Adobe can really be compared to an abusive relationship. "You let me cross these boundaries because you have nowhere else to go and everyone else trusts me."
I think most modern corporate models are based on the spouse batterer model. Notice how they never say, "Please Subscribe," but just issue the command "Subscribe"?
That’s why pirating them shouldn’t be encouraged. It’s like finally escaping but still needing their financial support and still looking through their social media and liking their posts.
Really is a shame how hard they fell... the constant drama and controveries. The pricings and limitations on our subscriptions. Exhausting the bank every month, for a service that, is being outmatched by free alternatives.
I unsubbed from Adobe. They wanted to charge a huge fee. The way I got around it was to switch to a different subscription and immediately cancelled then as the grace period resets.
It’s especially frustrating that is still very much an industry standard with many colleges & businesses still requiring their students n workers to own adobe software.
I’ve used Adobe products for 20+ years. I stopped subscribing a year ago, because I’ve been going through a tough financial patch. When I got a new gig, I still couldn’t afford to drop $60/month on the Adobe suite, so I signed up with a different email that came with a free 30-days, with the plan to cancel before the end. When I tried to I was met with a $130 “cancellation fee”. WTF? I tried calling and got the same run-a-round nonsense. Upon learning that the govt is suing Adobe for misleading and hidden practices, I filed a complaint with the FTC. So great to learn there are these great options! Thanks!
Yes, exactly. Though I've yet to find a good alternative for After Effects. Other than that, there's no reason to keeping using (or at least paying) their software.
@@dukkiegamer1733 It's interesting how corporations worry so about piracy while seemingly hell bent on disincentivizing people from actually paying for their products...
I wish they'd done it sooner, because Adobe's subscription model started the mess that artists are in right now with everyone going that route, and it could have been halted then if some bigger names had spoken up, but that move didn't affect larger content creators.
Yes but this can't last. The company WILL bleed money and eventually become adobe, it'll just take 5 to 20 years and you'll never know when. Adobe does suck badly and photoshop is the only thing I need a good replacement for.
@@footballexpert111 As a professional translator, I hear the same about my job, but when I look at the results of AI translation, I often laugh rather than cry. AI is awful for any consumer not willing to lower their standards to the equivalent of painting their walls with crayons. When I look at AI generated art, there are some cool things I can do, but most of it is lousy. It replaces the lack of soul with additional fingers 😛 I would not be too worried. AI will probably only put the glorified hobbyists out of a job, not people who take their job seriously and bring serious skills to the table.
@@PioneerPrint3D BlackMagic Design doesn't need the money from DaVinci Resolve, it's more like a cherry-on-top to be included or used with any of their physical hardware, which is where a majority of their money comes from. They give you Resolve for a one time fee in hopes that you invest in more of their hardware products down the line, or they just give you a free copy of DaVinci Resolve with their cameras/panels.
Speaking of half baked features, I can remember being excited about a feature that would allow you to 'paint' things like buildings, and 'fill' vines etc in Flash. Turns out that's all those features did. One crappy building pattern and one crappy vine pattern, that couldn't be changed or customised. Apple and Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash. Adobe left it to rot, along with the whole creative ecosystem that was built around it. People were making whole console games in Flash, but Adobe didn't seem to realise the value in what they had. During the golden age of mobile app development, it's staggering how much Adobe had dropped the ball, with regards to the Flash authoring tool. To this day, nothing has replaced what Flash did so well.
Flash was cancer even before Adobe bought it. Flash games/videos were one of the major attack vectors for malware. That that pile of ever burning tires finally flamed out was a good thing.
HTML5 killed Flash. Adobe had no choice but to let it rot. As a web developer, i'm very happy Flash no longer exists. It's a pile of steaming hot garbage, for a number of reasons.
I love how it always starts with ENGINEERS starting a business becasue they see a NEED. Then the marketing guys get to higher positions and then everything is set aside, whilst profit takes the stage. Boeing, Adobe, Microsoft, etc, etc, etc...
I'm just putting this out here, but if you are moving away from Photoshop to a project like Krita consider taking a fraction of what you used to pay for Adobe Products and set up a recurring donation to the project you're using. You probably know this, but these projects primarily rely on outside funding to pay their core maintainers and to hire more people working on their software, and this especially holds for UX and other non-engineering folks who are usually not as involved in the open-source community (not saying this to paint them in a negative light, it's just much more common for programmers to work on open-source in their free time than for other professions).
You've mentioned them. They are getting bought Joking aside. Any good video ones? Any good suggestions for the other things losing moving away from Adobe? I'm looking to try and get creative in a way. Small time as a hobby
I agree. Even making a one time donation as if you were purchasing stand alone software once is better than nothing. I have done so with GIMP, Krita, and Blender. I used to get an educator discount on CC when I was teaching, but I had to give it up when I retired, as it was just ridiculously expensive, and I used only a few apps. I was a total fanboy, but I really hate the subscription model, and all of their other business practices, plus the elitist attitude that THEY know what we need. The Blender Foundation ethos is the future. I hope Adobe withers away.
I ended up having to call my bank and have them block Adobe from charging my account because I tried for weeks to call and cancel my subscription. They would “ get disconnected”, cut the call when I was on hold, cycle me through multiple representatives, and at one point literally argue with me about the nature of my call. They spoke down to me and laughed at me when I began to get frustrated. Thankfully my bank was able to step in and protect me, they even refunded my account. Adobe sucks.
I had to invoke the australian ACCC, a government consumer watch dog, emailed them the threat (ACCC fined a similar company millions for not allow easy cancellation that month) they quickly backed away... Australia government have law in place for this sort of bullying from companies.
Forced subscription services are an absolute death nail. People prefer to buy things outright, and if you don't give them the option, all they have left is to pirate.
20+ year user of Premiere. Just jumped ship to DaVinci and couldn't be happier. Every program has its faults but not every software feels like a car with a forty year old engine.
Remember when Apple killed Final Cut Pro and started from the ground up with Final Cut Pro X? Which made full use of all the modern things we expect from computers and operating systems these days like multi-threading, GPU acceleration, FULLY 64BIT which Premiere STILL ISN'T and would only get better as the hardware you ran it on improved? Rather than relying almost entirely on single thread performance for much of the core functionality (which it still does)? Do you also remember how Adobe mocked Apple and said how crap it was because it lacked certain features that the old version had? Then advertised Premiere CS6 like it was some kind of second coming saviour for FCP users? You'd think they'd have seen that as a wake up call and realised that maybe they also needed to have started over with software that actually runs properly on "modern" hardware like multi-core CPU's which have been run of the mill standard even in crappy cheapo budget boxes for well over a decade at this point. Nope, they just kept using the same crappy code base that was showing its age even then, while Final Cut has gotten better and better with new features and it performs like a champ, and scales with the better hardware you throw at it. I also remember when they blamed Apple for them taking an extra year getting a 64bit version of Photoshop ready for the Mac because they claimed Apple never told them they'd need to move their code base to Cocoa. They were still using Carbon. I mean, it isn't like Steve Jobs told the entire world that Carbon was the intermediate language to get your Classic apps running on Mac OS X and that Cocoa was the native language when they introduced the beta in 1999, about 9 years before... oh wait! That's exactly what happened!
even a decade ago photoshop felt bloated and as i was learning how to use it, i distinctly felt like sifferent sections (menus, etc) were made at different times, if that makes sense. like yeah sure its all got the same coat of paint, but ages of the code varied wildly and oh my God does the clean-coder in me feel pain thinking back on that now. i can only imagine the spaghetti...
@@TigerAceSullivan You felt that because that's exactly what happened. It's an old peice of software, it has decades worth of UI design changes etc and hasn't been updated in a more gradual way. Think Windows, it's the same kind of UI mess with decades of cruft. They leave the old and add new on top so it's all disjointed and can be a really jarring experience. You don't notice it so much if you've been using it for a long time as you were there as they add it, if that makes sense. I prefer the way companies like Apple do things. They'll gradually change things over time so the jump isn't so huge and jarring. they also tend to stick more closely to the guidelines they set themselves too which helps with consistency. I'd have preferred for Adobe to go the Apple route rather than Microsoft route when it comes to their UI evolution. I noticed this divergence when they moved from using the OS native chrome to making their own (originally made in Flash I believe, which explains why performance sucked after the change lol). They used to use the interface elements found in the actual OS it was running on. So you'd get all the buttons on the Mac looking like buttons fron.. the Mac, for example. Then they went with what we essentially have now which is more consistent between Windows and Mac OS, but at the same time doesn't really match Windows or Mac OS so it looks and feels very much like a third party tool that doesn't even try to blend in with the platform it's on.
As a blind person who worked with Accessibility professionals at Adobe, I think that the perfect line in this whole piece was when you mentioned their self-importance. I have seldom met more smug people who are so sure of their rightness, despite customer complaints and frustration.
I’m sure they do think they are right because they were used to charging hundreds of dollars to customers and when they went to a monthly fee they wanted to make sure they still got hundreds or dollars per customer so they thought it would be a good idea to force users into a year-long commitment. They didn’t actually lower the price, they just turned it into a payment plan. They still wanted to squeeze every drop of blood possible out of working people who couldn’t afford it. Their greed is their downfall. Meanwhile, companies like Procreate are doing great charging a low one-time fee.
ngl it’s been missing for a reason. art commentary channels end up being preferred for their drama coverage and not their unique individual art. there are still some around- half of them barely care about the subject they’re talking about as are jumping on current tea, and the rest might care but it gets filtered out by all the samey-stuff
The irony of this video being constantly interrupted by adverts for Adobe was not lost on me. Also, 20+ year video editor here. +1 for Davinci Resolve. It's incredible.
If Jazza has waded into the Adobe fiasco, then you know things are bad! When my Adobe subscription came up for renewal early last year, dropped it like hot potato and never looked back. One of the best business money saving decisions I've made in years.
@@nyengster I've replaced the Adobe software I use with Affinity's suite of apps and Da Vinci Resolve for the video side of things. Unlike Jazza who's an artist, I work in industrial design, so use other software geared to making phyiscal things which thankfully Adobe hasn't tried to buy out.
Affinity designer and publisher 2 are actually better than the adobe equivalents imo. Can't wait to ditch them for good, just need to put some time into resolve! So glad to see people calling them out for what they've become.
I switched from Adobe to Blender, Resolve Studio, and Affinity about 4 years ago. Haven't looked back lol I did get Resolve Studio back when it was 15, but I didn't really use it big time until about the beginning of 2020. Cut my Adobe sub, in 2020 and it's been great.
Affinity Designer is still missing quite a few features if you are primarily a vector artist, but luckily software like Inkscape and Blender exist if you need to fill some of those gaps in the meantime. I can however say that Affinity Designer is significantly more user friendly than Adobe Illustrator ever was. Affinity Publisher is absolutely fantastic for what it does, can't deny that. I hope it adds the other missing Personas from Affinity Photo in the future so I don't have to switch between Publisher and Photo all the time.
My issue is that in my industry (pack design) design agencies, print shops etc use Adobe. And that Affinity Designer/ Paint shop (i think its called) don't play super well with opening up/saving out files compatible with Adobe. Which is a hurdle when working from home or something on shared/collaborative projects. Also when sending files like AI over to printers and such. We need a whole industry wide shift from adobe for the other apps to be a viable alternative- which makes sense as Adobe have such a monopoly- it ranges from college all the way into big design agencies. HOWEVER for my own shit, where it's just me working on it and it doesn't need someone else, I'm 100% going to switch. Its a shame, I learned on CS5 and I remember that I too was extremely happy with CC as I was just starting out as a young designer, working on freelance projects to support interning and without that, I'd have either had to suffer with pirate software or I'd have had real issues saving up and buying a suite at the prices of the CS software. But Adobe have just gotten too fucking greedy and they need to be taken down a peg before they destroy the industry they've been so benificial to
I stopped using them 5 years ago. Affinity, procreate, DaVinci all day. I did it mostly because the subscription model left me creatively in a slump. I felt obligated to only use Adobe even though their apps got frustrating. I was angry more than I was creating.
Do you have any affinity designer tutorials you can recommend? I mostly use illustrator, and have been looking to jump ship from Adobe for a while now.
@@ThompsonBrosStudios - Affinity does their own video tutorials, like dozens and dozens of them. They're very clear and produced in-house so you can trust them to know the software well.
My main gripe with Adobe is that they have a "predatory" model. It is all well and good that we have to pay for it yearly or monthly, but if you want to leave, the fees are out of this world. If you are a regular-level customer (I am a student, so I currently have student pricing), then it is not affordable. I acknowledge that they are the standard in the industry, but I have decided that upon graduation from my program, I will use Open-Source and Affinity for my day-to-day work. Loved the video!
You can apply a lot of this to Microsoft (and countless other) digital giants. Such a depressing world where technology innovation is actively stifled by corporate interests and greed.
Not even just digital giants, but you can apply it to other companies as well. I can name a few MAJOR companies that have their hands in EVERYTHING where their shareholders and/or profits are more important than their grumbling and complaining customer base who are trying to speak up about an inferior or deteriorating product. It's sad how greedy these corporations have become. It's like they don't realize that their customer base is what MADE them successful. But then again, sometimes you have unwitting and fiercely loyal consumers, as Jazza said, who are essentially duped or placated into continuing to use that product. Or even worse, "forced" to use the product due to basically what equates to a monopoly on it.
My Mom was working a high-paying job when I was a kid, and through her job was able to obtain Adobe Photoshop 5.5 (which was brand new when she got it, back in '99 or 2000), and that was the only art program (apart from MS Paint -the XP and Vista versions) that I used until 2020 (Mind you, I didn't have a tablet, I was using a corded mouse - cordED, not cordLESS). I never saw the need to update, and certainly wasn't about to jump into a subscription, so I remained content with my pre-millennial program. Then, in 2021 I got a Huion Tablet and downloaded Krita. You can imagine the world of difference.
I've been using Macromedia flash 8 for years. I still use it, and even when I had Adobe Illustrator, I did most of my work on flash 8. Illustrators only purpose for me, was creating vector files, and font files. I have affinity designer 2, to fill in for Illustrator these days. Macromedia flash 8 is very limited to what we have now, but I'm so use to using it, and no other program seems to work similarly to it to my satisfaction.
I've been banging the "Adobe Sucks" drum for a while now and it's so validating to see other professionals do the same. As an editor, I cannot recommend Davinci Resolve enough, for both Editors and Colourists, it's incredible.
Sadly enough it's not great at animation, and PS is just standard ( we swap files with other editors) so the place I work at isn't very into the thought of moving.
