I 100% agree with you. When I majored in Graphic design in 2021, Adobe Creative cloud was something I tried to stop payment immediately because I didnt want to pay an exorbitant amount. Adobe DOES not make it easy to cancel! It was so difficult. All I wanted to do was free up my bank account, and then the worst part was the cancellation fee! Why is Adobe so greedy? They already get almost $100 a month from customers anyways.
@@atrdigital5935 They are greedy as much as any other busuness after they've known for quite a while that the customer is proper hooked and is too deep in the habit of using the product (and too lazy/reluctant to switch : ).
It doesn't support Sony ARW currently. Atleast wha ti read. I've not tried it, but doesn't seem to be a way to try it without paying. I have Sony a7iv so need ARW support.
The algos are smart...its not by accident....more and more are popping up..... congrats Adobe...... your idiotic actions are creating a whole economy on EXITING you....
Well, it's not random, everyone is trying to get out of the adobe ecosystem, Brad, like other artists/youtubers are helping people to find their thing ^^
This is what we need more of, UA-camrs showing people that there ARE alternatives. Too many folks act like Adobe is the only option and that we all need to ask them nicely to treat us well. I've been using alternatives for a decade. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, with paid DaVinci audio and video solutions. Capture One is far superior to Lightroom (although they are following the Adobe business model now). Thanks for this, Brad. This is how we inspire change in the industry.
The biggest issue related to this topic is Acrobat. Everywhere you look, websites provide a link to Acrobat Reader, which is “required to open PDFs”. NO, it’s not the on,y application that can handle PDFs. Even your own browser can open and view PDFs. However, if you need an alternative to Acrobat Pro, there are tons of I personally refused to use it the entire time I paid for Creative Cloud because it’s always been buggy and slow. Nitro PDF and Foxit both have good “pro” options, but since PDF “pro” versions are ridiculously over priced anyway, try PDFSam. It’s basically a bundle of PDF manipulation tools bundled together, and you can do a lot more than the typical “reader” programs. Best of all, it’s free.
@@UncleMilty That's part of the problem too, yeah. It's one thing for Adobe to aim to monopolize the creative industry, but it's another thing when these same industries also INSISTED that Adobe HAVE to be the industry standard.
It's crap though. LOL I mean, way back in the day, Serif had a live trace feature in the program they had before Affinity Designer. It was super crap though. That's probably why it didn't make it into Affinity Designer. They don't know how to do it with any kind of quality. Illustrator's trace feature is very good.
The only thing remotely comparable to Illustrator is Coreldraw. Everything else on the list is there because they're telling people what they want to hear. That there's a cheap or free software that is a "replacement" for Illustrator. Or Photoshop. It's not realistic. Coreldraw is as close as you get, but it costs probably 50 cents more than Adobe per month.
@@toasteroven6761 I wasn't aware about Rive, but it doesn't look like a good comparison with AI. The cloud-based file storage is a non-starter for me - I was burned by Linearity Curve changing the license terms and holding the files hostage.
@@donowa5637 the latest official version of Audacity that does not implement telemetry is 3.0.2. Some Linux-based operating systems also ship Audacity with telemetry and networking features disabled by default.
Blender is awesome with 2D animation! Grease pencil is also vector based and beats animate 100-0 and it supports texture brushes. I have lots of tutorials on my channel ❤
Hey it's you. Yeah blender can do a lot of things including motion graphics because of geometry nodes and other features. I've done some of my commission for motion graphics in blender.
Sure, but doesn't it just give you the willies that Grease Pencil is drawn in an X-Z space instead of X-Y? I can't get my head around that. Blender was originally designed for architects (which is the only explanation for Z being the up axis.) When they brought in grease pencil (or ever further back when they brought in animation) they should have used a top-down view or switched to a Y-up axis to properly simulate 2D projection onto a screen or wall (I mean, who watches video projected onto the floor?). It's just too weird the way it is.
I'm a bit of a stuck record on this end, but as someone with a lot of ad agency and animation studio clients, Adobe has a strangle hold on the industry. There's just things you cannot do if you aren't in the ecosystem as your clients. If I was 100% independent I'd have jumped ship to Affinity, Procreate and Blender years ago. But because my bread and butter work is done in After Effects with art supplied as Illustrator files from client, I can't ditch Adobe any time soon. Especially with the array of plugins I've collected over time to make my work better and faster.
Don't worry, when your companies read the fine print and realize they're giving power and by extension money to Adobe the standards will shift. You think Disney or even half of these other big name publishers are gonna let Adobe essentially "by clause" steal all of their IPs and the work associated? Adobe shot themselves in the foot for waaay more than just the regular consumer base.
@@kofuku1660 Believe me, would if I could. Problem is I'm running a registered business, and local legislation around piracy is really steep. Gotta keep everything above board with two licences associated with the company.
@timmehjimmeh Well, hey, look at it this way. You may not be able to get out of it, but you can spread the word to others to not use thier software, it's perfectly fine to keep using what you need for your work, but that doesn't mean you have to like the company that made this. It's like the whole separate the art from the artist situation.
@@themysteriousspeeddemon I mean winge about Adobe every chance I get. So everyone knows how much I hate being trapped in their ecosystem! But there’s no avoiding them if you work at a professional level anytime soon. It’s salt in the wound with all their AI bullshit.
@@theinkyspoon Almost everything comes well set up after installation but you can change performance settings. The main reason it might feel laggy is a large brush size, you can change the default max size to about 1000px or less. It's not all of them but it can happen.
@@csmemarketingWould compiling from source make any difference? I don't know too much about compiling software on windows but I'm sure Krita has instructions to do so.
Inkscape DOES have a live trace feature! It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I often use it to trace JPEGs, then copy the SVG into Affinity Designer.
I will sing the good word of Da Vinci and Blackmagic Design forever because I love me some Da Vinci Resolve. The Fusion editor is kinda weird to figure out with the whole nodes thing but once you get it I think its pretty cool
@@benjaminjackson8663 That's TRUE. And we're BLESSED because Davinci Resolve have both FREE & paid LIFE TIME perpetual license. I've seen people bought Davinci Resolve version 15 for less than $300 four years ago. They've been updating it every year for FREE. Now, they're running version 19.
I heard you say “if” you were going to break away fully from Adobe. I hope you do. The more popular UA-camrs like you can break away from Adobe and really show alternatives and use them in your reviews, the more Adobe will have to take notice where they are failing as a company, and it will help to break their monopoly on some of these products.
As someone who has been using Photoshop for most of my professional work (more than ten years) which is art for mobile games I checked what would be alternative. So far the most capable replacement would be either Affinity Photo and Designer for more graphic design related work where you need tons of layers, vector stuff and text objects. However for digital painting those tools are not as good to me. Using brushes don't feel as smooth (worse than Photoshop). I don't like how color picker works. No right click menu for picking brushes and also I would prefer single hotkey + pen for rotating canvas. Hopefully they will improve that part but I understand both are not entirely digital painting programs. For strictly painting so far I was playing a lot with Krita and I actually like it. Some things are even better than in Photoshop and you can customize hotkeys to have almost zero friction transition from Photoshop. The only thing in Krita that is different is there is no dedicated tool for eraser but I learned to just have eraser brush in my right click menu and I jump to it very quickly. Also the layers work a bit differently. Instead of clipping layer I use all the time there is clipping group which is totally different to what is standard in most graphical programs. I wish Krita was a bit better in more graphic design and editing part because then it would be totally open source competitor to Photoshop. It totally left GIMP behind because you got adjustment layers and even Layer comp feature. However Layer styles are slow, vector tools not as developed and text tool at the moment is bad (though it should be better in new updates). Still I try to donate from time to time with hope it will catch up on those things some day. Clip Studio Paint I haven't tried yet. It is something I want to do at some point.
