My Love/Hate Relationship With Adobe
Adobe and I need marriage counseling. I love the Adobe Creative Cloud, and I use it every day, but it can really get on my nerves sometimes. In this excerpt, I will go through most of the major programs and list what I like and what I hate about them, and some alternatives that might be worth checking out.
I’ll start with Adobe as a whole; as a company. Adobe has made it possible for people like me to do what I do. For decades they have created cutting edge software that enables creatives to be creative. From individual apps to cloud syncing, to AI like Adobe Sensei, they have continuously paved the way for a brighter future. All this being said, they have some serious issues. They have an incredible design language called Spectrum that they just refuse to use in most cases. Their programs are inconsistent and buggy, and they frequently just stop working entirely. In some ways, they pretty much have a monopoly, which lets them get complacent and stop striving to create a better product. In many cases, so many of the people that use their software are professionals that have been in the industry for decades, and would throw a conniption fit if Adobe changed anything at all with the software they use, even if it was clearly for the better. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to designers, motion graphics artists, video editors, etc. who would perish the thought of a more broad acceptance of Spectrum across platforms simply because the fonts might change. But this article isn’t here to lay into older creatives who have stalled their own creativity and forgotten why they do what they do, it is here to lay into Adobe for not forcing their hand.
Adobe Photoshop
Good Alternatives: Affinity Photo (Mac, PC, iPad - $50) - Photopea (Web, $0)
Your high school sweetheart, your first love, the program that introduced you to the creative world. Chances are, this was the first Adobe product you learned how to use. Countless careers have started with some kid trying to make a meme, pirating a copy of Photoshop, and enjoying it so much it turns into their new life. Adobe PS is an incredible tool that has been at the forefront of the design world for decades. To this day, it remains the most advanced raster graphics editor on the market. With new advances in AI, masking subjects, even with transparency, has become ridiculously easy. Its probably the least flawed out of all the Adobe products, and you don’t even need the full Creative Cloud to use it. You can get the photography plan for only $10/month. All this being said, it still has some problems. For one, the cleanliness of the Spectrum design language has yet to be implemented, and the UI is incredibly slow and laggy in comparison to the beautifully smooth ride in newer programs like XD and Lightroom. Photoshop is prone to crashing under stress with a lot of layers, and I’m running on an extremely beefy PC. In fact, it seems like Photoshop runs better on my MacBook Pro than it does on my desktop PC sometimes. This is most likely due to poor optimization, but that would just prove my point further. C’mon guys, you’re Adobe. You have essentially unlimited resources. Optimize Photoshop.
Adobe Illustrator
Good Alternatives: Affinity Designer (Mac, PC, iPad - $50) - Gimp (Mac, PC - $0)
If PS wasn’t your first Adobe program, AI probably was. Like Photoshop, it is probably the most advanced vector editor program out there. It has a rough learning curve for people coming from raster editing, but once you understand the concepts of vector graphics, it all falls into place like magic. Im not really an artist, more of a technician, so I mainly use it for logos and icons, rather than full illustrations, but its capabilities are near endless. However, it suffers from the same stagnation that plagues Photoshop. The complaints I had about PS apply here as well, along with some minor things, like how difficult it can be to work with grouping and direct selection.
Adobe After Effects
Good Alternatives: Motion 5 (Mac - $50) - Blender (Mac, PC, - $0)
AE, the mitochondria of the Creative Cloud, the powerhouse of the suite. It seems no matter how much you learn about AE, theres always more to know. Essentially a glorified, no-code javascript editor, After Effects has almost unlimited potential. Unlike PS and AI, if you really want to master AE, you’re going to have to spend hundreds of hours diving into its many capabilities. Also unlike the aforementioned, it has a much wider support of third party plug-ins that open up a whole world of new possibilities. But AE has its woes. Its incredibly resource hungry, and can easily take up hundreds of gigabytes of cache files in only a few minutes of previews. In fact, purging the RAM cache is such a frequent necessity that I created a macro bound to my epic gamer mouse so I don’t have to Edit>Purge>All Memory and Disk Cache every five minutes. I suggest you do the same. I can see how it would be very difficult to implement the full Spectrum design language across this program, but I still think Adobe could pull it off. However, my biggest issue with AE is the lack of real-time rendering. Having to wait for previews as the engine re-renders my entire pre-comp every time I move an asset one pixel over is a pain in the ass, pardon my french. I just wish it could use the full power of my GPU in the way that Octane Render does with Cinema 4D. When you have 32GB of RAM and AE is still pitter pattering along trying its best to figure out how to add motion blur to your project, it can be quite infuriating. Also, please save your projects often. AE has a fun habit of crashing and not auto saving your work like PS or AI, especially when working on large projects with many third party plug-ins. But good luck using any of the other motion graphics platforms out there, they pale in comparison.
