. I know the shortcuts and it's professional looking.

I was thinking of building my own clone that suited my needs and attempting to sell it, although I recently found https://github.com/SethRobinson/Patchy which seems to do everything I want. My only complaint is that it's vibe coded, but maybe I should just suck it down and use it. Incidentally Seth Robinson was the author of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (aka LORD).

I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that).

Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.

Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.

The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.

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

Holy moly.

> 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...?

My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.

Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.

The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.

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.

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.

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/

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

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

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

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.

Nobody has mentioned Krita which is quite good.

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?

Rember when Adobe tried to stop people saying images had been “Photoshopped”?

Well, be careful what you wish for Adobe!

Now everyone just says an image is AI, and something being Photoshopped is a distant memory.

RIP Photoshopped Images.

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.

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.

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.

words cannot describe how much i hate the new adobe

> Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file

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

> 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)