Find Your Adobe Alternative (Part 1)



Be it the pricey subscription or its stance on AI training, graphics giant Adobe is falling out of favor. Yet it remains the industry standard, and finding worthy competitors can seem like a daunting task. This is why we’re here to help, with a rundown of crowdsourced suggestions for Adobe alternatives.

All-in-One: “the Affinity Trinity

Affinity Photo (photo editing), Affinity Designer (vector graphics) and Affinity Publisher (page layouts) are cheaper alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, respectively. Designer and Publisher are both considered worthy Adobe competitors. Affinity Photo, however, lacks many of the capabilities found in its counterpart. It’s primarily a photo editing tool — a far cry from Photoshop’s Swiss Army knife toolkit. 

The one-off purchase of an Affinity desktop bundle will cost you £159.99. If you need only one of the programs (or only their iPad versions), this will go even gentler on your wallet. Best of all, Affinity products come with a free 6-month trial — a good deal if you’re still not sold on them!

Digital drawing & painting

Clip Studio Paint (one-time purchase): this one is a favorite among the Tumblr crowd, who have singled it out as their top drawing software in a poll of over 25,000 votes. CSP is especially popular with comic makers thanks to its native support of industry-specific features, such as frames and lettering.

Paint Tool SAI (one-time purchase) is lightweight yet high-quality. It sports a recovery mode, clean UI, and excellent stabilization. SAI is a good fit for art styles based on lineart and cel shading. The app’s biggest downside is poor editing tools: if you want to adjust hues or brightness with the click of a mouse, you’ll need to go elsewhere.

Krita (free & open source): what SAI is to cel shading, Krita is to digital painting. The advanced brush engines make it easy to emulate traditional media. Real-time creation of seamless tiles (all at the press of a W button) is useful for patterns and games. There’s also a Symmetry Tool, which is exactly what it says on the tin. To top it off, Krita supports PSD files and the layers they contain, with the notable exceptions of text and smart objects.

Procreate: available only on iPad, Procreate packs a powerful punch in a compact package. It has a built-in screen recording feature, as well as a fantastic brush library (shout out to art wizard Kyle T Webster, who has left Adobe for Procreate). Despite its limitations in layer quantity and file size, the app is the go-to choice for portable digital drawing.

Honorable mentions in the drawing category include Corel PaintShop Pro (single purchase), MediBang Paint (free), FireAlpaca (free and open-source), and GIMP (free and open-source).

Design & Vectors

Figma – this powerhouse of interface design is doing its own thing, and with great success. It requires no setup – you just open your browser, log in, and start working. (There is a Mac/Window app available as well.) The web-based workflow means you don’t need to worry about storage, plug-ins, or updates. A must-have for UI/UX designers, Figma has become the industry standard. Its biggest competitor, Sketch, offers similar tools, but only in a Mac setting, which limits its user base. 

For people who want something simpler, Canva is the way to go. A lot of professionals look down on it, but there’s no arguing against its fast and easy interface. Both the free and paid versions offer a wide array of graphics customization options. This is no Illustrator, but it is a solid rival to Adobe Express.

Finally, there’s an app out there for lovers of Bezier curves: Inkscape. This free vector software works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, is compatible with SVG files, and exports to PDF and EPS. Its biggest flaw is that it doesn’t support printing.

Conclusion

While Adobe may seem like an end-all-be-all, there are a lot of alternatives if you know where to look. We only covered some of them today, and in Part 2, we will talk about photo editing, animation, video editing, and publishing software.

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