Krita's way of erasing is as an eraser mode, you toggle it on and off with the E key as any other art program, it makes it so your current selected brush acts as an eraser, with all the effects of the brush being applied (e.g. opacity), but on the opposite direction. In my opinion this is way better than a dedicated eraser tool as it gives you more control over the painting like say, erasing with a specific pattern of a brush, this makes all brushes work as both a normal and eraser brushes. Krita did recently add a new shortcut for a more traditional feeling "eraser tool", but you have to bind it yourself, just go into Keyboard Shortcuts and look for "Toggle Eraser Preset", its behavior is that by pressing it, it will switch you to one of the built-in eraser brushes, though it can also work as a "quick brush switch" as you can change which brush it toggles to. As for vectors, for simple stuff its good enough, but I just use Inkscape for more complex vector stuff to then import it into Krita as it imports Inkscape SVGs very well. Also look into the Settings > Dockers, you might be surprised with all the stuff Krita has hidden by default.
Clip studio paint is simply better than photoshop for digital art, i really recommend you try it out. They usually have these seasonal sales (can't remember when) but i bought it then and i was pretty cheap. good luck!
Long live Krita! It's 100% one of the best software out there and for sure the best for free. All kinds of tools and features, available on every platform except for iPad because it doesn't play well with OSS licenses. If also has good tools for vector illustration, animation and many people prefer it instead of GIMP, you might want to have an independent program for each use case but it's good that you have the option. Fun fact: it's the first (and maybe only) to feature live HDR painting for windows PCs. I can also vauch for Darktable, still only doing basic stuff with it but it works great, just need to be patient while learning. GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus have been updating recently, I'll be trying them soon. A program not "feeling snappy" is most subjective nitpicky thing lmao.
Inkscape has really come a far way and is now way better than it used to be similar to blender. I can't say the same for GIMP as it still feels clunky, hard to use and lacking in features and a modern layout. I really hope that is about to change though. Have never used Scribus so it might work great but the design looks similarly dated.
@@marenjones6665Wine can work well with some applications. Some are better than others. It's best to use Bottles to make containerized wine instances with settings specifically made for each program. Although I do hope Affinity eventually comes to Linux in some form like Flatpak.
Krita and Gimp not being as "Snappy" is almost for sure due to your using them on MacOS. The open source frameworks are not the most optimized for Mac. Both run the best on Linux imo.
GTK is well known for its severe performance issues on both Windows and Mac so yeah, GIMP suffers because of it on non-UNIX platforms. It is not unusable by any means but the lag is noticeable. But Krita uses Qt and is usually very fast in my experience regardless of the platform. In fact, I've ran it successfully on machines that had no business running such a powerful application and handling large resolution files so easily. It is bloody perfect. That said, it is not unusual to hear people citing it as "slow" particularly on Windows so perhaps its performance does vary a little based on the hardware it runs on?
Gimp was always quite quick on Pc with windows. Even older low end pcs, also ran well on with i7 devils canyon, also works well on modern beast with i9 too. Will run well on a cheap pc. As long a sits something absurdly old it should be fine.
@@csmemarketing Adobe Lightroom on the other hand is super slow, photoshop seems to be fine as long as I don't have Lightroom running eating 12 GB memory out of 64gb and slowing down pc so it's super slow. Memory usage increases, and it's very slow to load at times and switching between photos can be impossible have to rlav eit let it calm down for some minutes maybe half hour then it's responsive again. I've not tested other software with massive amount of edited photos. But with only one photo, Capture One is super fast. Rawtherapee too.
I see CapCut and Canva are missing from that list. Also, just a heads up-Photopea starts charging if you use certain tools more than once within two hours or 80 minutes.
Photopea is an excellent alternative for people making the migration away from Photoshop. It is one of the best in terms of maintaining continuity of layers, layer effects (like drop shadows), and even fonts! The reason for this is while it runs in your browser, it actually runs locally, eliminating a lot of slowdown if you are on slow or limited bandwidth. Also, because it runs locally, those odd fonts you used in that previous PSD file will be picked up and properly displayed in the browser app.
Warning about CapCut: the unsubscribe button on emails does not work, and they send a lot of emails. And voiceovers do not sync properly with the video
I got my first iPad last year, and downloaded procreate and it has quickly become my favorite tool for raster illustration and simple animation! In comparison, Photoshop on the iPad feels clunky and unintuitive. Having used Photoshop with a keyboard for over a decade, I feel the lack of hotkeys and features more than I feel empowered to make anything. The UI for Procreate feels tailor made for working on a tablet with a pen. Just the fact that I can liquify and adjust a group is mindblowing to me. My only gripes are with layer restrictions, and not being able to clipping mask over a group. I find myself being forced to manage my layer usage a lot because of that. I have a Wacom pen display at work, and I honestly prefer the iPad to that any day.
I actually never used Photoshop for drawing. I actually use Krita as an alternative to CSP. Inkscape doesn't feel very newbie-friendly... I find the UI a bit... confusing in terms of starting a new file.
I use Firealpaca for everything I do. It's not the best option, especially with the limited options to custom brushes. But if you're new/don't need many tools to begin with, and you want a free alternative, it's got damn near all the essentials, and probably the best thing out there in those regards.
This is very helpful, thank you. As a non-professional, and simply a hobbyist. It's dam near impossible to justify a subscription piece of software. To support an adobe model, you need it to generate a cash flow. Which is great for professionals. But it simply generates animosity from everyone else, and rightly so as Adobe shows little point in providing entry level services. These alternatives in one place is very valuable. Thank you
I must say it is really worth taking a look at blender, there is so much you can do with it, and it is extremely well built. I don't think anyone who uses blender professionally would claim knowing even half of the features. It has a distinct workflow, and in the past few releases the user interface has gotten a lot of attention from the development. You can really do film editing, 2d animation, drawing, and a whole lot more, and very well so. It does take some time to get into, especially to start out, but it really is an amazing tool.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The 3D modeller is said to be great, but the rest is meh to bad. Not my opinion, but what professionals say.
@@akyhne Video editing might be not good but for 2D animation and 3D modeling it's really good. You can do a lot of things that normal 2D animation software can't do because grease pencil is an object in 3D space and can animate it's location and frame independent.
Inkscape has had Bitmap Trace for AGES. That's even the only reason I have it on top of Affinity Designer, to round-trip for trace. As for Krita, it has a plugin for generative AI, so it's easier not to lust after Photoshop.
I didn't care for Inkscape but tracing is the only reason keep my old, pre-sub Illustrator installed. Affinity Designer beats it in every other way. Yeah, Krita's generative fill etc is excellent. Being free helps too.
The animator that works with me has been using Moho for years. It is VERY/ powerful he basically told me that a lot of stuff that would take him 2 hours to do in Animate (formerly known as flash), would take him about 15 minutes to do in Moho. Also Rive is a new interesting product which is very close to what flash used to be for web animation. Regarding after effects the closest to 1:1 capability would be Left Angle Autograph. Cavalry is great, but it does not have the compositing tools that After effects and Autograph have.
In Windows, you can block an application from accessing and sending data using firewall rules. It's one of the things that the pirated version of a program already does. This prevents the company from knowing about the use of their program without a license, but it can also prevent them from being able to collect anything from the user. Of course, this completely prevents the program from accessing the internet and consequently the use of its AI's.
If you own a Macbook, Pixelmator Pro is the BEST replacement for Photoshop, can be slightly cheaper than Affinity Photo, but it also has AI selection tools like remove background and select subject. More barebone than Photoshop or Affinity, but is definitely worth looking into for the clean UI and simplicity!