I work in the machine industry, as one of those people with many different average level skill sets. One of my roles is with IT. I do not want to use weird “off brand” products, so I like using industry standards like Microsoft 365, Adobe, Autodesk and so on. But we only use Adobe to do basic PDF editing, so the price for that is just insane. We also do basic defense contracts, and the new build-in AI features in software are just a no go for us since we will not have the need for it. I am now converting the company to Gimp, and PDF-Xchange PRO, and last week I closed our entire Adobe account. The change takes time, but it feels good. Like the good old days (00’s), when you bought software, and what you did with it, was up to you. Thank you... :-)
As a basic, average, untrained person who needs to do light photo editing from time to time, I find that GIMP does everything I need. I can barely use the software because I have zero experience using it, but it blows my mind that such a powerful software is free to use.
I was using Photoshop for 20 years. After being crapped on for the last 4 years, with regards to a very poor service. I made the decision to quit. It was watching this channel that pointed me towards using clip studio. I haven't looked back since, I've saved a ton of money and have had zero issues. Thanks Jazza. Best move I've done.
Got pretty much the same story, of 21 years as a loyal adobe-fanboy, but an earlier timeline. I got pissed of in 2014 when I realised I couldn't use my old bought software after using my photoshop license as a promo code. 1994-2015 is quite the run tho.
@@zedruph I was a traditional artist before I was steered to photoshop in 2003/4. I bought photoshop 7 then bought photoshop cs3 just before photoshop turned it to a subscription. I was able to carry on using it until I changed my laptop in 2019, then had to subscribe at £20 a month. It was full of issues, brushes not working, screen freezing, I ended up having to use an older version but still pay the same. Threw the towel in after I was losing work and tried clip studio after finding this channel. Best move ever, wish I had found it sooner.
Clip Studio is the best tool for 2D art. I used it even when PSP was still in CS6. But it's not designed for photo editing which is what most people want from photoshop.
@@jal051 unfortunately its not, youre quite right, something I found out quite quickly as I used photoshop for editing photos as well as painting. However I dont do photography much anymore so the need isnt there. If I do need to edit again on a serious level, I will hopefully find a program to suit.
Yep. Me too. I bounced around for a bit and while I don't use it for much more than hobby and fun - I bought Pixelmator, then Pixelmator Pro (mac only) and have never needed anything more for a PS replacement. On the rare vector project I'll break out Vectornator... but that's fairly amateur work.
They haven't done that - I still use CS3 (it still works on Windows 11) and my local printer still uses CS5. Adobe supplied none activating versions when they turned off the activation servers. I won't buy CC - CS3 does everything I need. If it stops working at some point there are plently of cheap and free alternatives. If you don't need CMYK you can still purchase Photoshop and Premiere Elements to own and they provide a lot of what the CS versions have. Having said that Premiere is a piece of crap - continuous crashes on every computer I tried it on and all the versions I tried over the years. Lots of better alterntives, some even free!
As a photographer I’ve had a major beef with Adobe since they stopped selling their standalone software and went subscription based. I have always felt they were very greedy but everyone else seemed happy with adobe regardless for years. I find their current Lightroom very glitchy and prefer my older software! I also hate that they make it SO hard to cancel!! I can’t stand them! Thank you for making this video. I honestly feel very validated for my feelings right now! I’m so glad I’m not alone! Something for all companies to realize is …With great pride comes a great fall! Staying grounded for the people is the best way!
Did you find out how their happiness worked first? I'm personally happy with my definitely legit 🏴☠copy of PS CC 2018, doesn't mean I agree nor like to pay for subscriptions. To me subscription just means them wanting us to be their bread-winners or child-supporters every month w/out being pressured to pump out quality updates.
@@MangaGamified The reason every tech company wants to sell subscriptions or "as a service" these days is all about human psychology. People are more likely to pay $10/mo than $100/year even though the monthly cost is higher. Adobe could make that bread without subscription if they released a new version of their software every few years for a fair price (multiple hundreds of dollars IS fair -- this software does take a lot of work to make). They don't because they want to sucker as many people into fake bargains as they can. That's unrelated to the decreasing product quality, which is 100% on the company trying to lower development costs because that looks good to shareholders and drives the stock price up, and the C-suite gets paid in stock options so that's the only thing they care about.
@@JohnDoe-420 It was once pay once, pay to upgrade. So, example. $400 for new. $150 to upgrade in a couple years "if you wanted". I think we are way past that now though. They will never go back to someone owning it and NOT needing to upgrade. There's the greed. But also 100% control. It was not uncommon for people to have a 5 year old version of PS and be completely fine as a professional just doing their thing. They realized they couldn't get their money that way. It's a shame and actually a little disgusting how not only have they disconnected themselves from their initial reason to exist, but they simply don't care.
When you're finding it unreasonably hard to cancel a subscription, a phone call to your credit card company (or online chat) can make the problem go away. "I tried to cancel, but I think they're going to take more payments..." is a legitimate concern and the card company will help. They know your alternative is to close the account.
I feel you. I got into filmmaking thanks to Adobe Premiere CS2. Back in the day, I used to pirate the software as a kid, but when I started landing my first paid gigs, I was happy to finally pay for it. To my surprise, though, the constant crashes weren’t because of my pirated software-it was because of the endless bugs. I learned to live with it, developing an almost instinctual Control + Save reflex and maxing out the version history to avoid losing work. Then, I decided to give DaVinci Resolve a try. I was lucky enough to get a license with a camera I purchased, and the difference was night and day. My crashes went down from 2+ a day to 1+ a year. When COVID hit, I had to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. And let me tell you, unsubscribing was a nightmare. But during this time, I started falling in love with DaVinci, and although it was hard to replace Photoshop at first, I eventually got over it by using free alternatives like Photopea. Every now and then, I check in on Adobe Premiere through colleagues who still use it, as well as online reviews. Unfortunately, even channels focused on Adobe are flooded with complaints. I haven’t seen a single feature in Premiere that makes it worth the risk of constant project crashes and being able to professionally color grade on the same project without back and forth was a deal braker. Generative Fill seems to be the only feature keeping Adobe relevant at this point, even though there are many alternatives out there. The dark side of Adobe, as discussed in this video and many others, makes me wish the company would continue to decline, paving the way for better, more reliable software to rise. It’s sad to wish Adobe a rough ending, but it feels well deserved. I’m saying this with tears in my eyes, but it’s the truth.
14:15. You hit the problem on the head: “Shareholders”. When a company goes public, their only responsibility is in increasing the stock price. Everything else goes by the wayside.
I was using university softwares until this month and its just run out. Was getting stressed over the pricing and limitations of Adobe. This video came at the perfect time.
Who remembers the time when Adobe's flash player was almost the only flash player and everyone was forced to use it on some websites to make them work?
I'm puzzled by your post. That's a weird thing to say? Flash is the name of the authoring / player / file format. It was a proprietary ecosystem. What you just said is a bit like "do you remember when Ford made Ford cars?" Did you actually use a third party Flash player? Or are you using the word "Flash" when you mean animation? But anyhow, in the olden days there were a couple of other formats, Shockwave and... another from Director I forget the name of. Macromedia ended up owning all three formats and underinvested in things other than Flash, then Adobe bought Macromedia and underinvested in Flash. Edit - the two other formats I'm thinking of are both types of Shockwave .swf and .dcr. Apparently. There is very little info online about what the difference is, but I used to make .dcr files from Director 4 using a stand alone program I found on a cover disc. They were slightly different to swf files and slightly less universally usable. Of course, they're all dead formats now 😢
It was actually Macromedia Flash Player originally and there were no alternatives. Flash made it possible to do stuff on websites that were otherwise impossible. That's why it became so popular and somewhat of a standard. People started to build whole websites in Flash as the possibilities were endless. When mobile internet became popular it turned out that these Flash applications were not very energy efficient. This was partly the reason why Apple decided to block Flash on iPhone, leading to the end of Flash all together.
Thanks Steve Jobs and the iPhone with nailing Flash’s coffin shut. Adobe bought out Macromedia cause of their competition. Macromedia was a way better company with cooler programs.
Lots of alternatives out there for their various products - Clip Studio Pro, Affinity Suite, Krita, Procreate, GIMP, Blender (3D modelling), Photomator (replaces Lightroom) - all of which are either one-time purchases or completely free.
But ClipStudio Paint. You can buy a lifetime license for $50, it doesn’t crash nearly as often. I’ve had it for 3 years and it only crashed twice. It auto-saves your work even if it DOES crash. Much MUCH higher quality artwork, tools, just overall software. But there IS a downside. Whenever there’s a new version that comes out, you have to purchase the new version if you want the newer features. The upDATES are FREE but the upGRADES are NOT. I’ve never upgraded my version bc I felt no need to but idk if it’s the full price or a discounted one.
Adobe has done exactly what Google does to stay on top. Buy out anything that conflicts with their plans of world domination. I can remember a time when Adobe software was a free attachment to some computer hardware (digital capture cards). You would get Adobe Premiere and Photoshop on disc with licences. All happening from the mid 90's and was pulled up somewhere in the 2000's. What's stumped me now is because the income on TH-cam is so low now that yearly Adobe subscription fee really hurts. My channels now runs at a massive loss to make Google look good. It's been amazing to see my partner turn into the enemy in my business.
Hey @leokvideo that's so interesting! I look at your channel and looks huge but you say even Google now are costing you too much? Or just Adobe? I guess Google don't care about where the views are going, so long as it's somewhere! Tough business content production, good luck with your work.
interestingly, in my country, Corel had cornered the market, creatively speaking. but When I was in highschool, Adobe started paying schools off to swap all their classes from the Corel Suites to Adobe products. One of my teachers was mortified that they saw entire school boards taking money from big companies to change their entire curriculum to promote those softwares, and remove alternatives entirely. I, as a young person, felt like it was really exciting, because I grew up using Photoshop, so I was at a significant advantage over my classmates. I didn't really understand how messed up it was that we couldn't use other softwares in our classes. As an adult I understand the context of the past better, and I have been spurned by Adobe, and seen friends spurned by them as well. I have completely replaced Adobe in my day to day life.
OMG, the stories about the fight over licensing within organizations I've been privy to... I was at a publisher who stayed with old, limited crashing versions of Corel for a I think nearly a decade because the nonprofit couldn't shell out for the cost of the Adobe Suite. A few years later in the 2010s I came across a Uni that used this kind of weird wonky very-early virtual machine and remote desktop setup with a really old version of InDesign to teach their page layout and design class. It was both incredibly janky and a complete marvel at the obvious licensing loophole they were utilizing in order to keep things kinda-sorta on the rails. Adobe's been making life hell for a long long time. It's the drug dealer model, and don't think for a second those old pirated product keys and cracks were not part of their strategy. I have it on very very good authority that it was part of the plan.
We had this issue as engineering Students. The university got sweet deals on high end software... We all moved into industry with only experience in those products and not the cheaper alternatives. The cheaper alternatives are often harder to use, if only we'd had an introduction to them in some kind of environment designed to grow your understanding of things...
@@RoberttheWise I don't really think it is corruption at the school boards level, to be fair. Schools need funding and software, and it was an understandable deal "we give you software, and money, as long as our competitor stays out of the classroom" it IS corrupt on Adobe's part though. Apple does it too. And it isn't just my region that was affected.
I hear you but a lot of companies do that like Autodesk and Toonboom. Toonboom specifically has a very similar marketing scheme in the US and Canada which ironically is outing Adobe (Animate) out of schools and colleges.
Thank you for making this video, Jazza. I had a professor tell me “It’s industry standard” and “you have to use it” which disgusted me because, although it might be an industry standard, other programs like procreate can be used to accomplish the same assignment without having to pay an outrageous subscription.
if you want to be an independent illustrator then programs doesn't really matter imo , but if you want to work in a studio then yes , sadly you have to get what programs they have and learn them, as it is the common requirement- and still photoshop and other adobe programs are still a requirement in studios.
It's about interoperability, that's why it's an industry standard (still). If you don't need to work with other people you can draw in Microsoft paint if you want
I agree with you! Even there are weak minded corporate butt-kissing saps out there who would make lame excuses for this "it's industry standard" bullshit line such as these two guys who responded to you!
Not long after they went subscription, I remember a controversy from my art school, when Adobe suddenly revoked our licenses with no warning, even though students/alumni were supposed to be able to keep their perpetual license of the version (CS6) as part of our costly tuition, especially affecting recent grads doing work with it. A bait and switch, meant to force us into their subscription. Despised them ever since.
@@Tugela60 No - even among other comments here, you will find Adobe makes deals with schools like my own, to "teach" (or rather, sell) their products to future creatives. My school still has the webpage up to address that controversy, and it states "Adobe entered into an agreement" with my school, Academy of Art. A student also complained to Adobe's website troubleshoot page, and got a response acknowledging their partnership to our school (I can still see this complaint on their site). Some students had taken legal action at the time. After some legal digging, it was revealed my school and Adobe knew about the cancellation but were intentionally not transparent with students about it. To "make up for it" though, they extended the license another year.
@@Tugela60 No, this IS on Adobe. A perpetual license means 'forever.' Those alumni/students should have been able to keep using CS6 as long as their hardware could run the apps. Revoking the licenses, warning or not, was breaching the perpetual license agreement. I have a perpetual license to Affinity V1. As long as I have a system that can run it, I'm free to use the V1 apps forever.
@@BeckyAnn6879 Educational licenses apply only if you qualiify for them, meaning that when you leave the institution, you have to upgrade to a full copy.
@@Tugela60 Did you even READ the comment? Adobe gave perpetual licenses as part to their tuition, then revoked them with no warning. Even saying, 'Hey, please upgrade now that you have graduated.' would have been better than, 'Oops, your copy is invalid now. Too Bad so sad.'
I started my professional career in graphic design after leaving college in 1977. I worked in the heart of Britain's advertising industry in Covent Garden garden. Other than photosetting everything was analogue from visuals to finished artwork. I worked alongside some brilliant designers, art directors, photographers, air brush illustrators and retouchers. By the 1980s I had gone freelance and in 1988 I bought my first Mac which saved me a lot of time and money on typesetting. I used Aldus Freehand and PageMaker. Fast forward a few years and those programmes and Photoshop had put half the Advertising industry out of business. Thousands of talented creative people were thrown on the scrap heap. Many that remained were rebadged as 'technical operatives' and doomed to a life of low salaries and self esteem. And now here we are in 2024 where you will own nothing and apparently be happy according to the WEF. Adobe have certainly embraced that mantra.
The Affinity Suite is also a pretty good hobbyist choice. Not free but a really solid replacement for InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop and they integrate really well with one another.
Krita ! Illustrator here and really...imo adobe isn't really good for illustration, never really understood while out of every options (for digital painting) you would choose toshop.
I was already a published author in the field and was invited to be an official beta-tester for Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, and other apps. I started sending suggestions about things that I felt could be improved (feature requests). One of the bosses there asked me to stop doing that, because I was creating "noise" in the bug report/feature request system.
