I have decided to finally act on a dream of mine to pursue a creative hobby, and I hope to eventually get to a point where I am making either webcomics or youtube videos.
Unlike a good number of youtubers already, I am fucking poor, and adobe is the gold standard of editing software and they know it, hence why it's so overpriced.
I would happy to hear of any alternatives.
I was ready to leave Adobe but then they added content-aware fill and I haven't been able to replace it.
Affinity Photo is a good alternative to Ps, if you are editing - you buy it once and keep the license forever and if you are more into creative work, I recommend Clip Studio - it's what I use now after moving away from Ps for my painting. It has a raft of extra features for making comics - from in-built 3D tools to build scenes that you can use as the basis for line work (including figure posing and importing assets), to creating pages with editable comic frames. They occasionally have sales where you can pick it up for 50% off.
And Shotcut is a feature-heavy open source video editor that is awesome. Comes with robust non-linear editing, audio and video effects, and solid export options. I use it instead of Premiere for quick editing jobs, works like a champ.
For webcomics specifically, check out Krita. It is very good.
For video editing, check out Kdenlive. It is very good.
Not that you asked, but Darktable is a pretty good alternative to Adobe Lightroom as well. In my personal experience, I found that it recognized which lens I was using on my α6000 from the EXIF data and was capable of automatically applying lens correction filters. It's a great RAW photo developer. I have a buddy who does professional photography and uses Lightroom and he's been impressed by the occasional photo I crank out of my open source pipeline. At one point I tried fucking around with astrophotography and I was able to use Darktable to automatically control the camera and capture a long series of exposures. Unfortunately there was too much dew and I only got a couple usable images. Not enough to stack. (It took me nearly three hours to get that damn equatorial mount calibrated and the telescope focused on the camera sensor and I never did it again lmfao)
Gimp is kind of a dog. It's good enough for making memes and light photo editing, but it is no utopia. That said, I learned on Gimp and find Photoshop incomprehensible. Gimp has some limitations with regards to colorspace and shit like that, but if you are designing media for the web this is completely irrelevant.
Inkscape (comparable to Adobe Illustrator) is pretty cool, but not as refined.
Gimp is kind of a dog
gimp is weird and probably worse for people who really know what they're doing but since its what i also learned on photoshop just makes me :cat-confused:
It seems like a completely different paradigm. That alone doesn't make it good or bad, but even taking the most charitable perspective on Gimp, claiming it is superior, it is no drop-in replacement.
Then again, this applies to most complex software. The fundamental workflows in Solidworks, Creo, Fusion360, and FreeCAD are very similar, but they are incredibly complicated pieces of software and if you want to get really good at one, you have to get really good at one. Surely the same applies to Maya vs. Blender (Blender is actually great though).
I've used Gimp a little and it's alright. You can pirate PS but like the version that I used to have required disconnecting from the internet while it loaded, which was a bit of a pain.
Pirate the industry standard software
All these open source alternatives are great, but you're going to have a harder time finding tutorials etc simply due to a smaller userbase
I don't know shit about video editing.
For image editing:
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Gimp is for editing or combining photographs. The stuff you find on subreddits birdswitharms, animalswithnoneck, and hybridanimals. You can paint in it, but it sucks.
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Krita is for painting. Use when you would use IRL paints, but don't want a mess.
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Inkscape is for vector graphics. Things with crisp lines, cartoony things, clipart, that sort of stuff. It has a slightly longer learning curve than the others, but once you learn it, it is by far the easiest and fastest for this specific kind of work.
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For the life of me I can't find a good free, open source video editing software. I've tried a dozen of them, they all suck shit. Pirate something like CyberLink PowerDirector.
For a Photoshop alt it depends what you need it for but there are great free and open source options. For photo manipulation people recommend GIMP, but I find that program needlessly complicated and obtuse, photo manip isn't something I need often so I can't speak to it really. But if you want graphic design then I say Krita all the way. I love Krita, I love their community, I can't recommend it enough for comics or digital drawing/painting.
Blender has features to be an After Effects alternate - so could be good instead of Premiere as well but I haven't really tried Photopea, GIMP instead of Photoshop
I do have the original CS6 Master collection files that I installed from Adobe directly before it got clapped
...with one smol bit of :downloading-communism:
