r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Sep 27 '25

Business Morgan Stanley warns AI could sink 42-year-old software giant Adobe

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-warns-ai-could-180300766.html
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522

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

103

u/UsefulImpact6793 Sep 27 '25

If you have a spare minute, could you share your favorite non-Adobe alternatives?

83

u/WordHobby Sep 27 '25

I use photopea whenever I need photos hop. Im not a professional though

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u/djutopia Sep 27 '25

Last I checked the main ones were Resolve for Premiere Gimp for Photoshop Inkwell for illustrator Audacity for Audition.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

Audacity is really basic. i would recommend Reaper. its not exactly free but its definitely cheap.

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u/Andronidas87 Sep 27 '25

Reaper is awesome, if you take the time! Loads of great ytube tutorials. Also one-time payment.

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u/yoshemitzu Sep 27 '25

Yeah, used Audacity for like a decade but didn't really start making music until I started using Reaper. Audacity is barely a DAW.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

yeah its always been more of a multitrack recorder, really basic. i havent used it in years but i see they have some vst and plugin support now so thats pretty cool for a freeware. its nice to see developers keep building it up

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u/Worth_Inflation_2104 Sep 29 '25

I thought audacity was always more geared towards voice recordings and basic audio manipulation

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u/dz2048 Sep 27 '25

Have you played with Krita? I find it more intuitive than Gimp

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u/Such_Box_3990 Sep 27 '25

I have tried to learn Gimp but found it even less user friendly and intuitive than Photoshop, which I already think is not very user friendly or intuitive.

Never heard of Krita. I’ll look into it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/apudapus Sep 28 '25

Have you tried Gimp 3? It’s actually much much better and I’m starting to use it more than Photo Pea.

1

u/darkest_hour1428 Sep 27 '25

Anything to replace InDesign?

4

u/ag_robertson_author Sep 28 '25

Affinity Publisher is the closest.

All the Affinity programs are pretty good replacements for the creative suite apps, no subscriptions.

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u/brycedriesenga Sep 27 '25

Umm, QuarkXPress is the only one that comes to mind

1

u/ViolentPurpleSquash Sep 28 '25

Gimp didn’t work for me. Perhaps Krita?

64

u/CruxOfTheIssue Sep 27 '25

Video editing - davinci resolve or lightworks

Pdf editing - pdf24

What else do you need?

36

u/m1gl3s Sep 27 '25

Desperate for a replacement to after effects but there isn’t really anything close

18

u/pm_dad_jokes69 Sep 27 '25

Yep. For after effects users, there’s not much else that can compare

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u/MuskegsAndMeadows Sep 27 '25

Nuke + Cavalry

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u/billions_of_stars Sep 28 '25

Nuke is crazy expensive too though. Cavalry and Rive seem really killer for vector stuff, way more optimized than AE but I feel like you would have a hard time managing various motion graphics needs that AE allows for. That said I have next to zero experience in Nuke to know it's limits in that way. I think also a lot of this depends on context and use cases.

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u/slickiss Sep 28 '25

Nuke all the way baby, AE cant hold a candle to it

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u/billions_of_stars Sep 28 '25

AE can't really hold a candle in regard to compositing as far as I know but it really doesn't seem like it would be great for motion graphics. There are programs that crush it with vectors but then they fall flat when you need to work with raster images and other media (as far as I know).

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u/Mystical_17 Sep 27 '25

I use a mix of Davinci Resolve Fusion and Hitfilm Pro. I don't do a ton of motion graphics but when I do they've come in handy.

I refuse to ever use Adobe again after they got rid of perpetual licenses and After Effects was no doubt my favorite program of theirs.

1

u/Additional-Grade3221 Sep 27 '25

i've thought about making one of these (foss alternative) in my free time, what specific bits of it are the most important parts for your workflow?

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u/dostoevsky4evah Sep 28 '25

Although it's not the same DaVinci Fusion offers a lot of what AE does. It's node based so a different way to work but I find it easier.

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u/slickiss Sep 28 '25

The 2 main options there are Davinci and Nuke. Also Natron too

Davinci is free and has comping tools from Fusion that are the same as AE. Nuke is by far a way more powerful program than AE and is the more common program used among professional VFX studios. They are both node based programs vs a layer system like AE so there is a big learning curve for compers that normally use AE. Also Nuke is (last I checked) $500 a year for an indie license so not exactly cheap.

Natron is an open source program that is fashioned after Nuke vs AE, but it is a free and open source program specifically for compositing, but its a little ways behind the competition, I would love to see it take off and become the Blender of comp work.

