If I’m using CC suite for InDesign/Lightroom/PS/Premiere Pro/Acrobat is there a cheap/free combination of options that actually replaces the functionality of those programs? Alternatively, are there any maritime options that will work and not come with Israeli malware? I don’t know enough about it anymore to confidently pick something that wouldn’t end up being more trouble to keep working than it’s worth.
You are not gonna find full replacements for adobe products but you can always pirate
InDesign: https://www.scribus.net/
Lightroom: https://www.darktable.org/
Photoshop:
- GNU IMP: https://www.gimp.org/
- Krita: https://krita.org/en/
Illustrator: https://inkscape.org/
Premiere Pro: https://kdenlive.org/
Acrobat:
- Reading PDFs:
- Windows: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader
- macOS: I like Sioyek, but there are like a million options (including Preview.app if you’re lazy)
- Creating PDFs: Everything listed above (where sensible) can export PDFs
- Editing PDFs:
- https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/draw/
- Inkscape can also do this
- Preview.app can do some basic edits
Awesome, I’ll check it all out
Reading PDFS:
- Firefox
- Evince
- Zotero
If you have a edu email from any former university time you can try and get a student discount via college buys
As far as I can tell it just needs you to have the college email address but otherwise doesn’t check anything
Try the open source stuff first but if there’s something you really can’t do without then go to a reputable tracker or metatracker and grab a high seed/leach-count torrent of your desired “linux iso” and you’ll be fine, these days it’s the official releases that come with the spyware…
I replaced CC with:
Affinity suite (v2, pre Canva, still works) for Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, it is pretty impressive if your Adobe workflow doesn’t rely heavily on plugins. The InDesign equivalent can do stuff to PDFs, but you won’t find the form builders etc. that Acrobat has.
Exposure x7 for a Lightroom-alike, it’s not as good (noticeably, highlight recovery from blown-out RAWs is much better in Lightroom) but it does the job for me
DaVinci Resolve for PremierIf you don’t need to be able to collaborate professionally Affinity works well enough. Canva bought it, which sucks, but it works and the UI isn’t complete shit like a lot of alternatives. Iirc it will open psd and idml files without issue (idml not indd tho). The RAW editor is not great though
Otherwise rutracker has several options
Holy hell, Canva is cancer. Someone tried to get me to learn it and as soon as I found out that you can’t export real vector files I never opened it again.
It’s cute for birthday cards but unbelievably ill-suited for real design work.
I’ve heard affinity is pretty good and it does illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop stuff, it’s free but they jammed some optional AI stuff.
For drawing I’d recommend krita, if you need a substitute for that part of Photoshop.
For video editing you can use DaVinci Resolve, it’s free but has a one time purchase version with extra features.
Acrobat is tricky, if you just want a pdf reader there are many, but some features of their pro version I have never found on other programs.
I remember using darktable for photo editing, it seems good, but I’ve never used lightroom, so idk.
That’s sort of what I heard about affinity. I don’t do all that much design work but I do enough that hiring it out would be a lot more expensive than having the tools available to me (or at least it was a couple of price hikes ago).
I see people saying good things about Davinci but I’m sure it’s going to be a pain in the ass to learn. Premiere Pro was such a slog to get the hang of but I’m tired enough of Adobe to make the commitment.
Acrobat is the big bonus item that made the CC suite worth it. The big programs were really useful but full editable control of PDFs is such a benefit.
Depends on the functionality you expect from each, and if you work alone or integrated into a company relying on Adobe products. But yes, in general, you could replace every single Adobe product with an alternative, either libre or proprietary.