Adobe Lightroom
Good Alternatives: Pixelmator Pro (Mac, iPad - $40) - Affinity Photo (Mac, PC, iPad - $50)
Don’t even get me started on Lightroom. Ok fine, I’ll bite. THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS OF LIGHTROOM THAT ESSENTIALLY DO THE SAME THING. Why, God, why. Let me lay this out for you. Adobe Lightroom uses the same engine that Photoshop uses for its Camera Raw filter. For years LR was the go to program for Photographers for its ease of use and batch editing features. In 2017, Adobe thought it was time to fix the laggy outdated mess that was Lightroom, so they did. They made an incredible new version of Lightroom that kept almost all of the features it had before, while simplifying the UI and beautifully integrating the new Spectrum design language. BUT THEN THEY DIDN’T GET RID OF THE OLD LIGHTROOM. They just renamed it to Lightroom Classic, and now there are two versions of Lightroom. LR Classic is still just as outdated and slow as it was before, and now there is a new app called LR CC that can sync presets with the app on your phone for mobile editing, and has all the batch features and engine power of LR Classic. But good luck finding any tutorials on how to use the new version of LR, because LR Classic used to be called LR CC. So now if you look up tutorials for LR CC you only get stuff for LR Classic, and if you look up tutorials for LR Classic, well I don’t know what you’re doing. Use the new Lightroom. It’s better. Get your head out of the sand and stop giving Adobe a reason to make the Creative Cloud even more bloated.
Adobe XD
Good Alternatives: Figma (Mac, PC - $0) - Sketch (Mac, - $100)
Experience Design had a rough start but is now an essential software that I use every day. It was originally made for UX prototyping, and it does its job well in that regard. It gets new features every month, and is very quickly catching up to the power of Figma. I use XD in place of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and even Adobe InDesign and Illustrator sometimes. Its raster and vector editing capabilities are limited, but the simplicity and smoothness of the experience put the rest of the Adobe products to shame. Fully designed with Spectrum, it is everything I want the other programs to look and perform like. My biggest complaint is its lack of functionality. But I find myself making more complex assets and graphics in PS and AI, and then throwing them into XD as soon as I can to do the rest of what I normally would use PS or AI for, such as layout, layering, and exporting. It would be nice to have more features for print design, such as a system for adding bleeds and margins. But XD wasn’t made for print design. That’s just me trying to avoid AI, ID, and PS as much as I can.
Other Adobe Products
That sums up how I feel about the Adobe products I use on the daily. But there are many more. I rarely use Premiere Pro, but when I do, I have the same issues that bother me with PS and AI. It works well but feels outdated and clunky, but what else am I going to do? Use Final Cut or worse yet, Vegas Pro? I think not. InDesign is something I try to avoid at all costs, as its entirely stuck in the mid 2000’s. It feels ancient, and more clunky than all the other programs combined, despite its powerful tool set. Audition seems like a decent DAW, if unconventional. Does it even count as a DAW? The only thing I’ve ever used it for is acapella isolation, which it doesn't do a very good job at. I feel like with Adobe’s recent advances in masking and compositing in AE and PS, making a high quality vocal isolator would not be out of the realm of possibility, and would really help me out so I don’t have to use weird EQ techniques in Logic Pro X or Ableton Live. Dreamweaver is a good program, but why would you use it when VSCode exists? Fuse, Bridge, and Dimention have some cool features but are pretty niche and I rarely use them. Mixamo is fantastic but its only a web app, and doesn’t really count as part of the CC. All I really want Adobe to do is make their apps consistent, and not crash. As the leading creative software developers in the world, I don’t think this is an unreasonable ask.
To summarize, my career relies on Adobe, but sometimes I wish it didn’t. When I can try alternatives, I do. When they make a program better, it gets me super hyped, but they shoot themselves in the foot so often it hurts my soul. Oh and Adobe, fix the icons. You know whats wrong with them. Stop. Get any designer from the community to draft up new icons. Students just learning AI can do a better job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to using your broken, clunky, bloated, overpriced software.
