[marcosdumay]

> I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file

Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody else.

I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be set by state actors. But they should only make them available, not mandate them into private actors.

[SomeCallMeTim]

> ask them for the files exported into a format you can open

They already do that. That's not the problem.

If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-only features, then no other art program can open the source material. Period.

At best you can get approximations of the original Photoshop render if you open the image in another program. But generally what you get is garbage if it's not a recent version of Photoshop.

The point of getting the Photoshop original with the layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of the layers and have it re-render a result that is better for what I need. Something that is difficult or impossible if I just have a JPEG.

And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the tools not being as good.

Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect them to be happy or productive.

[marcosdumay]

> And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know).

You mean the thing that every single company does for their work for hire?

When a developer doesn't know, they go after another developer. (And they should restrict the number of constraints to what is really important, but almost no company does that.)

[SomeCallMeTim]

No company I've worked for in the past decade has told me what kind of computer I should work on. Even the W2 gigs have allowed me my choice of Mac/Linux/Windows. I work for tech-savvy companies, though. I'm sure there are tech-naive companies that force everyone to work on Mac or whatever.

And companies that want programmers who write, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap developers, and would be better off porting their software to something more modern. I did some work on a Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time. They couldn't possibly pay me enough.

But that's my point: Just like they would get crap developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try to work with non-Adobe artists.