One aspect of the Affinty suite not mentioned is the seamless way an image in say Affinity Publisher can be opened in Affinity Photo without actually opening the program, changes can be made and the new edited image is straight back in the document. Very easy and quick.
Blender does actually have dedicated compositor features, similar to fusion from blackmagic. And you can work totally using external video sources, never touching the 3d stuff of blender. Same for 2d animation, if you want you can work totally in 2d using blender.
Filmora screwed customers with perpetual lisence, they switched to and forced subscription. But then they said sorry due to the backlash. I dint even try it. Buy its a simple video editor. But if you are above simple then thus is not for you. Then Resolve is a better option and it's free unless you need certain codes and certain advanced features mod towny need then Studio version is nice with one time payment. Yh others mentioned I've not looked into recently been years since I looked into them. But I've not heard of Combustion and Wavelab.
Paint Tool Sai served me so much back when I was younger and starting out on drawing with a computer! I had an old desktop with Windows Vista and not enough ram to save my life, but the program was made with not taking up too much memory in mind and was extremely lightweight- still is! My only problem with it is that it was never adapted to be compatible with other operating systems outside of windows (MacOS, Linux, Android ) To be fair, there was ever only one guy making the program for the last 20+ years and he probably just doesn’t want to do the extra work to port it, but it’s a shame 😔 I would go back to use it if I could, but I’m on a Mac now….
About video editing: If, for whatever reason, you are working with pixel animation or art, consider using Blender. I usually do my video editing in DaVinci Resolve but when I tried to use a pixel-art image sequence as footage it kept consistently giving me weird artefacting on render. Blender didn't present that issue for me
I had to do some simple video editing recently, for which I'd normally use After Effects, and tried to do it in Blender Video Editor. It turned out that Blender was great for that purpose. Highly recommended.
GIMP, Inkscape, Darktable - any free and open source software - are community tested and developed, so any missing features can be added by anyone who knows how to code, with feedback provided by users. Now is the time to join the movement.
Musician here👋🏻For Adobe Audition substitute I really recommend Ableton. Particularly for beginners Ableton Lite (now they changed to Intro), bc Ableton Live Suite one is super complicated. Interface is not as intuitive as Audition, but there’s a lot of tutorials on UA-cam. And there is waaaay more features and functions than in Audition. Also Ableton has Ableton Note app for fast recordings.
Reaper is an amazing audio tool. Not free but very cheap and the trial period does not expire! Very stable, great community for support and capable of fully professional results.
With krita, you can actually make the drawing area much larger by tweaking a few settings and hiding some of the unnecessary tabs. Also, pressing tab (if you have a keyboard connected) or a 4 finger tap maximizes the drawing space
Audacity got bought over, and the new owners made a series of bad PR decisions, including trying to introduce telemetry. A bunch of users left and a number of forks of the project were made. Tenacity seems to be the one that's made the most progress.
5:42 I love Krita. I've been using it for nearly a year, and it's my favorite drawing software. I don't really see the need for any other software, I love Krita.
Rebelle is really awesome on this list! Sony Imageworks used it to create Spot fx in Spider Verse. Also Heavypaint is really unique for painting. It's available on all platform incl. Linux and web, and it's not expensive (and has free web version with minor restrictions)
I am a fine art (oil painting and watercolor) person and just use digital apps to try out ideas. I love Rebelle for watercolor and Artrage for oil. A concern I have about leaving photoshop is there are a lot of brushes by fine artists that I can use for charcoal that I may not want to be without. I can see using the Affinity Suite though for everything illustration and Publisher. I am just getting into video creation but I totally love Davinci Resolve and totally find Premiere Pro to be too cumbersome to use. Same with Lightroom.
paint storm or painter are good alternatives, some of the brushes have just as good alternatives in those 2, paintstorm is pretty cheap and has black frifday sales, painter sometimes pups up in humple bundle for 24 USD, and in krita, there's analog feeling brushes that put adobes to shame.
Krita has a very feature rich brush system, you can find brush packs made by community members that can replicate tradicional media and with the help of textured background. I've seen that Rebelle has a effect of running watercolor, these don't but it's a good alternative. You can find in their YT channel brushes for watercolor, charcoal, impressionism style, pastel, etc. They do also support PS brushes but sometimes people have had trouble importing them.
You also can't use the majority of Fusion without the video being watermarked. DaVinci being touted as being "free" is basically a grift. The editing workflow is nice, I'll give it that, but I have a problem with it being hailed as the free video editor when if you want to do anything more involved than basic clip editing and color grading, you need to pay.
Like Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape (Open Source - FREE), DOES have a Vector Trace feature in it. It's a great alternative to Illustrator if you're looking for that feature.
Who said Inkscape doesn't have a live trace feature? I've been using it for years - and I found it (up until version 1.0+) easier and faster to use than Illustrator's. I personally think someone tried doing more features in newer versions and it's become more complex and my results haven't always been predictable like they used to be.
@@thebradcolbow Inkscape actually does some things that Illustrator doesn't (not the last time I used Illustrator 5 years ago) such as the clone and repeat tool. Affinity and Inkscape together (with Affinity as the main partner) cover a huge amount of ground. Illustrator wouldn't open Inkscape SVG files which was my last straw.
Moho is a very decent alternative to Animate but does things a little different, ie bones and smart nested animations. Great for rigged 2,5D puppets and FX.
One proper 1-1 After Effects alternative you didn't mentioned, its called Pikimov. Its very new and its on the browser as well and completely free. Maybe you can make a video in the future about it.
Hahaha, I believe we studied graphic design at about the same time. I had a class on how to use Flash and Dreamweaver. Pretty much when my studies were over, it was pretty much obsolete. 😅
Oh, and Blender does have a NLE built in. So you can do at least some of the stuff you can do in Premiere with it. I haven't used it much, but I figured I would be remiss in not bringing it up since it's not on the list. And from what I have heard, Blender's grease pencil feature is awesome for 2d animations.
I've been looking for alternatives to Adobe software for the last few years, but, as a professional motion designer, the one that's still irreplaceable is After Effects (and it kinda angers me). The emphasis on the video was VFX/compositing in AE, and yes, we have A TON of software that does a lot better than AE in this field, but not for motion graphics. It has so much powerful and flexible tools, workflows, scripts and extensions for complex animation. It's not creativity limiting at all. Other tools like Calvary, DaVinci's Fusion etc are getting more and more promising indeed, but if you compare to what you're capable of doing inside AE, they still have a very long way to go.
Audition was bought Cool Edit Pro which was really good piece of software. Adobe made it slow by adding unprepared extra features and there are lot of people stop using it after this sell. Nowadays it's part of the adobe package that's why lot of people use it, and even it seems to like it. In audio in general we have two Adobe like major corporate players Protools and Steinberg Cubase/Nuendo. Both used in best studios and knowing how to use them is a professional standart. Still we have a Reaper which is now is becoming game audio standart and Ableton/Frutty Loops which are music production tools. This new players have affordable prices and tones of features which Protools, Cubase don't or implementated later and works slow or kind in a wierd way. Audition neither innovative nor corporate standart, there is no need to use it unless you have a specific corporate situation or for some strange reason you really like it.
Photopea really botched their naming, nobody knows how to say it. From what I've heard (and from what makes the most sense), is PHO-TOE-PEE-AH (like utopia or dystopia)
was hoping you'd speak on inkscape, looking forward to see your perspective on that soon :) thanks for the affinity tip, downloading a test version right now
I'm a DaVinci Resolve Studio and Fusion user. A good piece of info to have is that if you buy DaVinci Resolve Studio you also get Fusion Studio. I have used Fusion of photoshop as well since I also found Gimp lacking and annoying. I plan on eventually moving over to Linux too so, it works better for me since it's natively supported.
