Here is the real truth
http://www.itassetmanagement.net/201...-relationship/
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5312380
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2...impact-budgets
A must read!
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2013/05...html#more-9251
Printable View
Really? Lets see what Adobe is going to do when their profits go doing from just listening to cloud subscribers only. That would be bad business and business suicide. If they are smart, they would listen to everyone. In my business all customers count and are important. That's what keeps me in business.
That being said, at this point, a lot of people are so fed up that they don't care what Adobe does. I personally know a lot of people and clients already in the process of making the move or are in the process of switching to non-Adobe software. This is a smart move. You never want to have one software company determine the success of your business or career. You always want to work with multiple tools.
A lot of people will be moving away from Adobe software and never looking back. Here is a good list that I found posted online:
For photo editing, manipulation, and composition:
Corel PaintShop Pro X5
Pixelmater
Corel Painter
Xara Designer Pro X
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX
Topaz standalone plug-ins
OnOne standalone plug-ins
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
PhotoLine
Snapheal
camerabag
For illustration:
Manga Studio 5 (better and faster than photoshop for coloring and illustration)
Corel Painter
Sketchbook Pro
ArtRage
VECTOR APPS:
Xara Designer Pro X (awesome!)
Serif DrawPlus X6 (awesome!)
Xara Xtreme
CorelDraw
Vector Magic
Artboard
IDraw
ZeusDraw
Inkscape
Intaglio
EazyDraw
Sketch
For video:
FinalCut Pro
Motion
Lightworks
iMovie
Avid Media Composer
VideoStudio Pro X6
Nuke
Wondershare Video Editor
For Audio:
Pro Tools
Sound Forge Pro
Audacity
ACID Pro
For print work:
Swift Publisher
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
QuarkXpress
Scribus
MultiAd Creator Pro
Xara Designer Pro X
For Web:
Expression Web
Espresso
Coda
Astana Studio
Wordpress
Tumult Hype ( instead of Adobe Edge Animate )
Notepad plus
For accessing and converting files:
XnView. (free) will read and write Photoshop .PSD files, also opens Adobe Illustrator .AI files.
ADOView. ($10) will read and display any InDesign or InCopy file, also reads Illustrator files.
For PDF:
PDF Studio Pro
Corel PDF Fusion
NitroPDFf
PDFsam Enhanced
Instead of Lightroom:
Aperture
Corel AfterShot Pro
DarkTable (free)
A useful list of Adobe alternatives, with one I'd avoid in the vector tools section: Serif DrawPlus X6 - your description of it as "awesome" is a bit wide of the mark, as this program is full of bugs, and the last version (X5) was so bad, Serif gave up on patching the problems and issued X6 with a lot of the problems still present. Still, it is cheap and you get what you pay for.
Bob.
Microsoft have stopped all development of Expression Web - but at least that means you can get the last version free....
Adobe isn't going to stop development any time soon. And Microsoft did not have a subscription only plan for Expression Web users. If they did the users would still be paying even though development stopped.
Edit: now that I have reread the previous comments I see that was a response to Serif DrawPlus being cheap and getting what you pay for.
Very true.
Nice list. Where did you get it? Here is another list I see being compiled:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...63#post7585563
I agree. Do something like Corel is doing at the moment with their "Welcome, CS users!" There is no way I will get rid of XDP, but I just bought an upgrade version for 'CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6' from Amazon.co.uk.
www.corel.com/cs/
http://mc.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=register
Thanks to everyone for posting more apps and links here! Spread the word on social media. A lot of people need help with this.
Here is a more complete list:
For photo editing, manipulation, and composition (instead of Photoshop):
Corel PaintShop Pro X5
Pixelmater
Corel Painter
Xara Designer Pro
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer
Topaz standalone plug-ins
OnOne standalone plug-ins
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
PhotoPlus X6
PhotoLine
Snapheal
camerabag
InstantMask Pro
Gimp
Oloneo PhotoEngine
For illustration (instead of Photoshop):
Manga Studio 5 ( Faster & better than Photoshop for illustration and coloring! )
Corel Painter
Sketchbook Pro
ArtRage
Corel PaintShop Pro X5
MyPaint
Howler
Gimp
Open Canvas (free)
Instead of Lightroom:
Aperture
Corel AfterShot Pro
Capture One Pro
DarkTable (free)
VECTOR APPS (instead of Adobe Illustrator):
Xara Designer Pro (awesome!)
