I won't miss you Adobe
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks were web design industry standard for many years. Everybody is familiar with these tools not because they are incredibly amazing but because they were the only choice. Some time ago Adobe changed their sales model to a monthly subscription. So many web developers and designers (including myself) were not very happy with that politics. Fortunately few new applications came out recently and finally we have the opportunity to use something else. I have tested a few of them: Sketch for UI and Pixelmator and Affinity Photo for photo retouching. Finally I’m ready to leave Adobe’s world!
My toolset of choice is Sketch + Affinity Photo. I can’t describe how amazing these two tools are. Pixelmator is an amazing piece of software as well, but it doesn’t do anything that I’m not able to do with Affinity Photo. Let me list few things that I like the most in my new set of design software.
Money, money, money
Of course the main reason that pushed me to look for new tools was the super high price of Adobe’s subscription. The minimum that I need to accomplish in my daily tasks is a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. Lets compare the price of these apps with my current toolkit.
- Adobe Creative Cloud: £45.73 per month
- Sketch 3: £79.99
- Affinity Photo: £39.99
You don’t have to be a math genius to notice that two months of subscription of Adobe Creative Cloud costs you about the same price like lifetime license for Sketch and Affinity Photo. I like it!
Let’s talk about performance
I prefer to use apps that do what I need and not much more. Sublime Text is a good example. It comes as a very plain text editor and if I need to add some missing feature, a small plugin solves the problem. Photoshop is a perfect example of an application that is the absolutely opposite. Things like 3D or video editing built in the core of Photoshop is a crap idea. I’m assuming that I have used maybe 1% of the available features, if not less. It causes performance issues. I like their competitors approach. Literally everything that you need and not much more. If you need a super cool feature in Sketch, I’m more than sure you can find a plugin to do that. Affinity Photo includes everything that I need, easy interface to work with and performance is so much better than in PS. As I expected from photo retouching tool it does it very well and not much more.
All these features takes some space on your hard drive. It is definitely not the most important factor for me, but I just don’t like to keep things that I don’t need. Let’s have a look as required space on our machines:
- Adobe Photoshop CC 2015: 1.78GB
- Sketch 3: 38MB
- Affinity Photo: 575MB
iCloud integration
Open, done! Save, done! Open on different computer and do some changes, done! Quick and easy. Thanks to iCloud integration. I’m aware of Creative Cloud, but do I really need another cloud in my life?
PHOTOshop is made for photos, not graphics interfaces
It never worked for me as a UI tool. Things like broken pixel snapping or totally unpredictable typefaces rendering drives me nuts. These are the things that you don’t want to spend time on to fix and be focused on design instead. For photos retouching I can’t think of a better tool. The problem is I’m not a retoucher.
Features
I don’t want to describe in depth about available features because you can find hundreds articles like that on Medium.com. I just want to say that Sketch and Affinity Photo gives me everything that I need for basic design tasks. Things like pages and artboards in Sketch or saving pretty well compressed .jpgs for web are amazing. All the cool features are very intuitive and well documented in the help tab.
I won’t miss you Adobe
I wish to see Adobe’s update soon that will make theirs tools fresh and modern like they were few years ago. For now I’m more than happy to use my brand new toolkit and I’m ready to get rid of every Adobe app from my computer.
What’s your opinion about Adobes recent changes? What is your toolkit of choice? Hmm? Photoshop addicts, how much do you hate me now?
Really, I appreciate adobes changes because they feature must helpful for designer and creative person who used this daily. Adobe is my favorite version.Always I am waiting for her updated.
You can still get the full Adobe CS6 Master Collection with all Adobe Software for One Hundred Fifty One and it downloads from Adobe. Check it out.
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On the licensing.
If you count the pile of money you needed to pay per EACH Adobe's piece of software update, and compare it to 50/mo subscription on yearly payment (which comes to ~$600), the subscription model is actually a money saver.
Sketch's license is not lifetime since last year. It's kinda subscription too, it's just cost you less.
The only winner here is Affinity, which I'm sure will also revise it's income model over the time.
Good point with a licence for a Sketch. I published this article long time ago and things changes since then. Thanks for a comment and have a great day.