[dagmx]

It truly depends what you do and need.

IMHO, as someone who professionally uses the Adobe products and has licenses to all the Affinity suite, none of the apps compare favorably to the Adobe equivalents other than price and a superior iPad version.

They’re all great apps though but they definitely exist in the tier below adobe’s offerings. Which may be fine for most folks but hasn’t been for me, because I literally cannot complete projects in them and I certainly have tried.

Affinity Designer lacks many utilities from illustrator like advanced gradient handling, perspective alignment and repetition automation. Inkscape isn’t that far off from Designer imho.

Affinity Photo is fine as a photo editing tool but it falls apart for more advanced edits where you need to use brushes and advanced masking tools. Again, perspective tools and more granular referencing tools are just missing or broken. It is a significant step up from Gimp though but I would personally push people to Krita instead.

Affinity Publisher is the weakest of the trio. But then again, so is InDesign. These two aren’t too far off but InDesign has better tools around multi page layout and quickly updating templates references. I don’t know of a good OSS equivalent.

Again, I think these tools are great for people who value the price over the feature set. Most people don’t need more than they offer. But if you’re a professional, the Adobe products are yet unmatched.

[wetpaste]

Coming from the world of audio software I've always wondered why it seemed like Adobe has such a stranglehold on visual work and nothing really catches up to photoshop or illustrator. In audio there are several big DAWs (digital audio workstations) that I would classify as popular and competent enough for serious work, each of which has artists or producers that have built successful careers around. Yes there are endless wars about what is better but more or less can do the same things and most experienced people say, choose one, learn it, decide what works for you. I feel like with photoshop it's always like "oh it's missing critical feature x, y, and z compared to photoshop so it's a dealbreaker". The closest analogy I could think of is pro-tools being a popular "de-facto" standard in many pro recording studios, but most hobbyists don't use pro-tools and agree that it's popular in pro studios mostly due to tradition.

I'm surprised there aren't at least a handful of adobe competitors that carved a niche and are significantly popular because they made some key workflows faster, more intuitive, or more powerful.

Maybe this difference is because of ubiquitous plugin formats like VST that translate across different DAWs?

[dagmx]

Audio has a few things going for it.

1. It's significantly more standardized and straightforward for data interpretation. MIDI is standard (and OSC sort of fizzled), and audio clips (wav, aiff, whatever) are also very standard. You don't have the issues of color science, and you have a much smaller range of transformations that can be done to an audio clip.

2. A lot of infrastructure is standardized. From hardware interaction, to key mapping, but also things like plugins (Audio Units, VSTs, RTAS/AAX). It's so much simpler to go between apps.

3. A lot of audio workflows are treated as procedural and non-destructive.

Compare this to images:

1. Color science is horrific. Even Adobe often get it wrong (Krita was actually the best for a long time). D

2. Plugins are very application specific. So biggest marketshare often wins.

3. The range of transformations people want to do is massive. Each of them need very bespoke workflows, and due to the lack of standardized plugins, they're rarely shared.

4. A lot of image workflows are destructive by nature. A lot of image plugins as well are destructive.

5. Document interchange still sucks. For raster, you'll be plagued by color science issues. For vector, you'll be plagued by nobody implementing SVG the same.

6. Hardware APIs also vary wildly. For a long time, you had to target every vendor of pen you wanted to support for example.

I think a large part of it is due to the industries behind it. Video and Audio need to scale massively within a single project, across a lot of hardware devices, and production houses. The data is massive in comparison. Issues cost a lot.

Images are smaller in scale. An issue can be fixed very cheaply.

The Video and Audio industries fixed this by putting effort into standardization, education and interoperability. Images never had that attention.

[robenkleene]

This is a great summarize, I'd emphasize that as a result of the items mentioned here, both input (through external MIDI controllers) and output (through VST instruments) are actually cross-DAW, that consistency makes switching DAWs far easier, and makes what any one DAW is best at much narrower.

