So if you’ve followed me for any length of time you know my general hate these decades for the once great company Adobe.
I was a die-hard Adobe Photoshop (and other application) user for years but they’ve become one of the true enshittification companies in this century.
I’m still chugging along with my ancient Adobe Photoshop CS3 version and did not renew my 1 year test subscription. I’ve been making do with that and Inkscape and I’ve always used Davinci Resolve.
Anyway, I’ve been testing out Affinity’s new Studio application that combines pixel, vector, and desktop publishing in one.
I’ve only been working in the pixel module and it has been fine for the basic edits and comps I’ve been making. I haven’t tried to do any real clean-up or path generation and such yet.
Now as of today it is free, but I suspect that something will eventually happen and it’ll have a cost.
I am hoping that they maintain the previous perpetual licenses. I will gladly purchase that if it does meet all my needs. I will NOT purchase a monthly subscription. I just can’t do that anymore for anything. (If it was something low like $2-3/month I could justify it, but no more given the amount of time I spent in the applications.)
If you’ve been unhappy with Adobe’s tactics, I suggest giving it a try to see if it is a potential replacement for you for at least some apps.
Inkscape could be truly great open source vector application if some really excellent GUI people worked with the developers to make it better.
Fucking US government should have made Adobe release FreeHand’s code to the open source community! FreeHand was my app and superior to Adobe Illustrator in every way! (Hence, why they killed it!)
That said, if the AI nightmare really creeps into this free version I’ll abandon it as well. I do not need the AI shit constantly taking up space nor do I need it for anything beyond possibly making background removals cleaner. That’s about it! No more than that! (The impact of LLMs/AI on graphics can have some benefit as an enhancement tool, not as a slop generating replacement.)
NOTE: They do have Canva AI integration but only if you pay for it. If it is not forced upon you in anyway like Microslop is doing I may be able to continue using