Xara Xtreme
CorelDraw
Serif DrawPlus X6
Vector Magic
Artboard
IDraw
ZeusDraw
Inkscape
Intaglio
EazyDraw
Sketch
Pixelmater (has vector tools as Vectormater)
For video:
FinalCut Pro
DaVinci Resolve
Motion
Lightworks
MAGIX Video Pro X5
iMovie
Avid Media Composer
VideoStudio Pro X6
Nuke
Wondershare Video Editor
Silhouette FX
Hitfilm
For Audio:
Pro Tools
Sound Forge Pro
Audacity
ACID Pro
MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab 2013
For print work ( instead of Adobe InDesign ):
Swift Publisher
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
QuarkXpress
Scribus
PagePlus X6
MultiAd Creator Pro
Xara Designer Pro X
For Web:
Expression Web
Espresso
Coda
Astana Studio
Xara Web Designer 9
WebPlus X6
Wordpress
Tumult Hype ( instead of Adobe Edge Animate )
Notepad plus
For accessing and converting files:
XnView. (free) will read and write Photoshop .PSD files, also opens Adobe Illustrator .AI files.
ADOView. ($10) will read and display any InDesign or InCopy file, also reads Illustrator files.
For PDF:
PDF Studio Pro
Corel PDF Fusion
NitroPDFf
PDFsam Enhanced
Instead of Flash:
AnimeStudio
ToonBoom Studio
Unity
Jonazen, no that unfortunately won't work. This is for people who have a license for one of the qualifying Adobe CS products. If you click on the 'Adobe product owned' dropdown menu you'll see what CS products qualify.
http://mc.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=register
You don't seem to be able to upgrade your version at all.
You need Graphics Suite X4 or X5, or CorelDRAW® Premium Suite X5 to be able to upgrade to CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6.
Thanks... I wasn't holding my breath, and it definitely seemed a stretch to get a significant upgrade discount applied to such an old product!
Somewhere in my office, I think I actually have an old copy of Aldus Pagemaker -- must be from about 1987 or 88. I have a suspicion that this wouldn't qualify for any upgrades either!
I have vague memories of a sweet spot in the history of some of these products (pre-Xara). I think I just have started with the first version of CorelDraw and Paint for Windows, and upgraded faithfully each time new releases came out. I also used PhotoImpact pretty heavily, beginning with V3 in the late 90's, for a number of projects: not the right tool for precision graphics perhaps, but the included features made it incredibly easy for me to prepare and modify numerous graphics for business and website use over the years. Between CorelDraw, CorelPaint, PhotoImpact and PaintShopPro, we were able to tackle an enormous variety of projects. We kept upgrading these each year for a few key reasons:
- new features were added, explicitly, to each new version -- there was a genuine improvement in value with each version
- the tools generally had a pretty short and simple learning curve
- the annual outlay (avg time for an upgrade) was pretty small
- if a particular upgrade didn't make sense, I could skip it -- and still "catch up" with later versions down the road when it was more appropriate
Jon -- besides XDP (and P&GD 9), I can recommend Paint.net ... a cool bitmap editor, and free. I recommend Oloneo Photoengine, for very fast photo editing, RAW and JPG files, straight and HDR. And, very worth acquiring, an old copy of Photoshop 7. As you said, with just a few low-cost programs, you can do almost any job.
Almost any job where you can avoid round-trip collaboration with others, that is. And that's the Adobe racket -- yearly upgrades that make it confusing and sometimes impossible to pass working files back and forth without each party being on the same upgrade level. At a price, the Creative Cloud solves that. But for those of us who NEVER let anyone else touch a work file, this is a horrifying glimpse of the future Adobe wants for us. Art drones, endlessly passing files back and forth, quibbling over each minor change. Mindless art by committee; an end to individual creativity.
