STEPHEN M GRANT

You know that nasty feeling you get when you know you're being ripped off, but there's nothing you can do about it? Like a £130 traffic ticket for having a part of your wheel in a bus lane, or discovering that you've been paying twice what you thought you were for an insurance premium since they kindly renewed it automatically? Well I've had that feeling about Adobe's offering for some time.

 

Now there's no doubt that Adobe created world-beating software. I've been using Photoshop since the early nineties and Premiere since about '97 or so and there was nothing to touch them. They  were the industry standards.

 

Things went on and Adobe became unassailable – used almost universally and in a professional context, almost exclusively. Their pricing model was exorbitant, but there was no real choice because they had the market by the pubes. After a decade or so of meaningful improvements, they started issuing 'upgrades' which were no more than tweaks and useless additions that nobody really wanted, much less needed, but which enabled Adobe to issue another version and rake in the millions as users the world over ensured they stayed 'current'. 

 

Around the turn of the decade, users realised that they could happily skip a version or two, saving themselves over a grand in the process. Realising this, in 2013 Adobe went to a cloud-based rental scheme, charging by the month. Shortly after that, they disabled earlier versions of the software bought outright by customers by dumping the online registration check. If you loaded your version of, say Photoshop CS5, it simply wouldn't run even though you had paid through the nose for it and had become thoroughly proficient in its use.

 

Like so many other Adobe 'customers', I had no choice but to go with them. Charged monthly, updated whenever they decided, increasingly resource-hungry and bloated, unavailable for use unless you were online – the whole Adobe experience had become a necessary evil instead of an enjoyable creative process. It was still great software of immense capability, but it was becoming more and more difficult to use. They kept on tweaking it with useless additions, adding more and more barnacles to what was once a fast, sleek hull.

 

The buzz online was growing more and more anti-Adobe. They were ripping us off. They were squeezing every last cent out of us. They kept increasing prices. Who on earth wanted the additions on the latest upgrade that took half an hour to download and install while I had an urgent deadline? We weren't customers - we were hostages.

(I'm not exaggerating here – there was a change.org petition that passed 30,000 signatures within a couple of weeks of the announcement.)

There were numerous syncing issues and failures, and one guy memorably described the user experience and one of 'mouseclicks and crossed fingers'. Adobe ignored the clamour calling for the reinstatement of software ownership, and then in 2014, Adobe's cloud failed.

 

It is a day I remember well, because I was working hard on a publicity brochure for a client and was simply locked out. There was nothing I could do. For me – that was the last straw. I migrated from Adobe wherever I could, but whilst I found a terrific alternative for Illustrator and Indesign in Xara Pro, I could not find a credible alternative for Photoshop. There were quite a few pretenders, but none it seemed, could match the sheer capability of Photoshop. I had also become so used to it, the migration to another package was going to prove difficult.

 

It was the same with Adobe Premiere. Then Blackmagic came along with DaVinci Resolve. In a single seamlessly integrated suite, it took on Premiere Pro, Audition and After Effects and swept them aside. It had a completely fresh approach, it was high-end (by that I mean broadcast/movie standards) and had colour correction that made Adobe's offering look insipid and overblown.

And it was free of charge. There was a Studio edition with professional high-end extras, which cost £240 and came with lifetime upgrades. However, if you bought a BlackMagic Camera or peripheral, the Studio version was bundled with it.

 

An exodus followed. Filmmakers, editors and colorists flocked to it droves, myself included, and without labouring the biblical analogy too much, it was a revelation. It showed the Adobe suite up for what it was – bloated, obtuse, resource-hungry and increasingly out-of-date.

 

But I was still stuck paying Adobe each month for Photoshop, at the mercy of their cloud, the sync failures and the vagaries of my broadband connection and the internet. Then I read of Affinity Photo. Professionals were raving about it as the programme enabling them to break the chains and release them from the Adobe model. There were a lot of 'Photoshop vs Affinity' videos on YouTube, and they were consistent: Affinity Photo did everything they needed it to do. What it DID have was a truly seamless workflow, and most importantly of all – on-the-fly actions. You no longer needed to render a file in order to see the results. That alone, is a huge advantage.

 

So I went for it. There was a fully-functional 30-day trial version which I downloaded. Three days later, I bought the licence. I did the same with Affinity Designer, and I am absolutely delighted with both.  Photo is just as capable as Photoshop, but it has a number of distinct advantages which make it a better programme. I long since ditched Illustrator for Xara Pro, but Affinity Designer is a league above even the excellent Xara Pro, which I'm using less and less as I use affinity more and more.

 

At just under £100 for the two, with no monthly charges and free interim upgrades, I have left  Adobe behind altogether.  So bye bye Adobe, and good riddance.