@@Jupiter-ry6ll in engineering we typically use "signal to noise" as an analogy for useful to useless information. (It comes from audio quality: if you amplify a signal, you make it louder, but you still won't hear it if the signal is in the noise). Calling them noise is calling them bad ideas, just a bit more politely.
@@JohnDoe-420 he wasn't being polite you are very naive he was telling him without telling him that the "feature request" part was unwanted and all they wanted is users debugging the software for free it's 100% that I know in meetings they say "please give us feedback and ideas to improve things" but it's a lie not only it's their job to think those improvements but they are never allowing a good one implemented unless they can make it look like it came from them because again it's their job and they aren't doing it
@@fredEVOIX THIS! my husband works for a large software company and they want beta testers de-bugging, make less work NOT more! The only feature requests they want are for the developers' own pet features that were cut to be brought back. Because here's what happens: An executive gets in their head that "A" is the best thing going, BUT they laid off half the programmers a few months ago/drove them off with sh!tty work conditions/ have had a hiring freeze for years. So, they're down about 25% of the workforce needed to keep up with the industry in general and "A" really needs an extra 25% increase to change the actual code as much as the executive wants to do to the product. Thus, the 75% workforce is asked to give 125%, on top of their already stretched system, and then someone finds a major bug or a country decides to declare war/change policy/ target your industry and wrecks havoc on part of your org. Usually a security bug or an entire step in the development team so you can't just work around it. And now that beta release that was supposed to go to the folks who agreed to test it in 3 weeks is getting renamed/ reworked/ "fixed" from the ground up and if you're lucky they'll even let you delay it for a whole week! But that means that all those little bugs that would have been worked out of the system don't get caught. SO, knowingly broken stuff gets sent to beta testers to find any other bugs while the people putting the magic smoke in the box try to recover from the 150% they've been at for the last month and get caught up on what was broken when it went out the door. So yeah, when one of those beta testers has the GALL to suggest that they really want to be able to do this and that, and "why can't they just click like this?" ~managers~ see it. Then Marketing gets the C suite to decide to meddle and ask for "B" because that's what they really meant when they said "A". So then programmers have to try to adjust "A" to really be "B" AND THEN when paying customers start getting any of it, THEY want "A" or even version 1.0 back, because that's what THEY were used to and don't want to spend down time trying to train their employees up to speed and "how dare you change it to fix a security flaw!" or not let them put your stuff in a package they sell themselves or what happened to this one little feature? that they used all the time but no one else ever did and it was taken out to allow this other feature that everyone kept requesting..... THAT'S why beta testers asking for features are nothing but noise. Programmers need real bugs found to fix them, and unless you are a corporate customer PAYING for support and 1000s of licences, a company can't afford to hire the number of people needed to implement random "feature requests" and keep them from breaking everything else while still paying -it's -CEO $50 M- shareholders what they demand.
I really think a lot of why I stuck with Adobe for so long is because it was hard to readjust my workflow and pipeline to learn new software. but between a month subscription being the cost of a yearly sub to another program, not having a pure purchase option, all the Ai stuff, and training on users data without our consent. switching programs became the easiest decision of my life and I wish I'd done it years ago.
@@jamesdominguez7685 I tried out Krita and that’s really great, but I ended up going with clip studio paint because I’m primarily a 3D artist and the ability to load my models into a scene for quick concept sketches is super helpful. But my adobe gripes also applies to other programs like Zbrush, once my favorite programs and my main recommendation due to the “lifetime upgrades” which stopped when they got bought out and are now a subscription only, now I recommend new users learn blender instead, same issue with Maya and substance tbh.
@@jamesdominguez7685 yeah sorry for the late response I’ve been using Krita and Clip Studio paint, krita was a great free option but CSP has great tools for comics and importing 3D models (I’m a 3D artist first) so it really works great for helping me sketch out concepts
Yeah, that's kind of what they count on. They know they've been the only player in the game for so long that everybody is _used to_ their software, and that learning a new program takes a lot of time and effort, and when you're a professional that time and effort is slowing down your work rate and costing you money, so if even switching to a "free" program is going to cost you, why not just stay with the devil you know?
@@jamesdominguez7685 I'm finding that affinity is so easy to adjust to it's been easier than my last CS update was. Partly because it's more intuitive where it's different, and partly because it's not that different anyway. And it's far better for my purposes than CS5. Publisher rocks. The way it handles linked files is fast and also fantastic- no more of those destructive adjustments where you had to jump between ID and PS all the time to do anything. I downloaded the 6 month trial yesterday and I'm already fully up to speed with Publisher after just about 3 hours, and for me it will be massively faster in use than CS5 ID. Photo looks like it will be an easy transition too.
Davinci is like a warm hug from your grand mother :) Dependable, reliable and asks for nothing in return :) After being bent over one last time when I parted ways with Adobe I've never looked back. Thank you Davinci Tiamo!!
I had used the CS for nearly two decades and was always very pleased with it. only recently my old mac gave out and since then, I've been stranded. I refuse to pay for a subscription to something you should be able to own! glad to hear there's alternatives available!
This is a slight diversion from the topic, but I REALLY liked the presentation of this video, it was perfect to watch while having lunch. I would love a deep dives with jazza series!
I work in a factory, but the way you talked about Adobe not listening to customers is the way I feel about communication with the corporate office of the company I work for. There's 4 HUGE issues on why it's more difficult for us to fill our orders. Their answer isn't to fix those problems, but to require exhausted and frustrated people to work overtime. This is the 2nd video in the last couple of weeks about ridiculous terms and conditions of big companies. The other one is a Film Theory video.
Creatives need to stand up for their rights to keep and own their work. It’s why I do not put my images on social media without extreme careful consideration. This video is an excellent story of how many of us were seduced by and then abused by Adobe. Thank you for making this comprehensive and informative video. A must-watch for anyone creating or using digital media. We have options! Let’s use and support them!
I have been busy and stopped watching you for two years or so. I'm really happy to see that I still perfectly resonate with you. I feel so at home watching your videos
A dedicated video about viable photoshop alternatives would be great. Because I think this is what most longterm professionals like u and me struggle with the most. Otherwise great dive into this important industry topic! ❤
The Affinity Suite which includes: Affinity Photo Affinity Designer Affinity Publisher You pay once for each full version (has been about 7 years before upgrade) and you’re not paying ridiculous prices.
Krita and Clip Studio Paint are good alternatives to Photoshop. Affordable and in some ways better for digital painting. Haven't missed Photoshop at all.
I echo Yoda. Krita as a free alternative that covers most things for free, and clip that has a one time buy option are great. I've been using krita for years.
You know, my mom worked for Tom Knoll (one of the knoll brothers who invented photoshop) when I was a kid as a housekeeper. My mom would bring me along and I had free reign to explore their sprawling, lovely home and grounds. He was a quiet, kind humble, and generous. The home my mom lives in to this day is paid off thanks to him and his former wife. Its wild that his product is owned by a monster of a company.
I am an design student from Germany and switchedto affinity and davinci. Best decision I’ve made. I paid 1090€ from 2019 - early 2023. There is a bit of a learning curve but I swear it’s almost exactly the same. There are few things missing, but you can work your way around there. Fuck adobe.
When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud and its subscription service I was just getting started with Photoshop. I instantly understood Adobe's motivations behind that move and refused to get sucked in and be taken hostage. I reverted to pen and paper and kept everything off the Cloud. This certainly changed what could have been...
im a young artist and i just simply refuse to ever use adobe, ive used it once because it came free with my school, and it was the most MISERABLE drawing process ive ever experienced
Same, we have Adobe, Autodesk, Construct 3 and maybe Microsoft 365? ☹️ I'm using free alternatives instead and it feels more future proof even if they sren't industry standards. Is this a good idea?
@@ujocdod My school provides Microsoft 365 and Canva subscriptions. Microsoft isn't all that bad from a I need to use it for school and if I operate outside this system problems arise point of view. Some things need to be submitted via teams, teachers post on teams, Google Slides doesn't work with the projector clicker so just powerpoint, and word of course has to be used to easily submit something. Having a Canva subscription is pretty useful.
Personally I get Adobe for super cheap through university & Photoshop is my favourite out of all the digital art programs I've tried, but I'm definitely switching once I stop getting it cheap lol
As a retired advertising and editorial photographer, I reluctantly admit that I’m glad Adobe no longer has the grips on my fellow creatives. The switch from buying Photoshop licenses to paying for the seat subscriptions was very frustrating and certainly not cost-effective for a growing studio. All the key points to your analysis of Adobes “grasp“ on creatives is 100% true. I was ashamed for some of my fellow creatives who were so impressed with themselves when they were “sponsored“ by Adobe yet were paid or no money or even free software other than beta. I believe Adobe‘s fall from grace has not yet completed and as much as I don’t will failure on anyone, I am watching with a gleam of interest in my eye as Adobe is forced to make these changes. Thank you for the video.
I've been using Photoshop since I was in middle school, thanks to an uncle with access to the software. It's really a shame that they're letting greed destroy themselves. Tech companies love becoming the industry standard and then nuking their reputation because they know everyone is too dependent to leave. I'm hoping the companies who are reliant on Adobe are able to slowly switch to the alternatives. Lastly, I love these style videos and hearing your opinions!
It's really hard to stop using adobe altogether as a professional. But I believe that nowadays there are many more options out there than in the past. All we can do is gradually move toward other viable software's and stop being so dependent of one corporation bundle. That's my personal plan for the next few years. Learning a new software takes time and effort but it will pay off I hope.
One point in Affinity Photo's favour is that it can import and export Photoshop files, so you won't have to go through the agonising process of converting your previous work to a new format. Affinity Designer does the same with Illustrator files.
it's not hard, it's just doing it. Most professionals are freelancers, and are free to use what they please, as the creating party. (the result is what counts, not the tools used)
To be clear, when they say that "Our video model is designed to be commercially safe and it's only trained on public domain or licensed content" - the licensed content part is your work that you previously had to agree to give them license to. This is not a "we are doing everything right this time" statement, this is stating that they used your "licensed" content to train the ai. They said in plain language, if you use their product, they have license to use what you made to make the software better. AI is the software they made better using your art that they have a "license" to, that you gave them when you clicked "agree"
So true! Hank Green has a great video explaining how when Google says Gemini is only training on content with licensing agreements, they mean literally all of TH-cam’s user generated content.
This is very important. No public statement means anything unless there are clear and concise changes to reflect that in the ToS/Licensing agreement. If they need to specify generative AI or machine learning, the type they use, and the content they use it on, means there are exceptions and those exceptions exist for a reason. Anything short of a legally-binding commitment to by default opting out users from their data being harvested and not changing that for the duration of their license is unacceptable.
I knew Adobe was bad, but I hadn't realized how bad they had gotten. I know the licensing has caused such problems at work that at one point it had taken up almost full-time of one person for several months just to untangle the problems, create a new tracking program to track these folks and what they were licensed for, and then administrator all of this (which then impacted all the other work he was supposed to be doing, but this had to come first). Rather than just tracking the software bought, which already had a system of tracking. It was crazy.
😂 this comment is hilarious because I’m sure it’s 100% true. The same thing is happening at my studio. Our tech group has a guy who manages the enterprise software & partnerships. I heard recently they asked for a headcount to hire a direct report to manage all the licenses for Adobe & similar products
Switch to Affinity equivalents of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. with a one-time payment that is VERY reasonable. Sometimes I get a quick project done in the time it takes Adobe’s software load fully. Love it!!
From someone who was taught through college and uni to use adobe and not being able to afford it I stumbled across affinity and never looked back a one off fee and its a great software to use :) no affiliation haha :)
This is the era of Adobe's downfall. With the recent statements from Procreate's CEO shitting on AI images, pricing changes from Clip Studio and free options popping up every other week, there's quite literally no way adobe can weasel their way out of this one
Unfortunately all their big corporate and enterprise clients will likely keep them in business a long time. Acrobat Pro is yet another example. This is why companies like Adobe and Microsoft love being "the standard". Not based on the merits of their proposed "standards", but by eliminating competition by any means necessary so that they become the defacto "standard" via limited choices/options and similar. I could go on and on but I gotta hop down from the soapbox sometime lol.
@@c.g.vonhagenstein7576 corporate and enterprise clients, and their extremely lucrative years-long contracts with universities and other educational institutions.... it's like indentured servitude
@@c.g.vonhagenstein7576that and it’s been the industry standard for so long that current professional artists (outside of those Jazza mentioned) will continue to use it. I had to buy Adobe for an art class because “it’s what professionals use and you need to know how to use it in the future”. It’s got a stranglehold on the market for that.
You introduced me to bothe resolve and krita and I havent looked back since. These free programns really are professional grade and are perfect avenues for aspiring and professional artists alike.
Probably worth mentioning that Resolve is free for most users, but to get access to a handful of professional-grade features to need to pay. That said, the purchase price for a small business is minimal compared to a year of Adobe. I think it was something like US$150-200 or so?
@jamesdominguez7685 even then, most hobbyist editors will NEVER need more than the free suite from my personal experience which is still amazing. Not to mention I'd pay $200 any day for a good product I get to own perpetually over a comparable and arguably more flawed product that is only accessible via a predatory subscription model.
Blackmagic is easily my favorite creative company. I just wish they made a photoshop competitor and/or buy something like the Calavry app and add them to DaVinci for easy 2d motion graphic creation. I would sh*t myself
So... I just started researching art programs to try learning how to make 2d animations, decided to avoid Adobe like the plague for their absurd pricing and my very low budget... and now you post this awesome video that also provides a list with more programs I could check? You are AWESOME! Thank you!
A loophole I remember hearing about for avoiding the cancellation fees is to switch your plan to the smallest plan available and then cancel. Since you switched it counts as a new subscription and you should be within their cancellation window to just leave with no or little fees.
@TalesOfWar What is illegal about it? You bought a years subscription at a discount and paid it in monthly installments. That was always clear. The purpose was to make payment more manageable for users. There was a proper monthly subscription option available as well, but it cost more.
@@Tugela60 I pay 30 bucks monthly for creative cloud. If I wanted to cancel my subscription, I would have to pay 30 more dollars to do it. Now, I have another subscription to Spotify. Do you know what they do when you cancel a sub with them? They give you the rest of the time you paid for then stop charging when the time is up. Why the fuck should adobe be able to force users to cough up more money to stop paying for their services?
@@Tugela60 It's called dark patterns and coercive marketing. This kind of thing has been getting a lot of scrutinty from regulators in recent years. Even the US as is mentioned in this video are taking Adobe to task on it, and we all know the US and user rights tend to be and oxymoron.
@@TalesOfWar It was perfectly clear and spelled out right from the start of the subscription model. The issue is that people just clicked on the lower number without reading the details, and now are crying. It has ALLWAYS been an annual subscription payable monthly, or a monthly subscription.