But I'm sure that the very wide world of non-cloud artists will survive and prosper. As I said at the start of this thread, Adobe's committing suicide. Large corporations will keep buying Adobe products... but will bargain for even steeper discounts. A few contractors will be forced to go the CC route to keep selling to their clients. But the rest of us, the REAL market, will avoid Adobe as we would a fairy princess with syphilis, and move on to other alternatives.
I remember paint.net - a friend had recommended it, but I never got to downloading it. Never heard of photoengine but will definitely look it up. Also just downloaded Photoscape and started to experiment....and this reminds me of Gimp and Inkscape too.
You raise interesting issues. I'm personally not at all comfortable with the idea of a cloud-only / subscription-only model, for all the reasons discussed in this thread already. Also, as you note, the larger and more distributed the team, the greater the impetus to be on the same version of the same tools, fitting the cloud model well. I'm intrigued, and a bit horrified pondering your vision of art outcome becoming the result of impersonal teams collaborating to create "team" art. We see a more mundane version of this concept in the "genuine oil painting" factories that literally follow an assembly line like process to crank out "hand painted" copies of cheap oil paintings by the hundreds (thousands?). First painter may lay down a background, next easel adds trees, sun and clouds. Another might add small flowers and animals, etc. The prospect of this happening with a cloud-based collaboration approach to graphic art is scary. Also - having been in IT 30+ years, it's easy for me to expand on this model with the idea that some members of this virtual team could be offshore, in India, Russia or China perhaps. As electronic tools continue to improve, this becomes more feasible. I've already watched and lived through the demise of a once-strong US-based IT industry, and would hate to see the same greed-driven mistakes being made in this one.
@know1 -- thanks for the reminder! I knew it was from one of Condon's books, And now I'll remember which one. A good book and a great movie. Angela Lansbury!
Jon raises further implications of distributed artwork, made possible by Adobe's Creative Cloud. Where I began by likening it to a cow fart, it is more like a Sarin nerve-gas attack. It will be easy now to produce commercial artwork via different work groups around the world, 24/7, year round. Same as software programming... the team in Vilnius hands off to the guys in Bangalore, who then pass the code for integration by the group in San Jose.
But I'll still place my bet on individual artists, using programs like XDP to create the breakthrough ads, brochures, and websites of the future. You can't 'can' creativity. And any ad agency that takes a modular 24/7 approach to concept development will fail. Guaranteed. On the other hand, in-house Fortune 500 artists will be stuck with the Cloud for quite a while, it's a management w** dream, sorry, Angelize. But then, you don't really need cutting-edge design for all those intranet and PowerPoint graphics. If you want those corporate benefits, get in with a defense contractor... just for security, they probably will be the last to offload your job to Shanghai.
Man, that's a lot of hysteria in the thread.
Hardly hysteria, Paul...a lot of extremely pissed off people, yes. It strikes me that the lack of choice for current Adobe customers is causing the dis-hotment with the path they have taken. Take-it-or-leave it isn't a great business model as far as I can see.
Bob.
Just for a few moments I imagined that Adobe's servers had melted and Adobe had disappeared - hence the rush to come up with wannabee lists of competitors.
Adobe may have to backtrack on their plan, but maybe the number of people climbing onboard will have greater effect than those who don't see the advantage of a subscription model, and don't wish to continue with Adobe.
Time will tell.
cgntoonartist, why did you pull the post?
@Paul (et al) -
Definitely not hysteria. But there are legitimate concerns here re: licensing, ongoing ability to access / modify an artist's own documents if, for whatever reason, people can't get access to the new cloud solution. In the past, if an artist or developer stopped upgrading their tools, he could still open and modify his own source documents with the older tools. The limits would pertain to sharing the source docs with other artists, developers or clients who depended on features in later tool versions. I don't want to rehash the entire thread, but small shops and individual contributors could do very well in many cases without shelling out for annual upgrades.