I was former Premire and current DaVinci user, but Vegas Magix is also a good option, has a really good engine, resembles PR much more than DaVinci does, easier to transition and they also make Vegas Effects that is theirs AE alternative. So if you are having trouble switching to Resolve maybe this would be better option for you. And just to add that Vegas exists over 20 years so they know what are they doing.
we as a creative community should get behind open source creative apps and donate when we can to help each other out sort of like the blender community
Agree with Affinity. And i agree with the purchase one time fee and the option to pay as I decide to update/grade. My recording software worked that way and was reasonable cost wise to upgrade yearly and every other year. But year 3 was almost the full price. Which i also understand. But these yearly upgrades were exactly that. Updates were free. Upgrades had noticeable changes and was a new and improved version. I was saying I’m ok with that a few weeks back and as long as they have the quality that Affinity has i will gladly pay for the work they obviously are doing. For vector i have procreate on ipad and Inkscape on desktop. I prefer Inkscape mostly because of ease of getting projects from program to program as well as svg to blender. Procreate is my pick for ipad play. But thats just my workflow due to how I learned, found and practiced.
Editor and youtuber here. I've been using FCPX close to 13 years now and it's honestly the best editing software I've ever used. I've used Sony Vegas and premiere pro in the past, but FCPX is just better and faster in my opinion. The program is so flexible that you can make you own effects, plugins and transition by using motion 5, and it's honestly so intuitive and easy to use once you get the hang of it
Another alternative to Illustrator I would suggest for anyone who wants to do more precise drawing of curves, with far, far more control and sophistication than Illustrator, is Rhino 3D. Yes, it is a 3D CAD program, but it is also a dream for 2D curve drawing. It is great for creating the basic outlines, however complex you would like them, which you can export to Affinity or whatever for coloring, adding raster elements, etc. You can do very sophisticated and precise things with Rhino's NURBS curves. So much more control! So powerful! You can make much smoother curves, G2, G3, G4, etc. More technical though. And with Grasshopper, you can do some very interesting things you'd never dream of being able to do in Illustrator! Steep learning curve though!
17:46 a shout out for Left Angle Autograph! It’s a legit clone of After Effects a good one at that according to reviews. It’s the only other layer based compositor out there!
Appreciate your break down! The biggest Thing I need photoshop for is all those filters and adjustments. I’m hoping photopea or affinity can cover all of that. I slowly migrated to clip and Procreate for everything else
Another alternative to After Effects that is worth mentioning (and often goes under the radar) is Apple Motion. I would say it can do 90% of what Ae can do, it is less resource intensive, has a user friendly interface and is a one time payment. However ever, just like Final Cut, it is only for macOS.
I'm pretty sure inkscape has bitmap trace 🤔 The worst thing about the FOSS apps is people don't get the same kind of dopamine they do when paying for stuff and often overlook the software in less enthusiasm lol
Saw that picture not long ago! Started to comb through it, but your input will be appreciated. Finding alternatives to an established software ecosystem can be difficult, so guidance and informed suggestions go a long way for more specific interests. Cheers, Brad!
After effects sections was surprisingly short, and while fusion is create for compositing, AE does way more than than, a good app in motion design space is Cavalry for sure.
For After Effects, I feel Unreal Engine 5 can also fit in as an alternative. UE5 has recently added a whole suite of Motion Design tools that I think rival AE
Sounds like your UX design journey is similar to mine - Photoshop - Sketch - Figma. I use the affinity suite of products plus Procreate (my favourite). thanks for sharing!
A nice minimal photo editing software is nevercenter camerabag photo, it's kind of the computer version of a phone image editing app and has some cool features!
The only thing keeping me on Adobe is Lightroom. I've yet to find an alternative that has Lr's catalog and storage functionality in addition to its RAW photo editing abilities. I really hate Adobe but being able to keep every photo I've ever taken in one place, with all of the edits I've made being so easy to view or change, is so valuable to me that I can't leave.
I’m really glad to see the creative community turning against Adobe. They’ve been greedy for far too long
💯👍
I 100% agree with you. When I majored in Graphic design in 2021, Adobe Creative cloud was something I tried to stop payment immediately because I didnt want to pay an exorbitant amount. Adobe DOES not make it easy to cancel! It was so difficult. All I wanted to do was free up my bank account, and then the worst part was the cancellation fee! Why is Adobe so greedy? They already get almost $100 a month from customers anyways.
@@atrdigital5935 They are greedy as much as any other busuness after they've known for quite a while that the customer is proper hooked and is too deep in the habit of using the product (and too lazy/reluctant to switch : ).
I'll always use adobe, jack sparrow version
@@jiburpak539 I see you are a man of culture as well then ; )
Affinity going on sale while Adobe fiasco is runnung is such a smart move.
and clip studio paint lol
Affinity is for hobbists.
It doesn't support Sony ARW currently. Atleast wha ti read. I've not tried it, but doesn't seem to be a way to try it without paying. I have Sony a7iv so need ARW support.
@@mtbboy1993 There is a 1 month free trial for the affinity apps.
I use corel aftershot for my raw photos. Also a one time purchase but basicly does everything liggtroom can @@mtbboy1993
Are you kidding me? I just started looking for adobe alternatives and this video comes out? Talk about perfect timing.
I replaced Adobe Illustrator with Amadine or Graphic
The algos are smart...its not by accident....more and more are popping up..... congrats Adobe...... your idiotic actions are creating a whole economy on EXITING you....
Well, it's not random, everyone is trying to get out of the adobe ecosystem, Brad, like other artists/youtubers are helping people to find their thing ^^
The Algoritm knows yuo😊and there is a funny problem now with Adobe , everybody hate them 😅
@@thibautguerquin3425 You make it sound like Google doesn't track the sites users visit.
Ps Photography 1:24
Ps Painting 4:17
Ai 7:06
An 9:01
Id 10:52
Substance 11:42
Lr 12:06
Xd 12:36
Au 14:20
Pr 15:17
Acrobat, Bridge, Dw 16:20
Ae 17:26
PIN THIS ALREADY!
Thank you so much
thanks
This is what we need more of, UA-camrs showing people that there ARE alternatives. Too many folks act like Adobe is the only option and that we all need to ask them nicely to treat us well. I've been using alternatives for a decade. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, with paid DaVinci audio and video solutions. Capture One is far superior to Lightroom (although they are following the Adobe business model now). Thanks for this, Brad. This is how we inspire change in the industry.
The biggest issue related to this topic is Acrobat. Everywhere you look, websites provide a link to Acrobat Reader, which is “required to open PDFs”. NO, it’s not the on,y application that can handle PDFs. Even your own browser can open and view PDFs. However, if you need an alternative to Acrobat Pro, there are tons of I personally refused to use it the entire time I paid for Creative Cloud because it’s always been buggy and slow. Nitro PDF and Foxit both have good “pro” options, but since PDF “pro” versions are ridiculously over priced anyway, try PDFSam. It’s basically a bundle of PDF manipulation tools bundled together, and you can do a lot more than the typical “reader” programs. Best of all, it’s free.
Agree but the ones that need changing are the employers.
@@UncleMilty That's part of the problem too, yeah. It's one thing for Adobe to aim to monopolize the creative industry, but it's another thing when these same industries also INSISTED that Adobe HAVE to be the industry standard.
@@UncleMilty Totally. Just about every creative job out there slavishly requires Adobe experience. So narrow-minded.
There are loads of UA-camrs doing similar things, which is helpful. No shortage.
Inkscape has a life trace feature and did have it for like 10 years
Was going to comment that
one of the best vector software in the open-source
anyone know the key differences between designer and inkscape?
It's crap though. LOL I mean, way back in the day, Serif had a live trace feature in the program they had before Affinity Designer. It was super crap though. That's probably why it didn't make it into Affinity Designer. They don't know how to do it with any kind of quality. Illustrator's trace feature is very good.