How times change yet, I still find myself watching alot of your old flash content on Newgrounds like it was just yesterday. I feel though while flash is dead the worlds that artists like yourself have created with it shall always remain forever within memory RIP Larry of Karryon and thank you Jazza for everything you have given the world with it.
I am very old, so many of my formative internet memories were delivered via Flash: Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Salad Fingers, Threebrain, RatherGood, etc.
I'm in my first semester of a Graphic Design major where Adobe is ALL we can use. This makes sense as it's industry standard, but even if I could afford it after graduating... I would not want to give my money to them. I hope to find the time to begin experimenting with other options while in college :)
Diversify your skills no matter what industry. Adobe isn't the only tool used by these industries. Note also that the studios do custom software or plug-ins. When you read the credits on "The Wild Robot" or "The Matrix", you'll see many reasons to explore other skills. Interviews of creators or the studios mention how each job meant other processes, other software, etc to learn. Wish I'd known this digital world when i was studying. Back when I helped publish a small newsletter, our cut and paste was really glue/paste and Xacto knife. High tech was using scanners. 😂😊
Affinity offer a fantastic alternative to adobe, I needed indesign for a new project 12 months ago, couldn’t stomach the costs so I tried Affinity, it took two days of seriously steep learning curve to get my head around it, but so happy with the switch now. And it’s really affordable one off payment.
As a longtime Adobe user, I found picking up Affinity Designer very intuitive and simple for the most part. If you want to have an edge, practice doing some of your projects in Affinity or another software as you go along, so you'll be as good at using that software as you are with Adobe products when you graduate.
Same since I’m never going professional and use it as a part time hobby I never saw the reason to pay so much for a program I’d not use on a daily basis OR even profit from. So I went krita and tested csp and I love them both ❤. I love how easily you can trade brushes in csp
I was one of those people who got 'the screen' and didn't know what to do because I kinda got a weird feeling. But I got to cancel, luckily, and am happily free from Adobe for some time now. I'm so glad Jazza did this piece and always stays true to himself! I also recommend DaVinci by the way.
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Thank you for coming forward. This video is great information for every starting content creator.
I went through the pain of dropping them, for me the worst part was needing to download 2 different bits of software to fully remove every thing it installs including several programs that do not show up in your programs lists.
I tried deleting creative -suite- _cloud_ from one of our work pc’s due to not having an extra license and to uninstall their programs from OUR pc’s we had to UPDATE all of their programs, log out on another system, log in on the mostly unstable PC and then delete the programs while being heavily pushed to keep it installed. So I removed the program files instead! It took longer, but I’m very spiteful when angry!
It's important to be able to read legal stuff correctly. When they asserted that they only used public domain and licensed data to train their AI? They were not saying that they did not use user data that was from customers who had accepted their agreement and then unsubscribed. They were saying that they did use that data. When you clicked "accept", you gave them a license, and they used it. The only way to avoid that would have been to not click 'accept'. The application doesn't let you quit without clicking accept? Force quit. If that won't work, reboot the computer. If it won't let you do that, power it off. For the people who clicked accept and are now suing them, I wish you luck. I would like to think at some point we could get a law passed that required companies to let us recover our data after we discontinue using their software. However, making that difficult was one of the "benefits" to the shareholders for moving into the cloud. Removing that benefit from them is not going to be easy. Personally, I don't go into the cloud if I can avoid it. If I have to go there, I make a local backup of everything.
Man Jazza this is such a flashback, I remember discovering your channel at 2016 back when I was learning how to animate, since all my school ever uses is the adobe suite yuck. I dove all into your tutorials back then to help me pass the class which I thankful for at the time and still am. You got me way more out of many jams with your adobe tutorials in your tutorial era then any other TH-camrs at the time. Since there weren't many tutorials to watch for animation back then. at least for me. Thanks Jazza for being such a great relaiaable source at that time for me. Now I've been using clip studio paint for a long time now and recently learning procreate on my iPad for my alternative as well as opentoonz.
Sadly, I'm still trapped using Adobe Animate. I know I should switch to Toon Boom, but while I'm stuck on the treadmill of making TH-cam Shorts, its hard to find any spare time to learn a new program. Especially one as complex as Toon Boom. 😭😭
I have had to learn toon boom for projects that I worked on, and I came from TVPaint. I learned the basics surprisingly fast. The basics of animations are the same regardless of the program. I highly recommend trying it out!
This is basically the only thing keeping Adobe profitable: many artists and businesses simply can't afford the time and effort required to learn new programs, update their workflows, etc. Apart from the rusted-on Adobe fanboys, everyone I've talked to about it who is sticking with Adobe for the time being only did so because of the effort of changing over. Some day soon, a competitor will find a way to smooth out the transition, and that's when Adobe will start to really haemorrhage customers.
Heads up, if you want to cancel your adobe subscription but you're not finished the 12 months, you can change your plan to a cheaper one, you get refunded the difference for the month, and then because you've started a new plan you have the 14 day (I believe) cancellation window where you can cancel without a fee. This worked for me about a year or so ago, I don't know if they've fixed it or if I've forgotten parts of the process, but that's what I did.
I did this, too about a year ago when they rolled out Firefly AI. Somebody on Reddit suggested it; I had a year subscription just to Photoshop, and iirc, I upgraded to all apps, then canceled. They've probably patched that loophole by now, but I hope a lot of people used it while they could!
Good to know - I'm about to cancel my subscription once I've finished my current project (fortunately I should get it down before the up the price) but I'm just so pissed they're upping the price before my 12 months is over
It's crazy how everything's come full circle I watched Jazza religiously when I started learning photoshop, and flash/animate, and now I'm watching the downfall of Adobe from Jazza after abandoning photoshop a couple years ago when I switched to Clip Studio Paint.
@@sallyedwards2911 Luckily, PS has innovated at the pace of the proverbial "asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping", so you're not missing much. Even the interface still has woefully little customisation and stupid "they've never tried to actually use this, have they?" shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N for "new layer" (A keyboard shortcut that needs two hands?)
TH-cams ads always tone deaf 😅 I got 2 Adobe ads on this, I got betterhelp ads on vids describing their shadiness, and I watch a load of failed mmo (where did it go wrong) vids that puts the same games in the ads.
As a graphic designer and video production editor, I stopped using adobe products when adobe switched to their subscription service model. I wasn't about to pay a recurring subscription fee just to use their software. I switched to alternative software apps when I found them. I am glad I missed that AI EULA change and having to pay a cancellation fee. Once I found other software apps and I never looked back to any adobe product.
Love ya Jazza, I've been watching you for years from my mid-teens to adulthood. Thank you for still being the honest, smart, down to earth and open guy you've always shown yourself to be. I can't thank you enough for creating and inspiring.
Imagine if the only way to get a toaster was to rent it, and it came with terms stipulating that you could only toast regular white bread. Forget about toasting bagels or lighting cigarettes-you would need a separate license for those!
It's not just Adobe that has adopted the business model of the stockholder as customer, and the end user as hostage, and naturally the Subscription model so you own nothing and pay every month forever. After all, who doesn't like recurring revenue. And monetizing your data is just part of the predatory business model.
What I really hate is how Adobe gives free trials to schools, not to mention Apple gives free pcs aswell. Like, it's clearly marketing and getting people used to THEIR products.
Thank you! I am just a boring old hobby photographer. I have been struggling for months trying to decide if I take the plunge of paying for the rest of my life. I will find something else.
Except that… *Any* variation of any pirated software is actually far worse than paying for it. That’s any variation of any: operating system, office software, or any other software out there. There are volumes of Microsoft Certified people out there that make volumes of money, just because someone though they were getting a version of it at a reduced cost, or for free. They ended up paying, and it also cost them much more than if they would have bought the full version software.
Another good video Jazza. (Resubscribed.) I'll never forgive Adobe's acquisition and destruction of Macromedia -- in doing this, they acquired Dreamweaver, Flash, and Authorware (which was my personal favorite for designing educational media) -- and gradually killed them all. This for me marked the start of their downfall...
do not do many web sites now but used Dreamweaver for years. When it went subscription I continued and it is expensive and has had no updates, fixes or new features in 10 years but it is twice as expensive as my subscription to the Adobe Photographers bundle using Photoshop and Light room often. I can understand the lower cost of the Bundle but there is nothing else I want or needed from Adobe now. Every month they do seem to have updates. Watching this video just reminded me to cancel Dreamweaver. I have used Davinci Resolve and it is great and free. My videos are not usually income producers but my still photography is producing income mostly doing actor portfolios, opera and ballet as a retirement business after 30 years as a recording studio owner, and engineer, back when records sold well. From 1971 until I moved out of the US, my 3 studio complex produced 197 gold and platinum albums
JAZZA THIS IS THE EARLIEST I HAVE EVEN BEEN AND IVE BEEN WATHCING YOU SINCE SINCE I WAS LIKE 8… I’m now nearly 18 and such a massive fan of your work and I am growing a business myself
I'm a retired graphic designer. I now volunteer my skills making album designs and concert posters for rising (and struggling) musicians. It's one of the ways I've found to help others (I'm also a handicap assistant part time), but I can't justify a monthly payment to Adobe for what has become hobby-level access to their tools. So I resurrected and installed my 2009 MacBook Pro hard drive with my purchased Creative Suite on it by buying a still-functioning exact-same model 2009 MacBook Pro for $150! Maybe it doesn't have the latest bells and whistles Adobe has added along the way, but it works the way I remember... and it allows me to give my time and skills to local artists in need of marketing.
My biggest complaint is once you decide to pay for one of their products, you're tied in for a whole year, and get a very short window when that subscription is up for renewal to cancel, before being locked in to paying for another 12 months. And they make it very difficult to cancel this subscription.
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Adobe can really be compared to an abusive relationship. "You let me cross these boundaries because you have nowhere else to go and everyone else trusts me."
"Nobody else but me is going to love you!"
You should check out James Lee's animation about it - this exactly
I think most modern corporate models are based on the spouse batterer model. Notice how they never say, "Please Subscribe," but just issue the command "Subscribe"?
Literally James lee vid
That’s why pirating them shouldn’t be encouraged. It’s like finally escaping but still needing their financial support and still looking through their social media and liking their posts.
TH-cam algorithm deciding to show me an Adobe ad on this video was the best part of the entire thing.
Same happened to me. It was like watching a video about how Scientology is a cult and then getting interrupted with an ad promoting Scientology 😂
I was just about to comment this
@@Screechyowlett I was about to comment the comment you just commented
Comedic irony is the perfect kind of comedy
Same Adobe Premiere 😂
Really is a shame how hard they fell... the constant drama and controveries. The pricings and limitations on our subscriptions.
Exhausting the bank every month, for a service that, is being outmatched by free alternatives.
I unsubbed from Adobe. They wanted to charge a huge fee. The way I got around it was to switch to a different subscription and immediately cancelled then as the grace period resets.
I mean they are just the perfect example of how capitalism works, profit and exploitation over everything else
It’s especially frustrating that is still very much an industry standard with many colleges & businesses still requiring their students n workers to own adobe software.
Let's not forget there are premium services with a much cheaper one off price.
Don't forget the final nail in the coffin. Using their software meaning the can take your artwork to use as training data for AI
I’ve used Adobe products for 20+ years. I stopped subscribing a year ago, because I’ve been going through a tough financial patch. When I got a new gig, I still couldn’t afford to drop $60/month on the Adobe suite, so I signed up with a different email that came with a free 30-days, with the plan to cancel before the end. When I tried to I was met with a $130 “cancellation fee”. WTF? I tried calling and got the same run-a-round nonsense. Upon learning that the govt is suing Adobe for misleading and hidden practices, I filed a complaint with the FTC. So great to learn there are these great options! Thanks!
adobe are croks by the sound of their cancelation fees.
it's not a free trial if there's a cancellation fee after it 😭 That's another level of illegal 💀
its great seeing artist's with a large following speaking out against Adobe and their awful business practices. They don't realize we have a choice.
Yes, exactly. Though I've yet to find a good alternative for After Effects. Other than that, there's no reason to keeping using (or at least paying) their software.
@@dukkiegamer1733 It's interesting how corporations worry so about piracy while seemingly hell bent on disincentivizing people from actually paying for their products...
I wish they'd done it sooner, because Adobe's subscription model started the mess that artists are in right now with everyone going that route, and it could have been halted then if some bigger names had spoken up, but that move didn't affect larger content creators.
@@dukkiegamer1733 Davinci Resolve Studio is fantastic.
I use Blender and Resolve and I can achieve the same thing as I did in AE.
10 years too late. This would've NEVER reached this stage if people had spine...
I bought Davinci Resolve Studio back when it was 15.
We're on 19 and I haven't had to pay for a single update/upgrade.
It's beyond amazing.
Yes but this can't last. The company WILL bleed money and eventually become adobe, it'll just take 5 to 20 years and you'll never know when. Adobe does suck badly and photoshop is the only thing I need a good replacement for.
@@PioneerPrint3D Unfortunately I believe that software like this will no longer be needed in 10 or 20 years. AI will take over everything
Affinity has a servicable replacement for PS AI and INDD.
@@footballexpert111 As a professional translator, I hear the same about my job, but when I look at the results of AI translation, I often laugh rather than cry. AI is awful for any consumer not willing to lower their standards to the equivalent of painting their walls with crayons. When I look at AI generated art, there are some cool things I can do, but most of it is lousy. It replaces the lack of soul with additional fingers 😛
I would not be too worried. AI will probably only put the glorified hobbyists out of a job, not people who take their job seriously and bring serious skills to the table.
@@PioneerPrint3D BlackMagic Design doesn't need the money from DaVinci Resolve, it's more like a cherry-on-top to be included or used with any of their physical hardware, which is where a majority of their money comes from. They give you Resolve for a one time fee in hopes that you invest in more of their hardware products down the line, or they just give you a free copy of DaVinci Resolve with their cameras/panels.
Speaking of half baked features, I can remember being excited about a feature that would allow you to 'paint' things like buildings, and 'fill' vines etc in Flash. Turns out that's all those features did. One crappy building pattern and one crappy vine pattern, that couldn't be changed or customised.
Apple and Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash. Adobe left it to rot, along with the whole creative ecosystem that was built around it. People were making whole console games in Flash, but Adobe didn't seem to realise the value in what they had. During the golden age of mobile app development, it's staggering how much Adobe had dropped the ball, with regards to the Flash authoring tool. To this day, nothing has replaced what Flash did so well.
Hey Mr Lee, how is yo doing with your ex-wife as I see
I still use a few Apps that incorporate flash videos
Flash was cancer even before Adobe bought it. Flash games/videos were one of the major attack vectors for malware. That that pile of ever burning tires finally flamed out was a good thing.
Omg the lawyer
HTML5 killed Flash. Adobe had no choice but to let it rot. As a web developer, i'm very happy Flash no longer exists. It's a pile of steaming hot garbage, for a number of reasons.