I suspect that your reference to "hysteria" may be in response to my comments about overseas outsourcing. Whether or not that's the case, I can assure you that this is, in fact, a very real prospect that's worth understanding. If you were to run a google search with just 3 keywords, "artwork outsourcing india", you'll see about 6.5 million hits in response. As always with a search like this, many results items won't pertain exactly to what you're looking for. However I just scrolled through the first several results pages, and saw dozens of firms that specialize in precisely these services.
My industry and much of my expertise revolves around software and product development, advisory services, and service delivery. I can remember, vividly, how people in the US software industry used to sneer at Tata (TCS) and firms like Wipro in the early 1980's, confident that "it couldn't happen here". A few executives, hyper-motivated by the chance to replace employees (with fully liquidated costs estimated between $150k and $200k) with $15/hour rent-a-coders, jumped at the new model without understanding the complexities of outsourcing. There are numerous horror stories and cautionary tales about the downsides of outsourcing -- BUT an awful lot has been learned about best practices over the last 25 years. With experienced management, the proper procedures, and proper expectations, established in advance, there are an increasing number of success stories.
Some of the impact on Information Technology, once a stimulating career path with endless growth possibilities, has been severely compromised except for a few shining exceptions like Google. Billions of dollars that once was directed to US salaries and consulting fees is now directed overseas, and the number of out-of-work US/domestic IT professionals has grown dramatically. Compensation and consulting rates are, today, SMALLER than they were 20 years ago in this field -- and that doesn't take into account the shrinking value of the dollar. There are exceptions of course, and some types of client interaction that still require face to face contact and a close collaborative environment. But the impact on IT careers has been nothing short of devastating.
Of course this model, as it matures, can be generalized to other disciplines and professions. Radiology was the first medical specialty to encounter this. Increased bandwidth and super high res equipment makes it extremely feasible to have the radiology team, or a large part of it, in India. A few short years ago, X-Rays, CAT-scans and SPECT scans might have been transmitted to the building next door for analysis -- now, with the same click, the images are sent to India, where professional services cost 1/5 of what they cost here.
I personally believe that the most effective relationships between artist and client, or artist and team - whether it's for a game, movie, ongoing ad campaign, etc - happen in a highly interactive and collaborative atmosphere that's difficult to replicate when the team is separated by ten thousand miles, 10 time zones, and a significant cultural learning curve for parties so widely separated. But I've also seen that these are NOT insurmountable issues, and corporate management becomes highly motivated when there's a perceived (even if inaccurate) chance to cut costs to such an extreme.
Try the google search I mentioned at the top of this post. The firms we see listed in the results are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And...in an attempt to stay relevant to the forum and thread topic - a cloud-based collaborative model such as the one we've been discussing can be a major enabler of a move to overseas distributed artwork collaboration, for good or for bad.
If this still sounds hysterical, I suggest you reach out to a few of the IT veterans who've lived through having a once superb career become a daily struggle to stay employed.
I suspect that your reference to "hysteria" may be in response to my comments about overseas outsourcing.
Absolutely not. It didn't enter my head.
I suggest you reach out to a few of the IT veterans who've lived through having a once superb career become a daily struggle to stay employed.
Why would I need to reach for anyone else's experience? I am a long-term software developer.
The world is changing fast and we have to change with it.
Well, with mobile operations, the cloud makes perfect sense.. ;-)
Nice picture!
@Paul -- maybe not so much hysteria, as resentment at change? Some of us, older rather than younger, trying to fight delaying-actions to stave off the inevitable? And younger people thinking "What? What are they upset about? What on earth is wrong with a distributed international 24/7 workforce?"