[omnimus]

Its a but funny that you say Indesign is the weakest of the three considering that in professional setting its Indesign (and After Effects) that keeps people with Adobe. Its the most complex one and the only irreplaceable one. Everything that ever gets printed is done with Indesign. Every book, poster, cover, billboard, business card…

Adobe Publisher is close though and in many important ways its way better than Indesign (speed, stability, editing of photos/vectors directly inside publisher) but it lacks one main feature and thats scripts api/third party plugins. Until they release that then professional shops simply cant switch because of automation and super specific workflows they need.

[dagmx]

I'll be pedantic and say it really depends on which "professional setting" as to which programs keep people with Adobe. But I assume you mean in the print world.

Personally though, InDesign is (to me) simultaneously both the strongest product in its category, but also the weakest in terms of feature/development compared to the other headlining Adobe product.

[omnimus]

Yeah because Adobe doesnt care since they know print industry has no other choice. Indesign has been basically only getting worse since CS6/the subscription. The only useful feature in last 15 years has been pdf comments/corrections.

Whats worst is that each version makes it more unstable and crashes with indesign can be costly. I know several design studios that keep old macs to do work in CS6 because of that.

At the same time its more often than not their fault. 80% dont need scripting or advanced indesign features but they are lazy/old to learn anything new. Unfortunately this will drag Indesign probably forever since you need to collaborate.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Affinity Photo is fine as a photo editing tool but it falls apart for more advanced edits where you need to use brushes and advanced masking tools. Again, perspective tools and more granular referencing tools are just missing or broken. It is a significant step up from Gimp though but I would personally push people to Krita instead.

I want to switch but the total lack of any automated export functionality is a complete deal-breaker. That's like 15 minutes of work per piece foisted back onto me, and like, I just cannot fathom a reason to even have the Layer States feature if you aren't going to use it for this.

[lastdong]

Also the lack of a plugin sdk, scriptable actions: hope basic automation comes soon. Discussing using AI was taboo, some vocal users misunderstood and missed that AI is a powerful tool for automatic masking, image segmentation, etc (and that can be ran locally), so all the smart stuff only lives in Adobe.

[jay_kyburz]

In our last game I had to dig pretty deep into Kritas scripting. I was making automated changes and exporting thousands of frames of animation.

It's a little janky but got the job done.

Keep an eye out for Wild Bastards on Steam. Every frame of the character animation was run through Krita.

[dagmx]

Yeah there are so many walls like that which I hit. I always go to their forum, find that it's been asked a lot and with no resolution. Which is fine, I get it that they are newer and don't have the resources.

But in the amount of time I've now wasted trying to do the thing, I just paid for my Adobe license for the month for the relevant app.

[thunfisch]

Do you know of Scribus, or do you not consider it a good OSS equivalent for InDesign? Last time I've worked with InDesign was around 2011, and it was meh. Scribus is also really realy meh, but gets the job done. I've got an Affinity license and have been using Designer for a bunch of projects - to me it's a toss between that and Scribus for what I do. They are totally different, but I have more experience with Scribus and therefore am much quicker in using that.

[omnimus]

Scribus is unfortunately pretty bad and also almost dead. Its maybe interesting if you want to layout embeded LaTeX but the ux will make you hate yourself.

[raffraffraff]

My wife has been using it for years. Hates it. She upgraded a while back in the hope that the latest version was better, but it sucked. First, it did a one way upgrade in the file format, and every doc she printed from 1.6 looked like trash on her printer (no other settings changed). After messing with various settings for hours she downgraded to 1.5.x, restored her old configuration and and files from backups. Old version prints as expected. It also does totally weird and broken stuff, like the other day she was creating an A4 sheet with 6 cards on it. 5 were copy/pastes of the first one, with minor changes. When she printed it, only 3 of them actually printed even though they're visible onscreen. She printed to a PDF... Same thing. She created a new doc and copy/pasted all 6 into it and printed... they all printed fine. Like WTF is even going on there?

[omnimus]

Long time ago ive tried to help the project but really its just too complex of a problem for the few people that maintain it. At same time its dense C++ codebase that only experienced programmers will be able to contribite to. And those programmers often dont value UX/Design much so it becomes huge rift between bunch of designers unable to do anything themselves and few annoyed programmers.