I love how it always starts with ENGINEERS starting a business becasue they see a NEED. Then the marketing guys get to higher positions and then everything is set aside, whilst profit takes the stage. Boeing, Adobe, Microsoft, etc, etc, etc...
pretty much
Corporatism
It's called capitalism
Marketing is lieology
An unfortunate thing to happen
I'm just putting this out here, but if you are moving away from Photoshop to a project like Krita consider taking a fraction of what you used to pay for Adobe Products and set up a recurring donation to the project you're using. You probably know this, but these projects primarily rely on outside funding to pay their core maintainers and to hire more people working on their software, and this especially holds for UX and other non-engineering folks who are usually not as involved in the open-source community (not saying this to paint them in a negative light, it's just much more common for programmers to work on open-source in their free time than for other professions).
Yeah I agree!
You've mentioned them. They are getting bought
Joking aside. Any good video ones? Any good suggestions for the other things losing moving away from Adobe? I'm looking to try and get creative in a way. Small time as a hobby
@@Uinb- Davinci Resolve, it was the first thing he mentioned.
I agree. Even making a one time donation as if you were purchasing stand alone software once is better than nothing. I have done so with GIMP, Krita, and Blender. I used to get an educator discount on CC when I was teaching, but I had to give it up when I retired, as it was just ridiculously expensive, and I used only a few apps. I was a total fanboy, but I really hate the subscription model, and all of their other business practices, plus the elitist attitude that THEY know what we need. The Blender Foundation ethos is the future. I hope Adobe withers away.
I just hope it doesn't get LgeeBT community managers like Godot tho lol
I'm just never going to purchase from Adobe ever
I've used Adobe products for almost 20 years. Never given them a single cent tho
You can purchase from Adobe? It's only subscriptions now
YARRR
@@gustavrsh however it is. I’m never giving money to them
YO-HO-HO! 🏴☠️
I ended up having to call my bank and have them block Adobe from charging my account because I tried for weeks to call and cancel my subscription. They would “ get disconnected”, cut the call when I was on hold, cycle me through multiple representatives, and at one point literally argue with me about the nature of my call. They spoke down to me and laughed at me when I began to get frustrated. Thankfully my bank was able to step in and protect me, they even refunded my account. Adobe sucks.
I had to invoke the australian ACCC, a government consumer watch dog, emailed them the threat (ACCC fined a similar company millions for not allow easy cancellation that month) they quickly backed away... Australia government have law in place for this sort of bullying from companies.
I had exactly the same experience as you.
they really acting like a scam call center
A friend also experienced this! Such despicable practices
Same experience here, too. Fortunately, my bank refunded me for the previous eight months' charges as well. Thankful that.
Forced subscription services are an absolute death nail. People prefer to buy things outright, and if you don't give them the option, all they have left is to pirate.
20+ year user of Premiere. Just jumped ship to DaVinci and couldn't be happier. Every program has its faults but not every software feels like a car with a forty year old engine.
Remember when Apple killed Final Cut Pro and started from the ground up with Final Cut Pro X? Which made full use of all the modern things we expect from computers and operating systems these days like multi-threading, GPU acceleration, FULLY 64BIT which Premiere STILL ISN'T and would only get better as the hardware you ran it on improved? Rather than relying almost entirely on single thread performance for much of the core functionality (which it still does)? Do you also remember how Adobe mocked Apple and said how crap it was because it lacked certain features that the old version had? Then advertised Premiere CS6 like it was some kind of second coming saviour for FCP users?
You'd think they'd have seen that as a wake up call and realised that maybe they also needed to have started over with software that actually runs properly on "modern" hardware like multi-core CPU's which have been run of the mill standard even in crappy cheapo budget boxes for well over a decade at this point. Nope, they just kept using the same crappy code base that was showing its age even then, while Final Cut has gotten better and better with new features and it performs like a champ, and scales with the better hardware you throw at it.
I also remember when they blamed Apple for them taking an extra year getting a 64bit version of Photoshop ready for the Mac because they claimed Apple never told them they'd need to move their code base to Cocoa. They were still using Carbon. I mean, it isn't like Steve Jobs told the entire world that Carbon was the intermediate language to get your Classic apps running on Mac OS X and that Cocoa was the native language when they introduced the beta in 1999, about 9 years before... oh wait! That's exactly what happened!
I love multimerge, its fun to work in the node way and still easily layer stuff, its just so easy to follow and fun to use
Used premiere and after effects since 2008 and also moved on to da vinci resolve.
even a decade ago photoshop felt bloated and as i was learning how to use it, i distinctly felt like sifferent sections (menus, etc) were made at different times, if that makes sense. like yeah sure its all got the same coat of paint, but ages of the code varied wildly and oh my God does the clean-coder in me feel pain thinking back on that now. i can only imagine the spaghetti...
@@TigerAceSullivan You felt that because that's exactly what happened. It's an old peice of software, it has decades worth of UI design changes etc and hasn't been updated in a more gradual way. Think Windows, it's the same kind of UI mess with decades of cruft. They leave the old and add new on top so it's all disjointed and can be a really jarring experience. You don't notice it so much if you've been using it for a long time as you were there as they add it, if that makes sense.
I prefer the way companies like Apple do things. They'll gradually change things over time so the jump isn't so huge and jarring. they also tend to stick more closely to the guidelines they set themselves too which helps with consistency. I'd have preferred for Adobe to go the Apple route rather than Microsoft route when it comes to their UI evolution.
I noticed this divergence when they moved from using the OS native chrome to making their own (originally made in Flash I believe, which explains why performance sucked after the change lol). They used to use the interface elements found in the actual OS it was running on. So you'd get all the buttons on the Mac looking like buttons fron.. the Mac, for example. Then they went with what we essentially have now which is more consistent between Windows and Mac OS, but at the same time doesn't really match Windows or Mac OS so it looks and feels very much like a third party tool that doesn't even try to blend in with the platform it's on.
As a blind person who worked with Accessibility professionals at Adobe, I think that the perfect line in this whole piece was when you mentioned their self-importance. I have seldom met more smug people who are so sure of their rightness, despite customer complaints and frustration.
Being a market leader breeds this kind of thinking. I've seen it with PlayStation, Telstra, Qantas... spend too long on top and you get arrogant.
Oohoho this is so spot on
I’m sure they do think they are right because they were used to charging hundreds of dollars to customers and when they went to a monthly fee they wanted to make sure they still got hundreds or dollars per customer so they thought it would be a good idea to force users into a year-long commitment. They didn’t actually lower the price, they just turned it into a payment plan. They still wanted to squeeze every drop of blood possible out of working people who couldn’t afford it. Their greed is their downfall. Meanwhile, companies like Procreate are doing great charging a low one-time fee.
Thank you for your comment ! I didn't even realize how blind or deaf people are affected by smug departments heads.
Blackberry died because of this kind of hubris too.
LOVE this video essay style from you! I’m a big fan of commentary channels and this has definitely been missing in the art niche.
I'm not even an artist and I'd love it if he did more videos like this. I love long-form essay videos.
ngl it’s been missing for a reason. art commentary channels end up being preferred for their drama coverage and not their unique individual art.
there are still some around- half of them barely care about the subject they’re talking about as are jumping on current tea, and the rest might care but it gets filtered out by all the samey-stuff
The irony of this video being constantly interrupted by adverts for Adobe was not lost on me.
Also, 20+ year video editor here. +1 for Davinci Resolve. It's incredible.
If Jazza has waded into the Adobe fiasco, then you know things are bad! When my Adobe subscription came up for renewal early last year, dropped it like hot potato and never looked back. One of the best business money saving decisions I've made in years.
Same! I don't regret it what so ever!
Just cancelled my monthly 2 minths ago after having the CC Suite since college in 2015.
WHat would you recomend of softwares?
I have dived into GIMP so far, and blender.
@@nyengster I've replaced the Adobe software I use with Affinity's suite of apps and Da Vinci Resolve for the video side of things. Unlike Jazza who's an artist, I work in industrial design, so use other software geared to making phyiscal things which thankfully Adobe hasn't tried to buy out.
@@taridean Thanks! Im an architect, so i was looking for some alternatives,
Affinity designer and publisher 2 are actually better than the adobe equivalents imo. Can't wait to ditch them for good, just need to put some time into resolve! So glad to see people calling them out for what they've become.
Unfortunately, they were recently bought by Canva. This is a bit of a strain as Canva's core business operates on a subscription model.
I switched from Adobe to Blender, Resolve Studio, and Affinity about 4 years ago.
Haven't looked back lol
I did get Resolve Studio back when it was 15, but I didn't really use it big time until about the beginning of 2020.
Cut my Adobe sub, in 2020 and it's been great.
Affinity Designer is still missing quite a few features if you are primarily a vector artist, but luckily software like Inkscape and Blender exist if you need to fill some of those gaps in the meantime. I can however say that Affinity Designer is significantly more user friendly than Adobe Illustrator ever was.
Affinity Publisher is absolutely fantastic for what it does, can't deny that. I hope it adds the other missing Personas from Affinity Photo in the future so I don't have to switch between Publisher and Photo all the time.
Resolve is far superior in so many ways.
My issue is that in my industry (pack design) design agencies, print shops etc use Adobe. And that Affinity Designer/ Paint shop (i think its called) don't play super well with opening up/saving out files compatible with Adobe. Which is a hurdle when working from home or something on shared/collaborative projects. Also when sending files like AI over to printers and such. We need a whole industry wide shift from adobe for the other apps to be a viable alternative- which makes sense as Adobe have such a monopoly- it ranges from college all the way into big design agencies.
HOWEVER for my own shit, where it's just me working on it and it doesn't need someone else, I'm 100% going to switch.
Its a shame, I learned on CS5 and I remember that I too was extremely happy with CC as I was just starting out as a young designer, working on freelance projects to support interning and without that, I'd have either had to suffer with pirate software or I'd have had real issues saving up and buying a suite at the prices of the CS software. But Adobe have just gotten too fucking greedy and they need to be taken down a peg before they destroy the industry they've been so benificial to
I stopped using them 5 years ago. Affinity, procreate, DaVinci all day. I did it mostly because the subscription model left me creatively in a slump. I felt obligated to only use Adobe even though their apps got frustrating. I was angry more than I was creating.
Do you have any affinity designer tutorials you can recommend? I mostly use illustrator, and have been looking to jump ship from Adobe for a while now.
procreate definitely leaves me wanting everything photoshop does way better unfortunately
100%
@@ThompsonBrosStudios - Affinity does their own video tutorials, like dozens and dozens of them. They're very clear and produced in-house so you can trust them to know the software well.
Procreate... 🤣🤣🤣🤣...I cannot believe they named it That... 🤨🤔😮💨🙄
My main gripe with Adobe is that they have a "predatory" model. It is all well and good that we have to pay for it yearly or monthly, but if you want to leave, the fees are out of this world. If you are a regular-level customer (I am a student, so I currently have student pricing), then it is not affordable. I acknowledge that they are the standard in the industry, but I have decided that upon graduation from my program, I will use Open-Source and Affinity for my day-to-day work. Loved the video!
You can apply a lot of this to Microsoft (and countless other) digital giants. Such a depressing world where technology innovation is actively stifled by corporate interests and greed.
It's lovely lovely capitalism :)
Microsoft at least let you buy the basic word, excel, powerpoint 2021 as a one time purchase. I've no need for updates so that actually works alright.
Not even just digital giants, but you can apply it to other companies as well. I can name a few MAJOR companies that have their hands in EVERYTHING where their shareholders and/or profits are more important than their grumbling and complaining customer base who are trying to speak up about an inferior or deteriorating product. It's sad how greedy these corporations have become. It's like they don't realize that their customer base is what MADE them successful. But then again, sometimes you have unwitting and fiercely loyal consumers, as Jazza said, who are essentially duped or placated into continuing to use that product. Or even worse, "forced" to use the product due to basically what equates to a monopoly on it.
microsoft is wayyy worse than
Apple is the worst, and yet not always mentioned
My Mom was working a high-paying job when I was a kid, and through her job was able to obtain Adobe Photoshop 5.5 (which was brand new when she got it, back in '99 or 2000), and that was the only art program (apart from MS Paint -the XP and Vista versions) that I used until 2020 (Mind you, I didn't have a tablet, I was using a corded mouse - cordED, not cordLESS). I never saw the need to update, and certainly wasn't about to jump into a subscription, so I remained content with my pre-millennial program. Then, in 2021 I got a Huion Tablet and downloaded Krita. You can imagine the world of difference.
I've been using Macromedia flash 8 for years. I still use it, and even when I had Adobe Illustrator, I did most of my work on flash 8. Illustrators only purpose for me, was creating vector files, and font files. I have affinity designer 2, to fill in for Illustrator these days. Macromedia flash 8 is very limited to what we have now, but I'm so use to using it, and no other program seems to work similarly to it to my satisfaction.
Krita is the bomb, for digital painting.
I recently got clip studio and I'm really considering abandoning photoshop for good
What does it matter if your mouse is corded or not? A heck of a lot less latency with a wired mouse.
@@ApolloMcrib I would never have a wireless mouse.. I dont love cables but it doesnt mean I cant live with them..
I've been banging the "Adobe Sucks" drum for a while now and it's so validating to see other professionals do the same. As an editor, I cannot recommend Davinci Resolve enough, for both Editors and Colourists, it's incredible.
@@SZvenM Absolutely. I wasn't too sure as my area is editing and I've only dabbled in Fusion. Glad to hear it's as good as the rest of the app
Sadly enough it's not great at animation, and PS is just standard ( we swap files with other editors) so the place I work at isn't very into the thought of moving.
I still use Adobe's programs, but completely cracked/pirated. I feel so vindicated for using their software for free for almost 15 years now haha.
@@frostreaper1607I was really pleased when I realised the Affinity suite now loads all of (and saves in some of) the standard Adobe formats.
I work in the machine industry, as one of those people with many different average level skill sets. One of my roles is with IT. I do not want to use weird “off brand” products, so I like using industry standards like Microsoft 365, Adobe, Autodesk and so on. But we only use Adobe to do basic PDF editing, so the price for that is just insane. We also do basic defense contracts, and the new build-in AI features in software are just a no go for us since we will not have the need for it.
I am now converting the company to Gimp, and PDF-Xchange PRO, and last week I closed our entire Adobe account. The change takes time, but it feels good. Like the good old days (00’s), when you bought software, and what you did with it, was up to you.
Thank you... :-)
Good, we need more people to do this!
As a basic, average, untrained person who needs to do light photo editing from time to time, I find that GIMP does everything I need. I can barely use the software because I have zero experience using it, but it blows my mind that such a powerful software is free to use.
I was using Photoshop for 20 years. After being crapped on for the last 4 years, with regards to a very poor service. I made the decision to quit. It was watching this channel that pointed me towards using clip studio. I haven't looked back since, I've saved a ton of money and have had zero issues. Thanks Jazza. Best move I've done.