@@KuttyJoe . i would not call it crap . i agree that illustrators implementation is better but not by much.
Correction: Inkscape does have live trace. Other apps missing from the AI comparator list: VectorStyler, Logoist5
The only thing remotely comparable to Illustrator is Coreldraw. Everything else on the list is there because they're telling people what they want to hear. That there's a cheap or free software that is a "replacement" for Illustrator. Or Photoshop. It's not realistic. Coreldraw is as close as you get, but it costs probably 50 cents more than Adobe per month.
Vectorstyler is the most like Illustrator in how it functions and the UI. I use it for all my vector work all day every day
Also Rive
@@toasteroven6761 I wasn't aware about Rive, but it doesn't look like a good comparison with AI. The cloud-based file storage is a non-starter for me - I was burned by Linearity Curve changing the license terms and holding the files hostage.
Tenacity Is a Fork of Audacity, there was a drama back then that a Russian company put Telemetry in Audacity so many forked Audacity.
audacity rolled that telemetry stuff back
@@donowa5637 I didn't know, that explains why many forks stoped development
I came here to say this. Lol
@@donowa5637 the latest official version of Audacity that does not implement telemetry is 3.0.2. Some Linux-based operating systems also ship Audacity with telemetry and networking features disabled by default.
Blender is awesome with 2D animation!
Grease pencil is also vector based and beats animate 100-0 and it supports texture brushes.
I have lots of tutorials on my channel ❤
Hey it's you. Yeah blender can do a lot of things including motion graphics because of geometry nodes and other features. I've done some of my commission for motion graphics in blender.
Sure, but doesn't it just give you the willies that Grease Pencil is drawn in an X-Z space instead of X-Y? I can't get my head around that. Blender was originally designed for architects (which is the only explanation for Z being the up axis.) When they brought in grease pencil (or ever further back when they brought in animation) they should have used a top-down view or switched to a Y-up axis to properly simulate 2D projection onto a screen or wall (I mean, who watches video projected onto the floor?). It's just too weird the way it is.
imagine pissing off your customers that badly that peeps make videos on how to put you out of biz 🙂
I'm a bit of a stuck record on this end, but as someone with a lot of ad agency and animation studio clients, Adobe has a strangle hold on the industry.
There's just things you cannot do if you aren't in the ecosystem as your clients.
If I was 100% independent I'd have jumped ship to Affinity, Procreate and Blender years ago.
But because my bread and butter work is done in After Effects with art supplied as Illustrator files from client, I can't ditch Adobe any time soon. Especially with the array of plugins I've collected over time to make my work better and faster.
Don't worry, when your companies read the fine print and realize they're giving power and by extension money to Adobe the standards will shift. You think Disney or even half of these other big name publishers are gonna let Adobe essentially "by clause" steal all of their IPs and the work associated? Adobe shot themselves in the foot for waaay more than just the regular consumer base.
That's why pirating adobe programs is always morally acceptable
@@kofuku1660 Believe me, would if I could. Problem is I'm running a registered business, and local legislation around piracy is really steep. Gotta keep everything above board with two licences associated with the company.
@timmehjimmeh Well, hey, look at it this way. You may not be able to get out of it, but you can spread the word to others to not use thier software, it's perfectly fine to keep using what you need for your work, but that doesn't mean you have to like the company that made this. It's like the whole separate the art from the artist situation.
@@themysteriousspeeddemon I mean winge about Adobe every chance I get. So everyone knows how much I hate being trapped in their ecosystem! But there’s no avoiding them if you work at a professional level anytime soon. It’s salt in the wound with all their AI bullshit.
5:51, I use Krita, a lot, and it's very responsive, you might have missed a setting or something.
I tried it at least 5 times over the years and it was always laggy and slow, I'm not certain what it is. My PC is pretty beefy and still
@@theinkyspoon Almost everything comes well set up after installation but you can change performance settings. The main reason it might feel laggy is a large brush size, you can change the default max size to about 1000px or less. It's not all of them but it can happen.
Everything is slower on Windows and Mac. These open source programs perform the fastest on Linux.
I agree. It is my main drawing/painting tool and I have no complaints regarding performance. It is a fantastic piece of software.
@@csmemarketingWould compiling from source make any difference? I don't know too much about compiling software on windows but I'm sure Krita has instructions to do so.
Inkscape DOES have a live trace feature! It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I often use it to trace JPEGs, then copy the SVG into Affinity Designer.
I will sing the good word of Da Vinci and Blackmagic Design forever because I love me some Da Vinci Resolve. The Fusion editor is kinda weird to figure out with the whole nodes thing but once you get it I think its pretty cool
Da Vinci is the only acceptable alternative.
@@benjaminjackson8663 That's TRUE. And we're BLESSED because Davinci Resolve have both FREE & paid LIFE TIME perpetual license. I've seen people bought Davinci Resolve version 15 for less than $300 four years ago. They've been updating it every year for FREE. Now, they're running version 19.
Nodes are used in Nuke as well, which is industry standard for compositing/VFX. Nodes are just so much more versatile than layer based workflows.
Tracking on Fusion is literally the same from my experience as Adobes AF.
I heard you say “if” you were going to break away fully from Adobe. I hope you do. The more popular UA-camrs like you can break away from Adobe and really show alternatives and use them in your reviews, the more Adobe will have to take notice where they are failing as a company, and it will help to break their monopoly on some of these products.
As someone who has been using Photoshop for most of my professional work (more than ten years) which is art for mobile games I checked what would be alternative. So far the most capable replacement would be either Affinity Photo and Designer for more graphic design related work where you need tons of layers, vector stuff and text objects. However for digital painting those tools are not as good to me. Using brushes don't feel as smooth (worse than Photoshop). I don't like how color picker works. No right click menu for picking brushes and also I would prefer single hotkey + pen for rotating canvas. Hopefully they will improve that part but I understand both are not entirely digital painting programs.
For strictly painting so far I was playing a lot with Krita and I actually like it. Some things are even better than in Photoshop and you can customize hotkeys to have almost zero friction transition from Photoshop. The only thing in Krita that is different is there is no dedicated tool for eraser but I learned to just have eraser brush in my right click menu and I jump to it very quickly. Also the layers work a bit differently. Instead of clipping layer I use all the time there is clipping group which is totally different to what is standard in most graphical programs. I wish Krita was a bit better in more graphic design and editing part because then it would be totally open source competitor to Photoshop. It totally left GIMP behind because you got adjustment layers and even Layer comp feature. However Layer styles are slow, vector tools not as developed and text tool at the moment is bad (though it should be better in new updates). Still I try to donate from time to time with hope it will catch up on those things some day.
Clip Studio Paint I haven't tried yet. It is something I want to do at some point.
Krita's way of erasing is as an eraser mode, you toggle it on and off with the E key as any other art program, it makes it so your current selected brush acts as an eraser, with all the effects of the brush being applied (e.g. opacity), but on the opposite direction. In my opinion this is way better than a dedicated eraser tool as it gives you more control over the painting like say, erasing with a specific pattern of a brush, this makes all brushes work as both a normal and eraser brushes. Krita did recently add a new shortcut for a more traditional feeling "eraser tool", but you have to bind it yourself, just go into Keyboard Shortcuts and look for "Toggle Eraser Preset", its behavior is that by pressing it, it will switch you to one of the built-in eraser brushes, though it can also work as a "quick brush switch" as you can change which brush it toggles to.
As for vectors, for simple stuff its good enough, but I just use Inkscape for more complex vector stuff to then import it into Krita as it imports Inkscape SVGs very well.
Also look into the Settings > Dockers, you might be surprised with all the stuff Krita has hidden by default.
