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After a decade in Adobe's ecosystem, I replaced Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere with free alternatives

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After a decade in Adobe's ecosystem, I replaced Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere with free alternatives

Adobe's creative applications remain industry standard for good reason. Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere are mature, powerful, and supported by an enormous ecosystem. The problem is that using them means accepting an ongoing subscription, even if you only need a fraction of their features.

So after having my creative projects stuck in Adobe's walled gardens for the better part of a decade, I decided to free them and replace Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere with free apps. And before I knew it, that $70 monthly Adobe subscription became hard to justify.

I stopped paying for design software after I realized Blender, GIMP, and Inkscape were better and didn't cost me anything to use.

GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is about as good a free Photoshop alternative as you can get. It's packed with tools for photo retouching, composition, and layer-based editing that rival Photoshop and other professional image editing programs. There are several key areas where GIMP outperforms Photoshop by quite a margin.

The interface can be a little different, especially if you're used to Photoshop. Thankfully, you can patch GIMP to feel like Photoshop and have a much easier time getting used to the program. It also supports external plugins, including some that can make GIMP more powerful than Photoshop.

If you're a painter or digital artist, Krita is another open-source Photoshop rival that's better than it has any right to be . It's designed specifically for painting and illustration rather than photo manipulation.



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