Got pretty much the same story, of 21 years as a loyal adobe-fanboy, but an earlier timeline. I got pissed of in 2014 when I realised I couldn't use my old bought software after using my photoshop license as a promo code. 1994-2015 is quite the run tho.
@@zedruph I was a traditional artist before I was steered to photoshop in 2003/4. I bought photoshop 7 then bought photoshop cs3 just before photoshop turned it to a subscription. I was able to carry on using it until I changed my laptop in 2019, then had to subscribe at £20 a month. It was full of issues, brushes not working, screen freezing, I ended up having to use an older version but still pay the same. Threw the towel in after I was losing work and tried clip studio after finding this channel. Best move ever, wish I had found it sooner.
Dumped Adobe after CS6, no way was I renting. Love the Affinity products, Realusion's Cartoon Animator & DaVinci Resolve, all software I can BUY.
Clip Studio is the best tool for 2D art. I used it even when PSP was still in CS6. But it's not designed for photo editing which is what most people want from photoshop.
@@jal051 unfortunately its not, youre quite right, something I found out quite quickly as I used photoshop for editing photos as well as painting. However I dont do photography much anymore so the need isnt there. If I do need to edit again on a serious level, I will hopefully find a program to suit.
The last adobe product i purchasrd was cs6 because that was the last time you could OWN the software.
Same
Yep. Me too. I bounced around for a bit and while I don't use it for much more than hobby and fun - I bought Pixelmator, then Pixelmator Pro (mac only) and have never needed anything more for a PS replacement. On the rare vector project I'll break out Vectornator... but that's fairly amateur work.
Wait until Adobe blocks the activation of CS6 and stops people of using it for good, sadly we don't own as much as we think.
@@creato938 they already do that, you cannot activate cs6 software already
They haven't done that - I still use CS3 (it still works on Windows 11) and my local printer still uses CS5. Adobe supplied none activating versions when they turned off the activation servers.
I won't buy CC - CS3 does everything I need. If it stops working at some point there are plently of cheap and free alternatives.
If you don't need CMYK you can still purchase Photoshop and Premiere Elements to own and they provide a lot of what the CS versions have.
Having said that Premiere is a piece of crap - continuous crashes on every computer I tried it on and all the versions I tried over the years. Lots of better alterntives, some even free!
As a photographer I’ve had a major beef with Adobe since they stopped selling their standalone software and went subscription based. I have always felt they were very greedy but everyone else seemed happy with adobe regardless for years. I find their current Lightroom very glitchy and prefer my older software! I also hate that they make it SO hard to cancel!! I can’t stand them! Thank you for making this video. I honestly feel very validated for my feelings right now! I’m so glad I’m not alone!
Something for all companies to realize is …With great pride comes a great fall! Staying grounded for the people is the best way!
Did you find out how their happiness worked first? I'm personally happy with my definitely legit 🏴☠copy of PS CC 2018, doesn't mean I agree nor like to pay for subscriptions.
To me subscription just means them wanting us to be their bread-winners or child-supporters every month w/out being pressured to pump out quality updates.
@@MangaGamified The reason every tech company wants to sell subscriptions or "as a service" these days is all about human psychology. People are more likely to pay $10/mo than $100/year even though the monthly cost is higher. Adobe could make that bread without subscription if they released a new version of their software every few years for a fair price (multiple hundreds of dollars IS fair -- this software does take a lot of work to make). They don't because they want to sucker as many people into fake bargains as they can.
That's unrelated to the decreasing product quality, which is 100% on the company trying to lower development costs because that looks good to shareholders and drives the stock price up, and the C-suite gets paid in stock options so that's the only thing they care about.
@@JohnDoe-420 It was once pay once, pay to upgrade. So, example. $400 for new. $150 to upgrade in a couple years "if you wanted". I think we are way past that now though. They will never go back to someone owning it and NOT needing to upgrade. There's the greed. But also 100% control. It was not uncommon for people to have a 5 year old version of PS and be completely fine as a professional just doing their thing. They realized they couldn't get their money that way. It's a shame and actually a little disgusting how not only have they disconnected themselves from their initial reason to exist, but they simply don't care.
When you're finding it unreasonably hard to cancel a subscription, a phone call to your credit card company (or online chat) can make the problem go away. "I tried to cancel, but I think they're going to take more payments..." is a legitimate concern and the card company will help. They know your alternative is to close the account.
I feel you. I got into filmmaking thanks to Adobe Premiere CS2. Back in the day, I used to pirate the software as a kid, but when I started landing my first paid gigs, I was happy to finally pay for it. To my surprise, though, the constant crashes weren’t because of my pirated software-it was because of the endless bugs. I learned to live with it, developing an almost instinctual Control + Save reflex and maxing out the version history to avoid losing work.
Then, I decided to give DaVinci Resolve a try. I was lucky enough to get a license with a camera I purchased, and the difference was night and day. My crashes went down from 2+ a day to 1+ a year.
When COVID hit, I had to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. And let me tell you, unsubscribing was a nightmare. But during this time, I started falling in love with DaVinci, and although it was hard to replace Photoshop at first, I eventually got over it by using free alternatives like Photopea.
Every now and then, I check in on Adobe Premiere through colleagues who still use it, as well as online reviews. Unfortunately, even channels focused on Adobe are flooded with complaints. I haven’t seen a single feature in Premiere that makes it worth the risk of constant project crashes and being able to professionally color grade on the same project without back and forth was a deal braker.
Generative Fill seems to be the only feature keeping Adobe relevant at this point, even though there are many alternatives out there. The dark side of Adobe, as discussed in this video and many others, makes me wish the company would continue to decline, paving the way for better, more reliable software to rise.
It’s sad to wish Adobe a rough ending, but it feels well deserved. I’m saying this with tears in my eyes, but it’s the truth.
14:15. You hit the problem on the head: “Shareholders”. When a company goes public, their only responsibility is in increasing the stock price. Everything else goes by the wayside.
I was using university softwares until this month and its just run out. Was getting stressed over the pricing and limitations of Adobe. This video came at the perfect time.
Open source or sail the seven seas
Who remembers the time when Adobe's flash player was almost the only flash player and everyone was forced to use it on some websites to make them work?
Yeah! and I could never figure out how to get it to work (I was a kid, but still)
I'm puzzled by your post. That's a weird thing to say? Flash is the name of the authoring / player / file format. It was a proprietary ecosystem. What you just said is a bit like "do you remember when Ford made Ford cars?" Did you actually use a third party Flash player? Or are you using the word "Flash" when you mean animation?
But anyhow, in the olden days there were a couple of other formats, Shockwave and... another from Director I forget the name of. Macromedia ended up owning all three formats and underinvested in things other than Flash, then Adobe bought Macromedia and underinvested in Flash.
Edit - the two other formats I'm thinking of are both types of Shockwave .swf and .dcr. Apparently. There is very little info online about what the difference is, but I used to make .dcr files from Director 4 using a stand alone program I found on a cover disc. They were slightly different to swf files and slightly less universally usable. Of course, they're all dead formats now 😢
I even remember when Adobe bought Macromedia the true creator of Flash. Such a slap in the face for the art community!
It was actually Macromedia Flash Player originally and there were no alternatives. Flash made it possible to do stuff on websites that were otherwise impossible. That's why it became so popular and somewhat of a standard. People started to build whole websites in Flash as the possibilities were endless. When mobile internet became popular it turned out that these Flash applications were not very energy efficient. This was partly the reason why Apple decided to block Flash on iPhone, leading to the end of Flash all together.
Thanks Steve Jobs and the iPhone with nailing Flash’s coffin shut. Adobe bought out Macromedia cause of their competition. Macromedia was a way better company with cooler programs.
I always hated the payment model. But I had no alternatives for a very long time. But now... its time to rethink it.
Clip studio is basically photoshop but its a one time purchase. Best decision I ever made. Fuck Adobe.
Lots of alternatives out there for their various products - Clip Studio Pro, Affinity Suite, Krita, Procreate, GIMP, Blender (3D modelling), Photomator (replaces Lightroom) - all of which are either one-time purchases or completely free.
Overthink or rethink?
@@XxTesla21xXProbably both, let's be real
But ClipStudio Paint. You can buy a lifetime license for $50, it doesn’t crash nearly as often. I’ve had it for 3 years and it only crashed twice. It auto-saves your work even if it DOES crash. Much MUCH higher quality artwork, tools, just overall software. But there IS a downside. Whenever there’s a new version that comes out, you have to purchase the new version if you want the newer features. The upDATES are FREE but the upGRADES are NOT. I’ve never upgraded my version bc I felt no need to but idk if it’s the full price or a discounted one.
Adobe has done exactly what Google does to stay on top. Buy out anything that conflicts with their plans of world domination. I can remember a time when Adobe software was a free attachment to some computer hardware (digital capture cards). You would get Adobe Premiere and Photoshop on disc with licences. All happening from the mid 90's and was pulled up somewhere in the 2000's. What's stumped me now is because the income on TH-cam is so low now that yearly Adobe subscription fee really hurts. My channels now runs at a massive loss to make Google look good. It's been amazing to see my partner turn into the enemy in my business.
Hey @leokvideo that's so interesting! I look at your channel and looks huge but you say even Google now are costing you too much? Or just Adobe? I guess Google don't care about where the views are going, so long as it's somewhere! Tough business content production, good luck with your work.
interestingly, in my country, Corel had cornered the market, creatively speaking. but When I was in highschool, Adobe started paying schools off to swap all their classes from the Corel Suites to Adobe products. One of my teachers was mortified that they saw entire school boards taking money from big companies to change their entire curriculum to promote those softwares, and remove alternatives entirely.
I, as a young person, felt like it was really exciting, because I grew up using Photoshop, so I was at a significant advantage over my classmates. I didn't really understand how messed up it was that we couldn't use other softwares in our classes. As an adult I understand the context of the past better, and I have been spurned by Adobe, and seen friends spurned by them as well. I have completely replaced Adobe in my day to day life.
OMG, the stories about the fight over licensing within organizations I've been privy to... I was at a publisher who stayed with old, limited crashing versions of Corel for a I think nearly a decade because the nonprofit couldn't shell out for the cost of the Adobe Suite.
A few years later in the 2010s I came across a Uni that used this kind of weird wonky very-early virtual machine and remote desktop setup with a really old version of InDesign to teach their page layout and design class. It was both incredibly janky and a complete marvel at the obvious licensing loophole they were utilizing in order to keep things kinda-sorta on the rails.
Adobe's been making life hell for a long long time. It's the drug dealer model, and don't think for a second those old pirated product keys and cracks were not part of their strategy. I have it on very very good authority that it was part of the plan.
We had this issue as engineering Students. The university got sweet deals on high end software... We all moved into industry with only experience in those products and not the cheaper alternatives. The cheaper alternatives are often harder to use, if only we'd had an introduction to them in some kind of environment designed to grow your understanding of things...
In my opinion the school boards involved should be dragged in front of a court and tried for corruption.
@@RoberttheWise I don't really think it is corruption at the school boards level, to be fair. Schools need funding and software, and it was an understandable deal "we give you software, and money, as long as our competitor stays out of the classroom" it IS corrupt on Adobe's part though. Apple does it too. And it isn't just my region that was affected.
I hear you but a lot of companies do that like Autodesk and Toonboom.
Toonboom specifically has a very similar marketing scheme in the US and Canada which ironically is outing Adobe (Animate) out of schools and colleges.
Thank you for making this video, Jazza. I had a professor tell me “It’s industry standard” and “you have to use it” which disgusted me because, although it might be an industry standard, other programs like procreate can be used to accomplish the same assignment without having to pay an outrageous subscription.
if you want to be an independent illustrator then programs doesn't really matter imo , but if you want to work in a studio then yes , sadly you have to get what programs they have and learn them, as it is the common requirement- and still photoshop and other adobe programs are still a requirement in studios.
It's about interoperability, that's why it's an industry standard (still). If you don't need to work with other people you can draw in Microsoft paint if you want
I agree with you! Even there are weak minded corporate butt-kissing saps out there who would make lame excuses for this "it's industry standard" bullshit line such as these two guys who responded to you!
It is industry standard and you do have to use it if you expect to work in a studio or for a large company.
It's so annoying.
Not long after they went subscription, I remember a controversy from my art school, when Adobe suddenly revoked our licenses with no warning, even though students/alumni were supposed to be able to keep their perpetual license of the version (CS6) as part of our costly tuition, especially affecting recent grads doing work with it. A bait and switch, meant to force us into their subscription. Despised them ever since.
That is between you and the school, Adobe has nothing to do with that.
@@Tugela60 No - even among other comments here, you will find Adobe makes deals with schools like my own, to "teach" (or rather, sell) their products to future creatives.
My school still has the webpage up to address that controversy, and it states "Adobe entered into an agreement" with my school, Academy of Art. A student also complained to Adobe's website troubleshoot page, and got a response acknowledging their partnership to our school (I can still see this complaint on their site).
Some students had taken legal action at the time. After some legal digging, it was revealed my school and Adobe knew about the cancellation but were intentionally not transparent with students about it.
To "make up for it" though, they extended the license another year.
@@Tugela60 No, this IS on Adobe.
A perpetual license means 'forever.' Those alumni/students should have been able to keep using CS6 as long as their hardware could run the apps. Revoking the licenses, warning or not, was breaching the perpetual license agreement.
I have a perpetual license to Affinity V1. As long as I have a system that can run it, I'm free to use the V1 apps forever.
@@BeckyAnn6879 Educational licenses apply only if you qualiify for them, meaning that when you leave the institution, you have to upgrade to a full copy.
@@Tugela60 Did you even READ the comment? Adobe gave perpetual licenses as part to their tuition, then revoked them with no warning.
Even saying, 'Hey, please upgrade now that you have graduated.' would have been better than, 'Oops, your copy is invalid now. Too Bad so sad.'
I started my professional career in graphic design after leaving college in 1977. I worked in the heart of Britain's advertising industry in Covent Garden garden. Other than photosetting everything was analogue from visuals to finished artwork. I worked alongside some brilliant designers, art directors, photographers, air brush illustrators and retouchers. By the 1980s I had gone freelance and in 1988 I bought my first Mac which saved me a lot of time and money on typesetting. I used Aldus Freehand and PageMaker. Fast forward a few years and those programmes and Photoshop had put half the Advertising industry out of business. Thousands of talented creative people were thrown on the scrap heap. Many that remained were rebadged as 'technical operatives' and doomed to a life of low salaries and self esteem. And now here we are in 2024 where you will own nothing and apparently be happy according to the WEF. Adobe have certainly embraced that mantra.
Good thing I use Krita, CSP, and GIMP for my art.
Same
Krita is probably your best bet at this point.