Clip studio paint is simply better than photoshop for digital art, i really recommend you try it out. They usually have these seasonal sales (can't remember when) but i bought it then and i was pretty cheap. good luck!
CSP ver 3 just added layer comps.
Dont forget the most important thing regarding FOSS. Free is not about money, is about freedom.
I’d still say free as in free beer is a major factor in many people’s decisions.
Yes thank you. I can afford it but morally I refuse to. If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.
@@Airwr3ck And if pirating isn't stealing, small studios going out of business and people losing their jobs isn't tragic.
Long live Krita! It's 100% one of the best software out there and for sure the best for free. All kinds of tools and features, available on every platform except for iPad because it doesn't play well with OSS licenses. If also has good tools for vector illustration, animation and many people prefer it instead of GIMP, you might want to have an independent program for each use case but it's good that you have the option. Fun fact: it's the first (and maybe only) to feature live HDR painting for windows PCs.
I can also vauch for Darktable, still only doing basic stuff with it but it works great, just need to be patient while learning. GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus have been updating recently, I'll be trying them soon.
A program not "feeling snappy" is most subjective nitpicky thing lmao.
Inkscape has really come a far way and is now way better than it used to be similar to blender. I can't say the same for GIMP as it still feels clunky, hard to use and lacking in features and a modern layout. I really hope that is about to change though. Have never used Scribus so it might work great but the design looks similarly dated.
I appreciate that Linux comparability is on the chart. After Microsoft Recall was announced, I jumped ship.
I haven't tried it myself but I understand that the Affinity suite will run on Linux under WINE.
@@tnetroP Wine is not fun. I'm an illustrator, so I don't think it will co,e to that.
@@marenjones6665Wine can work well with some applications. Some are better than others. It's best to use Bottles to make containerized wine instances with settings specifically made for each program.
Although I do hope Affinity eventually comes to Linux in some form like Flatpak.
@@tnetroP you need a modified version of wine that's a pain to setup but it should work flawlessly afterwards
Good thing recall got recalled
Krita and Gimp not being as "Snappy" is almost for sure due to your using them on MacOS. The open source frameworks are not the most optimized for Mac. Both run the best on Linux imo.
GTK is well known for its severe performance issues on both Windows and Mac so yeah, GIMP suffers because of it on non-UNIX platforms. It is not unusable by any means but the lag is noticeable. But Krita uses Qt and is usually very fast in my experience regardless of the platform. In fact, I've ran it successfully on machines that had no business running such a powerful application and handling large resolution files so easily. It is bloody perfect. That said, it is not unusual to hear people citing it as "slow" particularly on Windows so perhaps its performance does vary a little based on the hardware it runs on?
That's Facts.
Gimp was always quite quick on Pc with windows. Even older low end pcs, also ran well on with i7 devils canyon, also works well on modern beast with i9 too. Will run well on a cheap pc. As long a sits something absurdly old it should be fine.
@@mtbboy1993 I agree. Experienced that myself.
@@csmemarketing Adobe Lightroom on the other hand is super slow, photoshop seems to be fine as long as I don't have Lightroom running eating 12 GB memory out of 64gb and slowing down pc so it's super slow. Memory usage increases, and it's very slow to load at times and switching between photos can be impossible have to rlav eit let it calm down for some minutes maybe half hour then it's responsive again. I've not tested other software with massive amount of edited photos. But with only one photo, Capture One is super fast. Rawtherapee too.
I see CapCut and Canva are missing from that list. Also, just a heads up-Photopea starts charging if you use certain tools more than once within two hours or 80 minutes.
CapCut!!! Ohh I totally should have added that!
Also, is that new to Photopea?
Photopea is an excellent alternative for people making the migration away from Photoshop. It is one of the best in terms of maintaining continuity of layers, layer effects (like drop shadows), and even fonts! The reason for this is while it runs in your browser, it actually runs locally, eliminating a lot of slowdown if you are on slow or limited bandwidth. Also, because it runs locally, those odd fonts you used in that previous PSD file will be picked up and properly displayed in the browser app.
@@thebradcolbow there's also Rough Animator for 2d animation on android, I think it's worth checking out! It's a one time payment to my knowledge
@sfoldy it's like the 1st version of photoshop
Warning about CapCut: the unsubscribe button on emails does not work, and they send a lot of emails. And voiceovers do not sync properly with the video
I got my first iPad last year, and downloaded procreate and it has quickly become my favorite tool for raster illustration and simple animation! In comparison, Photoshop on the iPad feels clunky and unintuitive. Having used Photoshop with a keyboard for over a decade, I feel the lack of hotkeys and features more than I feel empowered to make anything.
The UI for Procreate feels tailor made for working on a tablet with a pen. Just the fact that I can liquify and adjust a group is mindblowing to me. My only gripes are with layer restrictions, and not being able to clipping mask over a group. I find myself being forced to manage my layer usage a lot because of that.
I have a Wacom pen display at work, and I honestly prefer the iPad to that any day.
I actually never used Photoshop for drawing. I actually use Krita as an alternative to CSP.
Inkscape doesn't feel very newbie-friendly... I find the UI a bit... confusing in terms of starting a new file.
Inkscape UI actually based on CorelDraw. That's why it looks confusing compared to like, Adobe Illustrator
I use Firealpaca for everything I do. It's not the best option, especially with the limited options to custom brushes. But if you're new/don't need many tools to begin with, and you want a free alternative, it's got damn near all the essentials, and probably the best thing out there in those regards.
This is very helpful, thank you.
As a non-professional, and simply a hobbyist. It's dam near impossible to justify a subscription piece of software. To support an adobe model, you need it to generate a cash flow. Which is great for professionals. But it simply generates animosity from everyone else, and rightly so as Adobe shows little point in providing entry level services. These alternatives in one place is very valuable. Thank you
I've been turning raster images to vector for ages in inkscape. I usually do it with logos and icons. The feature is called Trace Bitmap.
Kinda like in Flash?
I must say it is really worth taking a look at blender, there is so much you can do with it, and it is extremely well built. I don't think anyone who uses blender professionally would claim knowing even half of the features. It has a distinct workflow, and in the past few releases the user interface has gotten a lot of attention from the development. You can really do film editing, 2d animation, drawing, and a whole lot more, and very well so. It does take some time to get into, especially to start out, but it really is an amazing tool.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
The 3D modeller is said to be great, but the rest is meh to bad. Not my opinion, but what professionals say.
@@akyhne Video editing might be not good but for 2D animation and 3D modeling it's really good. You can do a lot of things that normal 2D animation software can't do because grease pencil is an object in 3D space and can animate it's location and frame independent.
Blender has many quality of life features that I would love to see in every software out there. It's so neat
Inkscape has had Bitmap Trace for AGES.
That's even the only reason I have it on top of Affinity Designer, to round-trip for trace.
As for Krita, it has a plugin for generative AI, so it's easier not to lust after Photoshop.
I didn't care for Inkscape but tracing is the only reason keep my old, pre-sub Illustrator installed. Affinity Designer beats it in every other way.
Yeah, Krita's generative fill etc is excellent. Being free helps too.
The animator that works with me has been using Moho for years. It is VERY/ powerful he basically told me that a lot of stuff that would take him 2 hours to do in Animate (formerly known as flash), would take him about 15 minutes to do in Moho. Also Rive is a new interesting product which is very close to what flash used to be for web animation. Regarding after effects the closest to 1:1 capability would be Left Angle Autograph. Cavalry is great, but it does not have the compositing tools that After effects and Autograph have.
In Windows, you can block an application from accessing and sending data using firewall rules. It's one of the things that the pirated version of a program already does. This prevents the company from knowing about the use of their program without a license, but it can also prevent them from being able to collect anything from the user. Of course, this completely prevents the program from accessing the internet and consequently the use of its AI's.
