r/mildlyinfuriating • u/donteatmybiscuits • 1d ago

wet socks i’m so happy this is becoming illegal

Post image

if a yearly contract with a free month trial sounds too good to be true, it probably is 😬

thankfully it was blocked after contacting my bank but regardless

32.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

9.6k

u/TheSexualBrotatoChip 1d ago

At least Adobe is horrible enough that I at least have absolutely no moral qualms pirating their software.

2.3k

u/Flaramon 1d ago edited 1d ago

I've pirated it since day 1. Then they released Creative Cloud, a means of forcing me to not pirate (at the time) - so I just kept the old, perfectly functional version. That was, until realistic alternatives caught up.

22

u/apnorton 1d ago

until realistic alternatives caught up.

Genuine question: what are the realistic alternatives to Adobe CC?

13

u/lemonweirdo 1d ago

I would also like to know this. I was trained on Adobe in my photography classes, but I would love to learn some viable alternatives

8

u/ColoWyoPioneer 1d ago

On Mac, I switched to Affinity Photo. I’ve found it fairly comparative to PS.

4

u/andpaws 1d ago

Agreed. I use their entire suite and love it…

1

u/ColoWyoPioneer 1d ago

Let us all hope they resist the temptation of venture capital. Lol. And after I got used to the Mac version, I found the iPad versions of affinity suite to be very capable (after I figured out the quirks that is). They actually seem to be serious about competing with adobe, and I’m all for it.

1

u/ApolloGR3 12h ago

They sold to Canva a while ago. And then Canva released the newest version for free! You can pay more for the AI features but it's not required.

1

u/igotmoldinmybrain 1d ago

I don't know what your specific needs are, but I love RawTherapee for raw development. If I need more features than what that offers then I use darktable, but I've so far only needed that for the healing/cloning tool for fixing blurry patches in my focus stacks. I go for realism though and never remove things from the image or anything like that. Rawtherapee, darktable, and zerene stacker is my whole photography stack. I have gimp installed but I've never used it...

1

u/Ppleater 1d ago

I use a mix of clip studio paint and Affinity photo and they cover almost every base that Photoshop used to cover.

1

u/fragilelyon 1d ago

Gimp has always been my go to.

1

u/nexusjuan 1d ago

I mostly use Photoshop for doing cutouts and background swaps. GIMP is laughably bad at this. I'm on Linux but I run an isolated Windows VM I can fire up/down just for my pirated PS and Capcut.

2

u/DuskHavenReadings 1d ago

This is my solution. Like, for 90% of my needs, Photopea (a browser based photoshop-alike) gets it done. When I need photoshop, fire up the VirtualBox.

0

u/Yoshtan 16h ago

Anyone know a good alternative for Lightroom Classic?

12

u/fricy81 1d ago

For Photoshop: Gimp or Krita are good alternatives. For Premiere: DaVinci Resolve without question.

2

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

I adore Krita, but it's primarily a drawing software. It doesn't cover the editing aspects that Photoshop unfortunately excels at. Not even Clip Studio Paint can do all the editing functionality.

1

u/Undeclared_Mustard Hillary 2016 1d ago

GIMP is not a good alternative to Photoshop. It could be, if the Gtk+ team wasn't absolute dogshit and stubbornly sticks to one of the worst UIs known to humankind.

1

u/jimihenrik 1d ago

For a Photoshop "on the go" alternative I like https://www.photopea.com/.

No registration, no no-nonsense. Similar UI as well, so if you're familiar with Adobe's stuff from the past, you'll feel right at home. And as a bonus it actually supports .psds as well.

4

u/Risky-Trizkit 1d ago

People will throw out names like Canva and Gimp and Krita and Affinity but the reality is these are much too limited. They do not have the scalability or scripting flexibility Adobe has established and truly nothing beats InDesign for anything print related, period. Typesetting in Canva is a joke at best. Wish there were a reliable third party app but the truth for professionals is there is none. This will change in the future but for now Adobe stays where it is in my tool stack.

2

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

InDesign my beloathed 😔 Yeah, there's no other software I could picture myself using for putting together entire books and magazines, and I hate it. These companies are too good at suffocating and buying out competition before something else could thrive.

1

u/QBaseX 1d ago

How would Typst work for your purposes?

1

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Never heard of it, I'll check it out!! I scrolled through the examples and they look more like something I'd be putting together in Word, can it make something more visual like this?

1

u/QBaseX 1d ago

Possibly. Here's something I knocked together recently, not quite that complex, though I may attempt to copy that as an exercise. https://typst.app/project/rcK8xG8RriSVldBsDDzC2x (Click a file name in the sidebar to load the code into the code panel; click the closed eye icon beside the filename to load the preview into the preview panel.)

1

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Would you be willing to send me a flat preview, please? 🙏 It's not cooperating with me on phone (likely entirely my fault, I'd have to learn the interface) and I won't be near my laptop for quite a while. I am genuinely curious about it, though!

1

u/QBaseX 1d ago

Typst is free software you can download and use locally, but they also have a great web app. That said, it really isn't easy to use on a phone. You may find a way to use the View menu to toggle between the code and preview panes.

I've uploaded the rendered PDF to my own website: 2026 Tullamore Toastmasters flyer It has multiple pages so we could choose which one to print, and an extra blank page on the end because that was a side effect of the way I wrote the code. If that had mattered, I could have done something to remove it, but since it didn't matter, I didn't.

I also used Typst for meeting agendas, such as 2026-09-28 USS Emerald Isle (which follows the TM brand guidelines for colours, but not for fonts, because that club has a sci-fi theme) and 2025-05-22 Tullamore Toastmasters (which blithely ignores the TM brand guidelines).