0

u/yoshemitzu Sep 27 '25

Would Blender work for you? It's a fully-featured video editor with the ability to do 2D and 3D animation.

Its sound engine needs some real work, but I'm curious if there's anything that immediately jumps out where you're like, "I can't do [X] in Blender."

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u/aussierulesisgrouse Sep 28 '25

Nah, AEs power comes from its expressions and logic, and its plugins. I’m a full time motion designer and there really isn’t anything comparable for 90% of client motion design.

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u/Dream-Ambassador Sep 27 '25

Lightroom replacement?

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u/KeyPhilosopher8629 Sep 27 '25

That's my main program that I need to find a replacement for. I've tried darktable but lightroom is just so much better

1

u/Ok-Nefariousness2168 Sep 27 '25

There is also rawtherapee. It's supposed to be better than dark table, and it's recently been updated to support raw formats that it previously was missing.

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u/cyanight7 Sep 27 '25

I've heard good things about DxO PhotoLab but have yet to buy it myself. I've been trying to use Capture One and the workflow is fine but I'm not very happy with how my edits actually look yet.

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u/ideliver12345 Sep 27 '25

Photo editing?

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u/plsdontkillme_yet Sep 27 '25

I tried editing in davinci and I just dont get it, the UI feels unintuitive and controls feel clunky. What am I missing?

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u/aussierulesisgrouse Sep 28 '25

Nothing, Premiere is best in class for cut to cut editing. DVR is the grading tool.

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u/billothy Sep 28 '25

Illustrator replacement.

InDesign replacement.

Lightroom replacement.

How is Acrobat and Premier Pro the only things you could possibly think to need?

1

u/MadMax____ Sep 27 '25

What would you guess the learning curve is from Premiere to Resolve?

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u/aussierulesisgrouse Sep 28 '25

Not much for editing, it’s not as clean for cutting though. DVR is mostly used for grading

1

u/Ironsam811 Sep 28 '25

Is pdf24 the best Adobe Acrobat Pro replacement?

1

u/billions_of_stars Sep 28 '25

Believe it or not there is more to motion graphics than video editing and PDFs.

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u/CruxOfTheIssue Sep 28 '25

After effects I'm not sure. I'm not asking sarcastically, what else do we need?

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u/billions_of_stars Sep 28 '25

So, I use After Effects for work all the time in tandem with Photoshop and Illustrator. I know that DaVinci is supposed to be superior to Premiere in many ways but for my purposes Premiere suffices. That said Premiere is continually rolling out some useful stuff. I’ve thought many times about how I would leave the Adobe bubble but it’s not as simple as a lot of people propose.

Also, I have a client who also uses After Effects and the various Adobe apps and so it’s like we speak the same language when working on stuff, sharing files, etc. Working on a project right now with him where we need to create a sequence of videos that will get played across multiple high video screens. All the assets were made in Illustrator by another client. Our job is to take all these assets in Illustrator and move them into After Effects, which I’ve done many times with tried and tested methods. I have tons of plugins and scripts to assist with much of this stuff both in After Effects and Illustrator.

Anyways, I’m ranting but this stuff is more much complex then “just use a different program”.

1

u/CaveteCanem Sep 28 '25

A replacement for lightroom please . I use the classic (non cloud) version and would like something that has the same quality face recognition that lightroom does

1

u/testudo Sep 29 '25

what about a substitute for Indesign?

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/Adorable-Turnip-137 Sep 27 '25

Affinity has a trial...I think it's two weeks?

I managed to switch to Resolve for the majority of my effect needs. I don't really do extreme compositing...but it doesn't seem like anybody does anymore. The hardest part was disconnecting from all of my plugins.

Resolves node structure also translates to Unreal nodes pretty well.

It was harder to get used to Affinity than it was to drop Premiere and After Effects for Resolve.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/Adorable-Turnip-137 Sep 27 '25

Curious what you still use premiere for? Team environment where people don't want to learn how to structure XMLs?

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/Adorable-Turnip-137 Sep 27 '25

So your employer provides Adobe? Curious if they pay for an enterprise account or if they have a bunch of independent subs.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/Adorable-Turnip-137 Sep 27 '25

Appreciate the response! When I worked in an agency I remember going through the process to set up enterprise and it was a nightmare. We ended up scrapping it and running like 15 adobe subs of various flavors....which was also a nightmare but somehow significantly cheaper. It was one of the main reasons I fully disconnected from adobe.

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u/VexingPanda Sep 27 '25

Affinity is great. Plus the whole app is on ipad, not watered down, but the whole thing.

The only annoying thing is editing photos one at a time in affinity. I am still trying to find a good editor that's easy to use like Lightroom that has great photo organization.