Technological change always affects a lot of people. Lots of jobs vanish; new jobs are created. When I got my first (very) low-level art job at DD&B in New York in the '60s, I rode the offset-printing change wave all the way in. Most of the letterpress guys never adapted and lost out. Thing was, though -- all those jobs -- the lost ones and the new ones -- were all in the USA. So if you could hop from an old wave to the new one, it worked out. Like going from artboard to computer... with the overwhelming benefits that came from standalone programs like Photoshop and Xara.
I'm going on about this because I want to keep art jobs in the USA. In California; in San Diego. Because I know that 5% of every generation coming up likes art enough to do it in some way or another for a life's work, a real career that pays well. Maybe 10%, if you add in people who paint custom cars, like that. And there's nothing I can do -- nothing -- to stop the offshoring of art jobs. The cost differential is too great for any business to resist. So you're picking up a lot of resentment at internet-caused change, sorry about that.
@Jon -- Fifty years ago, an artist and a copywriter would go into a room and come up with an ad. This worked well. Today you can do the same thing with Cisco Telepresence. Minus lunch, of course, and minus a few drinks after lunch. And minus having to argue for your concept face-to-face with Bill Bernbach or Helmut Krone, if you hadn't exactly come up with a winner. Again, though, you can do that via Cisco. In the distributed workplace, once everyone's made their changes, all will agree that the art's just fine.
But versus the cost-savings from much lower salaries, comes the increased friction and delays caused by design-by-committee. More meetings, more missed deadlines. Or mumbled agreements to 'put the changes in the next version', just to get something out the door on time. Sand in the gears.
But don't get your hopes up. The Creative Cloud is here to stay, in one form or another. And, the internet being what it is, probably for free or next to nothing. Adobe'll make a few bucks off it before they tank. But the real problem remains -- how to get those art jobs back home -- and keep them here!
interesting - I wonder if you USA guys ever stop to think about how you sound to those of us who live elsewhere? :)
My sentiments exactly.Quote:
how you sound to those of us who live elsewhere?
Hans
EDIT: @covoxer: I was talking about the jobs outsourcing - one of us at the very least benefits from that
as far as adobe CC is concerned I've said what I think earlier
be interesting to see how it pans out
I think the title Moderator is a bit of a misnomer in some cases.
I didn't
I deliberately said 'one of us at least' because I can only speak for one of us [me] the rest is a maybe
so if then you are referring to 'those of us who live elsewhere' - well it would be interesting to find out who agrees and who does not, about anti-globalisation and protectionism, which is what I was referring to
and sure grammatically what I said is in absolute terms, but in practice it is idiomatic - but I don't need to tell you that John, do I ? you speak english
Ah my fault! Sorry about saying it that way. I should say: "it all seems pretty much reasonable for those of us who live elsewhere". :D
No, I speak English. ;)Quote:
you speak english
On the serious note though, dividing TG members into "USA guys" and "those of us who live elsewhere" is a bit discriminating, don't you think?
On the serious note though, dividing TG members into "USA guys" and "those of us who live elsewhere" is a bit discriminating, don't you think?
No more than wanting art jobs to be in particular cities in the USA rather than anywhere else. A bit like suggesting that Xara should be hiring only from within the UK.
We all want our fellow citizens to be in employment, no matter where we live, it's entirely natural.
Perhaps we can all move on from this particular aspect?
Quote:
Thing was, though -- all those jobs -- the lost ones and the new ones -- were all in the USA. So if you could hop from an old wave to the new one, it worked out. Like going from artboard to computer... with the overwhelming benefits that came from standalone programs like Photoshop and Xara.
Quote:
I'm going on about this because I want to keep art jobs in the USA.
John,don't blame Steve for the somewhat discriminating replies.Quote:
But the real problem remains -- how to get those art jobs back home -- and keep them here!
Above is very condescending,don't you think?
But I'm with Paul on this one,move on to be on topic
Hans
One last remark on discrimination,what is ?
49,99 to 46,88 to 61,49
Hans
It's beyond me Hans!
49,99 dollars / 46,88 pounds / 61,49 euro fee for the adobe cloud
Hans
We'll soon be talking about currency ripoffs!
Just thought I'd mention it ;)