If you own a Macbook, Pixelmator Pro is the BEST replacement for Photoshop, can be slightly cheaper than Affinity Photo, but it also has AI selection tools like remove background and select subject. More barebone than Photoshop or Affinity, but is definitely worth looking into for the clean UI and simplicity!
One aspect of the Affinty suite not mentioned is the seamless way an image in say Affinity Publisher can be opened in Affinity Photo without actually opening the program, changes can be made and the new edited image is straight back in the document. Very easy and quick.
Inkscape does have a trace function. It's literally the only reason I have it
I've found it to work better than illustrator's image trace
It also has a feature to trace pixelart.
Can you add the link for the image in the description?
It seems they filtered out the link. So, I can share this part:
status/1799474607055102257
Blender does actually have dedicated compositor features, similar to fusion from blackmagic. And you can work totally using external video sources, never touching the 3d stuff of blender. Same for 2d animation, if you want you can work totally in 2d using blender.
Audio: Wavelab
Video: Avid Media Composer (Hollywood/TV Standard Editor), Vegas, Filmora, Hitfilm
AfterEffects: Combustion (professional, expensive), Apple Motion
Filmora screwed customers with perpetual lisence, they switched to and forced subscription. But then they said sorry due to the backlash. I dint even try it. Buy its a simple video editor. But if you are above simple then thus is not for you. Then Resolve is a better option and it's free unless you need certain codes and certain advanced features mod towny need then Studio version is nice with one time payment.
Yh others mentioned I've not looked into recently been years since I looked into them.
But I've not heard of Combustion and Wavelab.
+1 for Apple Motion
Paint Tool Sai served me so much back when I was younger and starting out on drawing with a computer! I had an old desktop with Windows Vista and not enough ram to save my life, but the program was made with not taking up too much memory in mind and was extremely lightweight- still is!
My only problem with it is that it was never adapted to be compatible with other operating systems outside of windows (MacOS, Linux, Android )
To be fair, there was ever only one guy making the program for the last 20+ years and he probably just doesn’t want to do the extra work to port it, but it’s a shame 😔 I would go back to use it if I could, but I’m on a Mac now….
8:50 I'm not sure how different live trace is, but inkscape can trace images into vectors.
About video editing: If, for whatever reason, you are working with pixel animation or art, consider using Blender. I usually do my video editing in DaVinci Resolve but when I tried to use a pixel-art image sequence as footage it kept consistently giving me weird artefacting on render. Blender didn't present that issue for me
I had to do some simple video editing recently, for which I'd normally use After Effects, and tried to do it in Blender Video Editor. It turned out that Blender was great for that purpose. Highly recommended.
GIMP, Inkscape, Darktable - any free and open source software - are community tested and developed, so any missing features can be added by anyone who knows how to code, with feedback provided by users. Now is the time to join the movement.
Musician here👋🏻For Adobe Audition substitute I really recommend Ableton. Particularly for beginners Ableton Lite (now they changed to Intro), bc Ableton Live Suite one is super complicated. Interface is not as intuitive as Audition, but there’s a lot of tutorials on UA-cam. And there is waaaay more features and functions than in Audition. Also Ableton has Ableton Note app for fast recordings.
Reaper is an amazing audio tool. Not free but very cheap and the trial period does not expire! Very stable, great community for support and capable of fully professional results.
Recent convert to the Affinity suite of tools. Came to see what other tools might be good to have in a Post Adobe World.
Woah! A list of Adobe alternatives? Looks like this is going to be a great resource. Thanks for doing this video, Brad!
With krita, you can actually make the drawing area much larger by tweaking a few settings and hiding some of the unnecessary tabs. Also, pressing tab (if you have a keyboard connected) or a 4 finger tap maximizes the drawing space
Audacity got bought over, and the new owners made a series of bad PR decisions, including trying to introduce telemetry. A bunch of users left and a number of forks of the project were made. Tenacity seems to be the one that's made the most progress.
5:42 I love Krita. I've been using it for nearly a year, and it's my favorite drawing software. I don't really see the need for any other software, I love Krita.
Rebelle is really awesome on this list! Sony Imageworks used it to create Spot fx in Spider Verse. Also Heavypaint is really unique for painting. It's available on all platform incl. Linux and web, and it's not expensive (and has free web version with minor restrictions)
I am a fine art (oil painting and watercolor) person and just use digital apps to try out ideas. I love Rebelle for watercolor and Artrage for oil. A concern I have about leaving photoshop is there are a lot of brushes by fine artists that I can use for charcoal that I may not want to be without. I can see using the Affinity Suite though for everything illustration and Publisher. I am just getting into video creation but I totally love Davinci Resolve and totally find Premiere Pro to be too cumbersome to use. Same with Lightroom.
paint storm or painter are good alternatives, some of the brushes have just as good alternatives in those 2, paintstorm is pretty cheap and has black frifday sales, painter sometimes pups up in humple bundle for 24 USD, and in krita, there's analog feeling brushes that put adobes to shame.
Krita has a very feature rich brush system, you can find brush packs made by community members that can replicate tradicional media and with the help of textured background. I've seen that Rebelle has a effect of running watercolor, these don't but it's a good alternative.
You can find in their YT channel brushes for watercolor, charcoal, impressionism style, pastel, etc. They do also support PS brushes but sometimes people have had trouble importing them.
I'm pretty sure Clip Studio and Krita can import Photoshop brushes seamlessly
One note with DaVinci Resolve, you don't get hardware acceleration unless you pay for the software.
This is hardware acceleration during editing but I assume it does use the GPU for rendering right?
You also can't use the majority of Fusion without the video being watermarked. DaVinci being touted as being "free" is basically a grift. The editing workflow is nice, I'll give it that, but I have a problem with it being hailed as the free video editor when if you want to do anything more involved than basic clip editing and color grading, you need to pay.
@@NopeNaw hell no bro more than 90% of its features are free mostly ai features requires studio version
Like Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape (Open Source - FREE), DOES have a Vector Trace feature in it. It's a great alternative to Illustrator if you're looking for that feature.
Who said Inkscape doesn't have a live trace feature? I've been using it for years - and I found it (up until version 1.0+) easier and faster to use than Illustrator's. I personally think someone tried doing more features in newer versions and it's become more complex and my results haven't always been predictable like they used to be.
Good to know. I didn't think it did. yet another reason I should spend more time in it.
@@thebradcolbow Inkscape actually does some things that Illustrator doesn't (not the last time I used Illustrator 5 years ago) such as the clone and repeat tool.
Affinity and Inkscape together (with Affinity as the main partner) cover a huge amount of ground.
Illustrator wouldn't open Inkscape SVG files which was my last straw.
9:03 Inkscape totally has a Bitmap to Path tool. I use it every day.
Photopea is also avaible as plugin inside Figma. Really great combination if you need to make tons of online art and keep branding consistent
Moho is a very decent alternative to Animate but does things a little different, ie bones and smart nested animations. Great for rigged 2,5D puppets and FX.
One proper 1-1 After Effects alternative you didn't mentioned, its called Pikimov. Its very new and its on the browser as well and completely free. Maybe you can make a video in the future about it.
where is the link to orignal tweet @brad ?
youtube wont let me link it but just google xdanielart and itll come up
lol the bait and switch.
😢
very suspicious brad
Hahaha, I believe we studied graphic design at about the same time. I had a class on how to use Flash and Dreamweaver. Pretty much when my studies were over, it was pretty much obsolete. 😅
Oh, and Blender does have a NLE built in. So you can do at least some of the stuff you can do in Premiere with it. I haven't used it much, but I figured I would be remiss in not bringing it up since it's not on the list.
And from what I have heard, Blender's grease pencil feature is awesome for 2d animations.
inkscape has an image trace and it does a decent job. So it would take a drawing and convert to vector.
I've been looking for alternatives to Adobe software for the last few years, but, as a professional motion designer, the one that's still irreplaceable is After Effects (and it kinda angers me). The emphasis on the video was VFX/compositing in AE, and yes, we have A TON of software that does a lot better than AE in this field, but not for motion graphics. It has so much powerful and flexible tools, workflows, scripts and extensions for complex animation. It's not creativity limiting at all. Other tools like Calvary, DaVinci's Fusion etc are getting more and more promising indeed, but if you compare to what you're capable of doing inside AE, they still have a very long way to go.
Its gonna be important to mention in the animation category Procreate and Procreate Dreams.
Audition was bought Cool Edit Pro which was really good piece of software. Adobe made it slow by adding unprepared extra features and there are lot of people stop using it after this sell. Nowadays it's part of the adobe package that's why lot of people use it, and even it seems to like it. In audio in general we have two Adobe like major corporate players Protools and Steinberg Cubase/Nuendo. Both used in best studios and knowing how to use them is a professional standart. Still we have a Reaper which is now is becoming game audio standart and Ableton/Frutty Loops which are music production tools. This new players have affordable prices and tones of features which Protools, Cubase don't or implementated later and works slow or kind in a wierd way. Audition neither innovative nor corporate standart, there is no need to use it unless you have a specific corporate situation or for some strange reason you really like it.
Photopea really botched their naming, nobody knows how to say it. From what I've heard (and from what makes the most sense), is PHO-TOE-PEE-AH (like utopia or dystopia)
Wow... That actually sounds sooo much better than pho-toe-pee 😂
I thought they meant like a pea 🫛 lol
9:00 Linearity Curve have Image Tracing too. They recently changed to subscription model tho.
was hoping you'd speak on inkscape, looking forward to see your perspective on that soon :)
thanks for the affinity tip, downloading a test version right now
TvPaint is pretty good as well from what I’ve heard
I'm a DaVinci Resolve Studio and Fusion user. A good piece of info to have is that if you buy DaVinci Resolve Studio you also get Fusion Studio.
I have used Fusion of photoshop as well since I also found Gimp lacking and annoying. I plan on eventually moving over to Linux too so, it works better for me since it's natively supported.
As someone who makes a living using software programs to create content. Thank you for this video! 👍
I was former Premire and current DaVinci user, but Vegas Magix is also a good option, has a really good engine, resembles PR much more than DaVinci does, easier to transition
and they also make Vegas Effects that is theirs AE alternative. So if you are having trouble switching to Resolve maybe this would be better option for you. And just to add
that Vegas exists over 20 years so they know what are they doing.
we as a creative community should get behind open source creative apps and donate when we can to help each other out sort of like the blender community
For audio, I have been using Mixcraft for years. I found it easier to work with than Audacity depending on the project.
Perfectly timed Adobe advert as the beginning 😅
Agree with Affinity. And i agree with the purchase one time fee and the option to pay as I decide to update/grade. My recording software worked that way and was reasonable cost wise to upgrade yearly and every other year. But year 3 was almost the full price. Which i also understand. But these yearly upgrades were exactly that. Updates were free. Upgrades had noticeable changes and was a new and improved version.
I was saying I’m ok with that a few weeks back and as long as they have the quality that Affinity has i will gladly pay for the work they obviously are doing.
For vector i have procreate on ipad and Inkscape on desktop. I prefer Inkscape mostly because of ease of getting projects from program to program as well as svg to blender. Procreate is my pick for ipad play. But thats just my workflow due to how I learned, found and practiced.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity,
Editor and youtuber here. I've been using FCPX close to 13 years now and it's honestly the best editing software I've ever used. I've used Sony Vegas and premiere pro in the past, but FCPX is just better and faster in my opinion. The program is so flexible that you can make you own effects, plugins and transition by using motion 5, and it's honestly so intuitive and easy to use once you get the hang of it
I'd love to see a few of these commercial options, especially Affinity's suite, come to Linux!
Another alternative to Illustrator I would suggest for anyone who wants to do more precise drawing of curves, with far, far more control and sophistication than Illustrator, is Rhino 3D. Yes, it is a 3D CAD program, but it is also a dream for 2D curve drawing. It is great for creating the basic outlines, however complex you would like them, which you can export to Affinity or whatever for coloring, adding raster elements, etc. You can do very sophisticated and precise things with Rhino's NURBS curves. So much more control! So powerful! You can make much smoother curves, G2, G3, G4, etc. More technical though. And with Grasshopper, you can do some very interesting things you'd never dream of being able to do in Illustrator! Steep learning curve though!
SUPPORT INKSCAPE!!!!!!!
17:46 a shout out for Left Angle Autograph! It’s a legit clone of After Effects a good one at that according to reviews. It’s the only other layer based compositor out there!
I was LITTELARY hoping you would do a video like this YESTERDAY ...can I predict the future??
Appreciate your break down! The biggest Thing I need photoshop for is all those filters and adjustments.
I’m hoping photopea or affinity can cover all of that.
I slowly migrated to clip and Procreate for everything else
Can you do a video on how you make comics using affinity?
Another alternative to After Effects that is worth mentioning (and often goes under the radar) is Apple Motion. I would say it can do 90% of what Ae can do, it is less resource intensive, has a user friendly interface and is a one time payment. However ever, just like Final Cut, it is only for macOS.
I'm pretty sure inkscape has bitmap trace 🤔
The worst thing about the FOSS apps is people don't get the same kind of dopamine they do when paying for stuff and often overlook the software in less enthusiasm lol
BTW Krita is also a free alternative to Animate, as it includes an animation crossplatform (and a good one). This does not apper on the list posted.
Saw that picture not long ago! Started to comb through it, but your input will be appreciated. Finding alternatives to an established software ecosystem can be difficult, so guidance and informed suggestions go a long way for more specific interests. Cheers, Brad!
After effects sections was surprisingly short, and while fusion is create for compositing, AE does way more than than, a good app in motion design space is Cavalry for sure.
Cavalry looks interesting, think I'll check it out.
Please do chapters for the different categories!!!
8:35 about image tracing blender 3d also have image tracing and it is free
After Effects replacement needed f🎉or video on wall. like screen replacement. preferably for android tablet's
I found a few I could really use. Brad hits a home run again! Thank you.
Not mentioning Darktable or RawTherapee for photography is a huge miss honestly.
Yup, using darktable quite a bit but boy if it's so heavily stuffed with the most technical jargon that a software could have
For After Effects, I feel Unreal Engine 5 can also fit in as an alternative. UE5 has recently added a whole suite of Motion Design tools that I think rival AE
Is pirating Adobe Softwares justifiable at this point?
it's not just justifiable, it's the morally correct choice if you don't wish to use alternatives
@@karaneaagreed
Always has been
Sounds like your UX design journey is similar to mine - Photoshop - Sketch - Figma. I use the affinity suite of products plus Procreate (my favourite). thanks for sharing!
i use krita and like it a lot
A nice minimal photo editing software is nevercenter camerabag photo, it's kind of the computer version of a phone image editing app and has some cool features!
Adobe hid the tweet in their reply 😂😂😂
The only thing keeping me on Adobe is Lightroom. I've yet to find an alternative that has Lr's catalog and storage functionality in addition to its RAW photo editing abilities.
I really hate Adobe but being able to keep every photo I've ever taken in one place, with all of the edits I've made being so easy to view or change, is so valuable to me that I can't leave.
when you talk about gimp, i think it's not enought when you call it free, it's free and open source..
:P
Problem, it's also gimped. The least intuitive UI I've ever seen.
The timing of this video is impeccable! Thank you for explaining these options detail! 😊