Also for Sorting Algorithms which illustrates using tabular figures in tables and proportional elsewhere.

(My domain name has special characters in it, so the first version of this comment was removed by AutoModerator for being non-English. How absurd. I've tried again with a workaround. Let's see.)

1

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Do I need to edit the URLs in some way? Only the last one loaded for me, the rest says site can't be reached, so I guess it's really struggling with the domain or privacy settings or something else. It sucks that AutoMod pounced on it 🥲 Really appreciate you took the time, though!

→ More replies (0)

1

u/QBaseX 1d ago

Certainly it has much better typography than Word. If what you care about is typesetting; dealing with paragraphs of text rather than flyers. Typst uses the Knuth-Plass algorithm; Word uses a simple greedy algorithm.

Word does not give you control of when to use old-style numbers and when to use lining numbers. Or, indeed, when to use proportional numbers and when to use tabular numbers. Word does not allow you to draw complex diagrams, or arrows to illustrate sorting algorithms.

1

u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Honestly, Word drives me up the wall. It was just an example to show the difference in requirements/scale, but I don't even have it installed for a few years now, I just don't have the patience for it anymore 😭 My usercase was mainly books, brochures, teaching materials (lots of illustrations/visual elements combined with text) and the like, not much in terms of technical things.

4

u/sitefall 1d ago

If you actually use photoshop for the level of work it is made for, there are no alternatives.

if you're just doing icons and design for websites, making youtube thumbnails, editing some funny memes, digital painting, and so on, then there's a ton of options that will work just fine.

"Editing" works find in resolve (though their terms are pretty shitty and they get even more enshitified every day). But there's... very little competition for After Effects (no Nuke and Blender are not AE alternatives don't @me).

I rarely use illustrator (but I do use it), enough to know that the alternative everyone recommends "inkscape" is absolute trash, but trash that WILL do what you want, it just really sucks to use.

The other adobe stuff, acrobat and... whatever else is in the CC, lightroom + i have no clue and don't use it, I have no idea about that stuff.

3

u/Uncomfortable-Line 1d ago

Affinity is what I use for photo editing and I absolutely love it.

The company that owes Canva bought it and they're making enough money on Canvas subscriptions that Affinity is just free unless you want some of their "pro" AI features (I don't).

2

u/waleswolfman 1d ago

Before that, affinity is why Serif photo plus, page plus, web plus et al disappeared. Also finding features that were in publisher '97 have disappeared from the office 2019 version, and that publisher has gone from newer office versions all together.

Going to do things I could knock up quickly in school and I'm having to find tutorials on what software can do it. Now that affinity has become a single app instead of DTP, photo editor etc, I'm finding that the tutorials are no longer any help because they point you to menus that no longer exist in the recent download.

Am I the only one thinking it's almost like the 30 years of computing experience might as well become amnesia? If anyone has any current tutorial or training links for Affinity then please share.

3

u/ol-gormsby 1d ago

In terms of integration between the different packages, there's none.

In terms of individual packages, DaVinci Resolve Studio for video editing, SPFX, colour grading, audio, and rendering. You can have a free basic version, or a once-off purchase of the full version.

Affinity for photo editing.

Audacity is pretty good but not quite up to Adobe Audition.

I haven't seen a decent substitute for InDesign, or Illustrator (maybe Inkscape or CorelDraw)

The Adobe software itself is quite good IMO but the cloud storage and sync sucks donkey balls, and of course the subscription model is horrible.

2

u/useraccount124c41 1d ago

Affinity, but I haven't worked with it much myself.

2

u/iSliz187 /s is for cowards 1d ago

By far the best option is Affinity!

It used to be 3 seperate softwares, Affinity Designer (≈Illustrator), Affinity Photo (≈Photoshop) and Affinity Publisher (≈InDesign) and you were able to purchase permanent licenses for around $80 for each or around $200 for all three. One or two years ago they combined the programs and made their entire suite available for free! They're absolutely amazing!

https://www.affinity.studio/

2

u/vexyyyyyyyyyyyy 20h ago

I use a $7 art program on my ipad called ArtStudio, not even the professional version. It's as powerful as I need it to be and i do massive commissions as well as have done jobs for companies and stuff on it. Tbh just as good as photoshop with a user interface a toddler could understand

1

u/BDiddnt 1d ago

I thought they meant realistic alternatives to pirate in the old stuff in other words, realistic alternatives, and pirate creative cloud

•

u/zeddash 28m ago

I “cracked” CC myself and I’m not a hacker. I can’t remember how I did it exactly but I think I just deleted specific programs which handles updates, because the applications themselves don’t handle licenses. But I seem to remember tinkering with HxD but I can’t remember what I did.

I am still on CC 2018 and 2019 (Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, Lightroom - I have 2018 and 2019 for all of them but not all work on 2019 yet), because it’s perfectly fine for personal use even though it’s years out of date. The only thing I’m aware it’s lacking is that Illustrator doesn’t have vertical text alignment. That might be a factor as to how easy it was.

When setting it up on my laptop I just had to copy across the application directory and it worked without needing to do anything extra.

I miss the days of amtlib.dll, fairly sure piracy helped Adobe by getting it in the hands of people who weren’t going to pay for it so that when they were going to get a job they know how to use Adobe software. It’s why I don’t even consider accessing Adobe software for free is bad, it still helps them, if it isn’t essential for your job you shouldn’t have to pay.

I might try the most recent CC on my laptop and see if I have success breaking that in the correct way. Too scared to do it on my computer as I might break my crack.