They open scource policy births a lot of cool and creative plugins and assets.
Same for me, and I'm glad! What used to be frugality has become principle.
The Affinity Suite is also a pretty good hobbyist choice. Not free but a really solid replacement for InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop and they integrate really well with one another.
Krita ! Illustrator here and really...imo adobe isn't really good for illustration, never really understood while out of every options (for digital painting) you would choose toshop.
I was already a published author in the field and was invited to be an official beta-tester for Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, and other apps. I started sending suggestions about things that I felt could be improved (feature requests). One of the bosses there asked me to stop doing that, because I was creating "noise" in the bug report/feature request system.
Maybe your ideas were terrible and they wanted you to stop. Not everyone has brilliant feedback.
@@dddon513 I mean if they were bad ideas then why call it 'noise' than a good reason or just atleast one that suggested it.
@@Jupiter-ry6ll in engineering we typically use "signal to noise" as an analogy for useful to useless information. (It comes from audio quality: if you amplify a signal, you make it louder, but you still won't hear it if the signal is in the noise). Calling them noise is calling them bad ideas, just a bit more politely.
@@JohnDoe-420 he wasn't being polite you are very naive he was telling him without telling him that the "feature request" part was unwanted and all they wanted is users debugging the software for free it's 100% that I know in meetings they say "please give us feedback and ideas to improve things" but it's a lie not only it's their job to think those improvements but they are never allowing a good one implemented unless they can make it look like it came from them because again it's their job and they aren't doing it
@@fredEVOIX THIS! my husband works for a large software company and they want beta testers de-bugging, make less work NOT more! The only feature requests they want are for the developers' own pet features that were cut to be brought back.
Because here's what happens: An executive gets in their head that "A" is the best thing going, BUT they laid off half the programmers a few months ago/drove them off with sh!tty work conditions/ have had a hiring freeze for years. So, they're down about 25% of the workforce needed to keep up with the industry in general and "A" really needs an extra 25% increase to change the actual code as much as the executive wants to do to the product.
Thus, the 75% workforce is asked to give 125%, on top of their already stretched system, and then someone finds a major bug or a country decides to declare war/change policy/ target your industry and wrecks havoc on part of your org. Usually a security bug or an entire step in the development team so you can't just work around it.
And now that beta release that was supposed to go to the folks who agreed to test it in 3 weeks is getting renamed/ reworked/ "fixed" from the ground up and if you're lucky they'll even let you delay it for a whole week! But that means that all those little bugs that would have been worked out of the system don't get caught. SO, knowingly broken stuff gets sent to beta testers to find any other bugs while the people putting the magic smoke in the box try to recover from the 150% they've been at for the last month and get caught up on what was broken when it went out the door.
So yeah, when one of those beta testers has the GALL to suggest that they really want to be able to do this and that, and "why can't they just click like this?" ~managers~ see it. Then Marketing gets the C suite to decide to meddle and ask for "B" because that's what they really meant when they said "A".
So then programmers have to try to adjust "A" to really be "B" AND THEN when paying customers start getting any of it, THEY want "A" or even version 1.0 back, because that's what THEY were used to and don't want to spend down time trying to train their employees up to speed and "how dare you change it to fix a security flaw!" or not let them put your stuff in a package they sell themselves or what happened to this one little feature? that they used all the time but no one else ever did and it was taken out to allow this other feature that everyone kept requesting.....
THAT'S why beta testers asking for features are nothing but noise. Programmers need real bugs found to fix them, and unless you are a corporate customer PAYING for support and 1000s of licences, a company can't afford to hire the number of people needed to implement random "feature requests" and keep them from breaking everything else while still paying -it's -CEO $50 M- shareholders what they demand.
I really think a lot of why I stuck with Adobe for so long is because it was hard to readjust my workflow and pipeline to learn new software. but between a month subscription being the cost of a yearly sub to another program, not having a pure purchase option, all the Ai stuff, and training on users data without our consent. switching programs became the easiest decision of my life and I wish I'd done it years ago.
This is true for a LOT of former Adobe users. May I ask which programs you switched to?
@@jamesdominguez7685 I tried out Krita and that’s really great, but I ended up going with clip studio paint because I’m primarily a 3D artist and the ability to load my models into a scene for quick concept sketches is super helpful. But my adobe gripes also applies to other programs like Zbrush, once my favorite programs and my main recommendation due to the “lifetime upgrades” which stopped when they got bought out and are now a subscription only, now I recommend new users learn blender instead, same issue with Maya and substance tbh.
@@jamesdominguez7685 yeah sorry for the late response I’ve been using Krita and Clip Studio paint, krita was a great free option but CSP has great tools for comics and importing 3D models (I’m a 3D artist first) so it really works great for helping me sketch out concepts
Yeah, that's kind of what they count on. They know they've been the only player in the game for so long that everybody is _used to_ their software, and that learning a new program takes a lot of time and effort, and when you're a professional that time and effort is slowing down your work rate and costing you money, so if even switching to a "free" program is going to cost you, why not just stay with the devil you know?
@@jamesdominguez7685 I'm finding that affinity is so easy to adjust to it's been easier than my last CS update was. Partly because it's more intuitive where it's different, and partly because it's not that different anyway. And it's far better for my purposes than CS5. Publisher rocks. The way it handles linked files is fast and also fantastic- no more of those destructive adjustments where you had to jump between ID and PS all the time to do anything. I downloaded the 6 month trial yesterday and I'm already fully up to speed with Publisher after just about 3 hours, and for me it will be massively faster in use than CS5 ID. Photo looks like it will be an easy transition too.
I have been using the CS6 Master Collection daily for over 10 years now and will continue to for as long as possible.
And it didn't cost me a dime...
Davinci is like a warm hug from your grand mother :) Dependable, reliable and asks for nothing in return :) After being bent over one last time when I parted ways with Adobe I've never looked back. Thank you Davinci Tiamo!!
I love how adobe gave you an ad right after you started to talk about them going from purchase to a subscription
just happened to me right now,
posted a link of this video on facebook & got an adobe ad
I'm also getting their ads on this vid 😂
Same 😂
same here😅
Me too
I had used the CS for nearly two decades and was always very pleased with it. only recently my old mac gave out and since then, I've been stranded. I refuse to pay for a subscription to something you should be able to own! glad to hear there's alternatives available!
This is a slight diversion from the topic, but I REALLY liked the presentation of this video, it was perfect to watch while having lunch. I would love a deep dives with jazza series!
Same!
Off Topic: What did you have for lunch?
My husband cooked and I watched this while eating, it was a nice experience!
I work in a factory, but the way you talked about Adobe not listening to customers is the way I feel about communication with the corporate office of the company I work for. There's 4 HUGE issues on why it's more difficult for us to fill our orders. Their answer isn't to fix those problems, but to require exhausted and frustrated people to work overtime.
This is the 2nd video in the last couple of weeks about ridiculous terms and conditions of big companies. The other one is a Film Theory video.
Except you aren't getting paid by Adobe, you are paying them
@@jal051 Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Creatives need to stand up for their rights to keep and own their work. It’s why I do not put my images on social media without extreme careful consideration. This video is an excellent story of how many of us were seduced by and then abused by Adobe. Thank you for making this comprehensive and informative video. A must-watch for anyone creating or using digital media. We have options! Let’s use and support them!
I have been busy and stopped watching you for two years or so. I'm really happy to see that I still perfectly resonate with you. I feel so at home watching your videos
A dedicated video about viable photoshop alternatives would be great. Because I think this is what most longterm professionals like u and me struggle with the most. Otherwise great dive into this important industry topic! ❤
The Affinity Suite which includes:
Affinity Photo
Affinity Designer
Affinity Publisher
You pay once for each full version (has been about 7 years before upgrade) and you’re not paying ridiculous prices.
Krita and Clip Studio Paint are good alternatives to Photoshop. Affordable and in some ways better for digital painting. Haven't missed Photoshop at all.
Affinity Designer / Photo are good replacements for PS and AI
I echo Yoda. Krita as a free alternative that covers most things for free, and clip that has a one time buy option are great.
I've been using krita for years.
When companies get big enough, they stop being about what they make and start being about how much they make.
Public trading is always a race to the bottom. It doesn't matter what your company does, the shareholders only care about the dollar.
@Tubeytime And it should have been the other way, if you start thinking about it.
With the SAAS model, they don't need to make anything, just take, take and take.
You know, my mom worked for Tom Knoll (one of the knoll brothers who invented photoshop) when I was a kid as a housekeeper. My mom would bring me along and I had free reign to explore their sprawling, lovely home and grounds. He was a quiet, kind humble, and generous. The home my mom lives in to this day is paid off thanks to him and his former wife. Its wild that his product is owned by a monster of a company.
I am an design student from Germany and switchedto affinity and davinci. Best decision I’ve made. I paid 1090€ from 2019 - early 2023.
There is a bit of a learning curve but I swear it’s almost exactly the same. There are few things missing, but you can work your way around there.
Fuck adobe.
When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud and its subscription service I was just getting started with Photoshop.
I instantly understood Adobe's motivations behind that move and refused to get sucked in and be taken hostage.
I reverted to pen and paper and kept everything off the Cloud.
This certainly changed what could have been...
im a young artist and i just simply refuse to ever use adobe, ive used it once because it came free with my school, and it was the most MISERABLE drawing process ive ever experienced
What do you use instead and enjoy to use?
Same, we have Adobe, Autodesk, Construct 3 and maybe Microsoft 365? ☹️ I'm using free alternatives instead and it feels more future proof even if they sren't industry standards. Is this a good idea?
@@ujocdod My school provides Microsoft 365 and Canva subscriptions. Microsoft isn't all that bad from a I need to use it for school and if I operate outside this system problems arise point of view. Some things need to be submitted via teams, teachers post on teams, Google Slides doesn't work with the projector clicker so just powerpoint, and word of course has to be used to easily submit something. Having a Canva subscription is pretty useful.
Personally I get Adobe for super cheap through university & Photoshop is my favourite out of all the digital art programs I've tried, but I'm definitely switching once I stop getting it cheap lol
Same
As a retired advertising and editorial photographer, I reluctantly admit that I’m glad Adobe no longer has the grips on my fellow creatives. The switch from buying Photoshop licenses to paying for the seat subscriptions was very frustrating and certainly not cost-effective for a growing studio. All the key points to your analysis of Adobes “grasp“ on creatives is 100% true. I was ashamed for some of my fellow creatives who were so impressed with themselves when they were “sponsored“ by Adobe yet were paid or no money or even free software other than beta. I believe Adobe‘s fall from grace has not yet completed and as much as I don’t will failure on anyone, I am watching with a gleam of interest in my eye as Adobe is forced to make these changes. Thank you for the video.
I've been using Photoshop since I was in middle school, thanks to an uncle with access to the software. It's really a shame that they're letting greed destroy themselves. Tech companies love becoming the industry standard and then nuking their reputation because they know everyone is too dependent to leave. I'm hoping the companies who are reliant on Adobe are able to slowly switch to the alternatives.
Lastly, I love these style videos and hearing your opinions!
It's really hard to stop using adobe altogether as a professional. But I believe that nowadays there are many more options out there than in the past. All we can do is gradually move toward other viable software's and stop being so dependent of one corporation bundle. That's my personal plan for the next few years. Learning a new software takes time and effort but it will pay off I hope.
One point in Affinity Photo's favour is that it can import and export Photoshop files, so you won't have to go through the agonising process of converting your previous work to a new format. Affinity Designer does the same with Illustrator files.
it's not hard, it's just doing it. Most professionals are freelancers, and are free to use what they please, as the creating party. (the result is what counts, not the tools used)
To be clear, when they say that "Our video model is designed to be commercially safe and it's only trained on public domain or licensed content" - the licensed content part is your work that you previously had to agree to give them license to. This is not a "we are doing everything right this time" statement, this is stating that they used your "licensed" content to train the ai. They said in plain language, if you use their product, they have license to use what you made to make the software better. AI is the software they made better using your art that they have a "license" to, that you gave them when you clicked "agree"
So true! Hank Green has a great video explaining how when Google says Gemini is only training on content with licensing agreements, they mean literally all of TH-cam’s user generated content.
@@pegmama8 Yeah, the 'pile' that was scraped, without permission, then licenced to these companies by someone who had no right to do so.
This is very important. No public statement means anything unless there are clear and concise changes to reflect that in the ToS/Licensing agreement. If they need to specify generative AI or machine learning, the type they use, and the content they use it on, means there are exceptions and those exceptions exist for a reason.
Anything short of a legally-binding commitment to by default opting out users from their data being harvested and not changing that for the duration of their license is unacceptable.
Pin this
well said 💯🤙
As an Adobe user of over 25 years, I am glad that I was always suspicious of and never used their Adobe Cloud for files.
Ironic that I got an Adobe advert before this video XD
I JUST DID TOOO LMAOOOO!!! 😭😭 BEFORE THE AI TALK PART!! O.o
😅
Me too 😂
I did too
me be too
I am a proud Affinity user. Designer and Publisher helped me get my tabletop wargame book out to the public and it was a one time purchase!
I knew Adobe was bad, but I hadn't realized how bad they had gotten. I know the licensing has caused such problems at work that at one point it had taken up almost full-time of one person for several months just to untangle the problems, create a new tracking program to track these folks and what they were licensed for, and then administrator all of this (which then impacted all the other work he was supposed to be doing, but this had to come first). Rather than just tracking the software bought, which already had a system of tracking. It was crazy.
😂 this comment is hilarious because I’m sure it’s 100% true. The same thing is happening at my studio. Our tech group has a guy who manages the enterprise software & partnerships. I heard recently they asked for a headcount to hire a direct report to manage all the licenses for Adobe & similar products
Switch to Affinity equivalents of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. with a one-time payment that is VERY reasonable. Sometimes I get a quick project done in the time it takes Adobe’s software load fully. Love it!!
From someone who was taught through college and uni to use adobe and not being able to afford it I stumbled across affinity and never looked back a one off fee and its a great software to use :) no affiliation haha :)
This is the era of Adobe's downfall. With the recent statements from Procreate's CEO shitting on AI images, pricing changes from Clip Studio and free options popping up every other week, there's quite literally no way adobe can weasel their way out of this one
Unfortunately all their big corporate and enterprise clients will likely keep them in business a long time. Acrobat Pro is yet another example. This is why companies like Adobe and Microsoft love being "the standard". Not based on the merits of their proposed "standards", but by eliminating competition by any means necessary so that they become the defacto "standard" via limited choices/options and similar. I could go on and on but I gotta hop down from the soapbox sometime lol.
@@c.g.vonhagenstein7576 corporate and enterprise clients, and their extremely lucrative years-long contracts with universities and other educational institutions.... it's like indentured servitude
@@c.g.vonhagenstein7576that and it’s been the industry standard for so long that current professional artists (outside of those Jazza mentioned) will continue to use it. I had to buy Adobe for an art class because “it’s what professionals use and you need to know how to use it in the future”. It’s got a stranglehold on the market for that.
Clip Studio going into that pseudo-subscription model isn't a good thing.
You introduced me to bothe resolve and krita and I havent looked back since. These free programns really are professional grade and are perfect avenues for aspiring and professional artists alike.
Probably worth mentioning that Resolve is free for most users, but to get access to a handful of professional-grade features to need to pay. That said, the purchase price for a small business is minimal compared to a year of Adobe. I think it was something like US$150-200 or so?
@jamesdominguez7685 even then, most hobbyist editors will NEVER need more than the free suite from my personal experience which is still amazing. Not to mention I'd pay $200 any day for a good product I get to own perpetually over a comparable and arguably more flawed product that is only accessible via a predatory subscription model.
Blackmagic is easily my favorite creative company. I just wish they made a photoshop competitor and/or buy something like the Calavry app and add them to DaVinci for easy 2d motion graphic creation. I would sh*t myself
So... I just started researching art programs to try learning how to make 2d animations, decided to avoid Adobe like the plague for their absurd pricing and my very low budget... and now you post this awesome video that also provides a list with more programs I could check?
You are AWESOME! Thank you!
A loophole I remember hearing about for avoiding the cancellation fees is to switch your plan to the smallest plan available and then cancel. Since you switched it counts as a new subscription and you should be within their cancellation window to just leave with no or little fees.
Alternatively they get fined an obscene amount for pulling that crap in the first place. That kind of thing is illegal in the EU.
@TalesOfWar What is illegal about it? You bought a years subscription at a discount and paid it in monthly installments. That was always clear. The purpose was to make payment more manageable for users. There was a proper monthly subscription option available as well, but it cost more.
@@Tugela60 I pay 30 bucks monthly for creative cloud. If I wanted to cancel my subscription, I would have to pay 30 more dollars to do it. Now, I have another subscription to Spotify. Do you know what they do when you cancel a sub with them? They give you the rest of the time you paid for then stop charging when the time is up. Why the fuck should adobe be able to force users to cough up more money to stop paying for their services?
@@Tugela60 It's called dark patterns and coercive marketing. This kind of thing has been getting a lot of scrutinty from regulators in recent years. Even the US as is mentioned in this video are taking Adobe to task on it, and we all know the US and user rights tend to be and oxymoron.
@@TalesOfWar It was perfectly clear and spelled out right from the start of the subscription model.
The issue is that people just clicked on the lower number without reading the details, and now are crying. It has ALLWAYS been an annual subscription payable monthly, or a monthly subscription.
How times change yet, I still find myself watching alot of your old flash content on Newgrounds like it was just yesterday. I feel though while flash is dead the worlds that artists like yourself have created with it shall always remain forever within memory
RIP Larry of Karryon and thank you Jazza for everything you have given the world with it.
I am very old, so many of my formative internet memories were delivered via Flash: Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Salad Fingers, Threebrain, RatherGood, etc.
Flash was basically crap when it came out and went down hill from release 1.
You have absolutely nailed this video. You've touched on so many points that I've felt for a while but couldn't word properly.
I'm in my first semester of a Graphic Design major where Adobe is ALL we can use. This makes sense as it's industry standard, but even if I could afford it after graduating... I would not want to give my money to them. I hope to find the time to begin experimenting with other options while in college :)
Diversify your skills no matter what industry. Adobe isn't the only tool used by these industries. Note also that the studios do custom software or plug-ins. When you read the credits on "The Wild Robot" or "The Matrix", you'll see many reasons to explore other skills. Interviews of creators or the studios mention how each job meant other processes, other software, etc to learn. Wish I'd known this digital world when i was studying. Back when I helped publish a small newsletter, our cut and paste was really glue/paste and Xacto knife. High tech was using scanners. 😂😊
Affinity offer a fantastic alternative to adobe, I needed indesign for a new project 12 months ago, couldn’t stomach the costs so I tried Affinity, it took two days of seriously steep learning curve to get my head around it, but so happy with the switch now. And it’s really affordable one off payment.
As a longtime Adobe user, I found picking up Affinity Designer very intuitive and simple for the most part. If you want to have an edge, practice doing some of your projects in Affinity or another software as you go along, so you'll be as good at using that software as you are with Adobe products when you graduate.
I've used krita from the start of my digital drawing because I couldn't afford adobe. Best case of blessed limitations ever!
Same since I’m never going professional and use it as a part time hobby I never saw the reason to pay so much for a program I’d not use on a daily basis OR even profit from. So I went krita and tested csp and I love them both ❤. I love how easily you can trade brushes in csp
I was one of those people who got 'the screen' and didn't know what to do because I kinda got a weird feeling. But I got to cancel, luckily, and am happily free from Adobe for some time now. I'm so glad Jazza did this piece and always stays true to himself! I also recommend DaVinci by the way.
Thank you for coming forward. This video is great information for every starting content creator.
Keep the video essays coming!! Love this.
I went through the pain of dropping them, for me the worst part was needing to download 2 different bits of software to fully remove every thing it installs including several programs that do not show up in your programs lists.
I tried deleting creative -suite- _cloud_ from one of our work pc’s due to not having an extra license and to uninstall their programs from OUR pc’s we had to UPDATE all of their programs, log out on another system, log in on the mostly unstable PC and then delete the programs while being heavily pushed to keep it installed. So I removed the program files instead! It took longer, but I’m very spiteful when angry!
Can't a license holder disconnect a device from the license remotely?
It's important to be able to read legal stuff correctly. When they asserted that they only used public domain and licensed data to train their AI? They were not saying that they did not use user data that was from customers who had accepted their agreement and then unsubscribed. They were saying that they did use that data. When you clicked "accept", you gave them a license, and they used it.
The only way to avoid that would have been to not click 'accept'. The application doesn't let you quit without clicking accept? Force quit. If that won't work, reboot the computer. If it won't let you do that, power it off.
For the people who clicked accept and are now suing them, I wish you luck.
I would like to think at some point we could get a law passed that required companies to let us recover our data after we discontinue using their software. However, making that difficult was one of the "benefits" to the shareholders for moving into the cloud. Removing that benefit from them is not going to be easy. Personally, I don't go into the cloud if I can avoid it. If I have to go there, I make a local backup of everything.
Got an Adobe gen ai add. The irony.
Got acrobat😂
same lol
Illustrator add for me :D
Hell yeah, Adobe is paying Jazza for this content!
Anytime I get an ai add I pause it, exit full screen mode, block it, and refresh the page. Don’t give them a single metric.
Man Jazza this is such a flashback, I remember discovering your channel at 2016 back when I was learning how to animate, since all my school ever uses is the adobe suite yuck. I dove all into your tutorials back then to help me pass the class which I thankful for at the time and still am. You got me way more out of many jams with your adobe tutorials in your tutorial era then any other TH-camrs at the time. Since there weren't many tutorials to watch for animation back then. at least for me. Thanks Jazza for being such a great relaiaable source at that time for me. Now I've been using clip studio paint for a long time now and recently learning procreate on my iPad for my alternative as well as opentoonz.
Sadly, I'm still trapped using Adobe Animate. I know I should switch to Toon Boom, but while I'm stuck on the treadmill of making TH-cam Shorts, its hard to find any spare time to learn a new program. Especially one as complex as Toon Boom. 😭😭
make reaction videos to you learning toon boom 😅
I have had to learn toon boom for projects that I worked on, and I came from TVPaint. I learned the basics surprisingly fast. The basics of animations are the same regardless of the program. I highly recommend trying it out!
This is basically the only thing keeping Adobe profitable: many artists and businesses simply can't afford the time and effort required to learn new programs, update their workflows, etc. Apart from the rusted-on Adobe fanboys, everyone I've talked to about it who is sticking with Adobe for the time being only did so because of the effort of changing over. Some day soon, a competitor will find a way to smooth out the transition, and that's when Adobe will start to really haemorrhage customers.
look into Reallusion's Cartoon Animator
Has you tried Clip Studio Paint?
Heads up, if you want to cancel your adobe subscription but you're not finished the 12 months, you can change your plan to a cheaper one, you get refunded the difference for the month, and then because you've started a new plan you have the 14 day (I believe) cancellation window where you can cancel without a fee. This worked for me about a year or so ago, I don't know if they've fixed it or if I've forgotten parts of the process, but that's what I did.
I did this, too about a year ago when they rolled out Firefly AI. Somebody on Reddit suggested it; I had a year subscription just to Photoshop, and iirc, I upgraded to all apps, then canceled. They've probably patched that loophole by now, but I hope a lot of people used it while they could!
They’ve stopped it🥲
Good to know - I'm about to cancel my subscription once I've finished my current project (fortunately I should get it down before the up the price) but I'm just so pissed they're upping the price before my 12 months is over
6:14 A common misconception. You never owned the software, you only bought a license to use it.
It's crazy how everything's come full circle
I watched Jazza religiously when I started learning photoshop, and flash/animate, and now I'm watching the downfall of Adobe from Jazza after abandoning photoshop a couple years ago when I switched to Clip Studio Paint.
So glad I got CS5 when I did. Still using it today. Never switching to a subscription model.
СS5 from the year 2015? I've got it too
I'm even older, I'm still using my CS4, and I'm NEVER going to pay for a subscription! 😊
CS5 is from 2010, the year I have started my webdev business.
@@gbartosz83 , oh, I could misremember the year...
@@sallyedwards2911 Luckily, PS has innovated at the pace of the proverbial "asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping", so you're not missing much. Even the interface still has woefully little customisation and stupid "they've never tried to actually use this, have they?" shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N for "new layer" (A keyboard shortcut that needs two hands?)
Very fitting that TH-cam shows the Adobe AI advertisement during the video… right when you start talking about it…. Smart…vile…evil… welp..
TH-cams ads always tone deaf 😅 I got 2 Adobe ads on this, I got betterhelp ads on vids describing their shadiness, and I watch a load of failed mmo (where did it go wrong) vids that puts the same games in the ads.
@@CaityRaindrop every publicity is good publicity mindset… silly marketing imho
As a graphic designer and video production editor, I stopped using adobe products when adobe switched to their subscription service model. I wasn't about to pay a recurring subscription fee just to use their software. I switched to alternative software apps when I found them. I am glad I missed that AI EULA change and having to pay a cancellation fee.
Once I found other software apps and I never looked back to any adobe product.
Jazza I’m so proud of you breaking your nail biting habit!! First time I’ve seen white on your nails!!! Good job 👏
Love ya Jazza, I've been watching you for years from my mid-teens to adulthood. Thank you for still being the honest, smart, down to earth and open guy you've always shown yourself to be.
I can't thank you enough for creating and inspiring.
Imagine if the only way to get a toaster was to rent it, and it came with terms stipulating that you could only toast regular white bread. Forget about toasting bagels or lighting cigarettes-you would need a separate license for those!
Great analogy
It's not just Adobe that has adopted the business model of the stockholder as customer, and the end user as hostage, and naturally the Subscription model so you own nothing and pay every month forever. After all, who doesn't like recurring revenue. And monetizing your data is just part of the predatory business model.
What I really hate is how Adobe gives free trials to schools, not to mention Apple gives free pcs aswell. Like, it's clearly marketing and getting people used to THEIR products.
Yeah, I’m in my senior year of art school and I’m scrambling to find alternatives
Autodesk does the same whily lying about Blender.
@@skitterly
Affinity Suite, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, davinci resolve, Hitman pro, and more but I forgot the names.
Remember when their trials used to last for 30 days and not 7?
I enjoy how you're dabbling into the video essay format! I'll be looking forward if you ever choose to dive into it! ❤
(And if not, it's still okay!)
Adobe is like the final boss after you unlock it as a playable character, once was really powerful, now it's literal crap.
Relax bud
@Jackisacoolperson This is true 😭
@@BP-el9zr "Relax bud"? You are annoying right out the gate, he made a fair analogy and your only response is some condescending b/s.
@@BP-el9zrwomp womp unc
Thank you! I am just a boring old hobby photographer. I have been struggling for months trying to decide if I take the plunge of paying for the rest of my life. I will find something else.
8:28 To this day I'm still using pirated versions of Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Animate from 2016, they're just what I know and what I'm used to
Except that…
*Any* variation of any pirated software is actually far worse than paying for it. That’s any variation of any: operating system, office software, or any other software out there.
There are volumes of Microsoft Certified people out there that make volumes of money, just because someone though they were getting a version of it at a reduced cost, or for free. They ended up paying, and it also cost them much more than if they would have bought the full version software.
@@ronaldckrausejr7762What are you even on about lmao
Another good video Jazza. (Resubscribed.) I'll never forgive Adobe's acquisition and destruction of Macromedia -- in doing this, they acquired Dreamweaver, Flash, and Authorware (which was my personal favorite for designing educational media) -- and gradually killed them all.
This for me marked the start of their downfall...
do not do many web sites now but used Dreamweaver for years. When it went subscription I continued and it is expensive and has had no updates, fixes or new features in 10 years but it is twice as expensive as my subscription to the Adobe Photographers bundle using Photoshop and Light room often. I can understand the lower cost of the Bundle but there is nothing else I want or needed from Adobe now. Every month they do seem to have updates. Watching this video just reminded me to cancel Dreamweaver.
I have used Davinci Resolve and it is great and free. My videos are not usually income producers but my still photography is producing income mostly doing actor portfolios, opera and ballet as a retirement business after 30 years as a recording studio owner, and engineer, back when records sold well. From 1971 until I moved out of the US, my 3 studio complex produced 197 gold and platinum albums
Agree..and they destroyed FreeHand and Fireworks…..I use Affinity and Resolve….they work fine on my old MacBook and cost very little..
JAZZA THIS IS THE EARLIEST I HAVE EVEN BEEN AND IVE BEEN WATHCING YOU SINCE SINCE I WAS LIKE 8… I’m now nearly 18 and such a massive fan of your work and I am growing a business myself
I love you so much and I will always support you! I’m from perth :)
I'm a retired graphic designer. I now volunteer my skills making album designs and concert posters for rising (and struggling) musicians. It's one of the ways I've found to help others (I'm also a handicap assistant part time), but I can't justify a monthly payment to Adobe for what has become hobby-level access to their tools.
So I resurrected and installed my 2009 MacBook Pro hard drive with my purchased Creative Suite on it by buying a still-functioning exact-same model 2009 MacBook Pro for $150! Maybe it doesn't have the latest bells and whistles Adobe has added along the way, but it works the way I remember... and it allows me to give my time and skills to local artists in need of marketing.
My biggest complaint is once you decide to pay for one of their products, you're tied in for a whole year, and get a very short window when that subscription is up for renewal to cancel, before being locked in to paying for another 12 months. And they make it very difficult to cancel this subscription.