Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
This past week, Adobe became the subject of a public relations firestorm after it pushed an update to its terms of service that many users saw at best as overly aggressive and at worst as a rights grab. Adobe quickly clarified it isn’t spying on users and even promised to go back and adjust its terms of service in response.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
I want to point out, because I see this chart or something like it a lot. Adobe has an absolute monopoly in the professional design space. None of these programs can remotely come close to the creative suite if you’re doing more than tinkering. If you’re making memes or doing some personal image manipulation, you can get by with GIMP or something. If you’re creating professional art or creating files for print or publication, you need Adobe. It’s scary that one corporation holds so much sway over an entire industry but they definitely do.
Affinity is the closest but still a ways off being a viable replacement for ID or PS. Source: worked in a design studio, every few years we would try Affinity in an attempt to de-Adobe our workflows but it’s just not comparable.
I’ve been pretty excited about what I’ve been seeing from Affinity. You’re right, they’re not there yet. But they’re closer than anyone. They need more money and time and they will hopefully get there.
Yeah to be fair it’s been a few years since I looked and the list of issues that meant we couldn’t switch wasn’t too massive. Hopefully they get there!
Its getting real close and I like Affinity’s workflow much better. Theres a few small bugs here and there. If anything im a Freelance professional but its my hobby first. Ive used Photoshop/Lightroom, GIMP/RawTherapee in the past on the photography side and Inkscape on the Graphic design side but now I mainly use Designer 2 and Photo 2. Granted my workflow is probably a decent bit different than a studios and I dont know what specifcs a studio needs over something like my workflow. What sorta challenges did switching to Affinity present for your studio?
The main issue was plugins and external programs compatability. There are some really obscure plugins for advanced work in Indesign, like syncing with client spreadsheets for catalogue work, auto generating indexes/references, that kind of thing. Another problem with ID was working on a network with multiple users accessing the same file from different locations. With Photoshop it’s a similar story, we had a lot of actions and custom scripts that would’ve been a massive headache (or impossible) to port over manually. Personally I use a lot of scripts/actions using smart objects, auto selections etc for batch processing and the feature set in Affinity just isn’t (or at least wasn’t) up to it. These days I prefer Capture One over Lightroom for RAW processing but I still need to use LR when processing timelapse because the 3rd party plugins only exist for LR.