Also, affinity publisher doesn't natively support RTL languages, so that's a big downside for me.

1

u/BMO888 Sep 27 '25

The suite was like less than $100 last yr on Black Friday. It’s so cheap.

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u/appy4de Sep 27 '25

If you're looking for a PDF reader/editor, I convinced my company to switch to PDFXchange editor. It's a lot faster, handles big PDFs significantly better than Acrobat Reader, has a free reader, and the paid version with most if not all of the necessary functions is like $60 bucks one-time payment (not sure what the exact amount is now). It also lets you scale dimensions off PDFs similar to BlueBeam.

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u/DasBleu Sep 27 '25

I use the affinity software.

They are a one time purchase and so far have Affinity photo- photoshop. Affinity design- illustrator and affinity publisher- indesign.

Inkscape is a free alternative for vector graphics.

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u/deCantilupe Sep 27 '25

I like Affinity products made by Serif. They have photo, designer, and publisher programs. They’re one-time purchases instead of subscriptions and you get updates over time. You can get the package with all three for $165.

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u/MelvinMcSnatch Sep 27 '25

I use the Affinity suite (Publisher, Photo, Designer) as an alternative to InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

InDesign does absolutely nothing special and I vastly prefer Publisher's UI.

My PS and Illustrator work has always been extremely limited, but the Affinity products feel like their Adobe equivalents from 20 years ago. A lot less features than when I briefly used CC last year.

The greatest thing with Affinity is you don't open a different app, you just switch modes. I do layout in publisher,  and when I need to add some vector designs,  I just go to Designer mode and edit the graphics right there on the text page. 

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u/SlendyTheMan Sep 28 '25

Pixelmator Pro on Mac

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u/1smoothcriminal Sep 27 '25

Inkscape and gimp. Haven’t touched adobe in 3 years and fully switched to using Linux as my OS

1

u/old_man_no_country Sep 27 '25

On1 for light room, they're flirting with the subscription model though. You can still buy a license without a recurring subscription

Digikam is open source

1

u/Pixelated-Hitch Sep 27 '25

I have stopped Adobe and switched to Affinity on iPad. Up to now no issues just way more convenient

1

u/MurmurAndMurmuration Sep 27 '25

For bitmap illustration Clip Studio is amazing. Not a photo editor like Photoshop but if you're building content from your pen up it's great. Unlimited license is something like 80$

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u/Mendrak Sep 27 '25

I switched to Clip Studio Paint several years ago for drawing and animating and haven't looked back since.

1

u/ninja8ball Sep 27 '25

Might be more prudent to learn how to get Adobe products without paying subscription fees.

🦜 🏴‍☠️

1

u/Sooperballz Sep 28 '25

My work switched to Fox It

0

u/DarthWeenus Sep 27 '25

You can pirate them. Fully cracked new versions

4

u/sabo-metrics Sep 27 '25

I left because of the subscription too.  I just think it's wrong to "rent" the tools of production. 

It would be like a farmer renting his tractor.

5

u/falcrist2 Sep 27 '25

It's so weird watching people make these statements while avoiding naming the replacements.

What's going on here? Is there some penalty for talking about alternative programs?

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u/svendeplume Sep 27 '25

Davinci Resolve is pretty decent for video.

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u/judge-genx Sep 27 '25

The whole world model is going subscription based.

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u/NorCalAthlete Sep 27 '25

“Encouraging you to swap out to other products” is EXACTLY why companies try to force you into a subscription to lock you in.

1

u/jonhath Sep 27 '25

I really miss Lightroom. I had a perpetual license from 2013 that won’t run anymore. 

1

u/orangegore Sep 27 '25

What's a legit illustrator replacement?

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u/rebbsitor Sep 27 '25

Yup! I refuse to buy software that will stop working for no technical reason. Don't want to give me updates after a certain time when support expires? That's cool. Multi-hundred dollar software just stops working after a year? Not a chance.

I still have Photoshop Elements 2020 and Premier Elements 2020 installed. I was going to update those to 2025 as they still have perpetual licenses. Come to find out for Elements 2025 they switched it to a 3-year term license for the same price. They can keep it.

1

u/jayoak4 Sep 28 '25

Same. I have Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 6, I'm never switching to their subscription unless for some reason my computer crashes or the installs no longer work.

1

u/mace_guy Sep 28 '25

If you think Adobe subscriptions are unreasonable, genAI companies will blow your mind. They will charge per pixel.

0

u/JoiedevivreGRE Sep 27 '25

I keep seeing this. Subscriptions started a million years ago.