I use macOS and I’m trying to find alternatives to the Adobe suite. I mainly use Photoshop & Lightroom.
I’m not that great at parsing Privacy Policies and understanding what is good and what is not, so I’m hoping some of you great people here might have run into looking for good alternatives to these two apps.
I know that GIMP and DarkTable exist, but - and no offense - I cannot get around the lack of polish that GIMP has in its UI/UX. Somewhat similar comment for DarkTable, though that one is a little bit better. Another issue with DarkTable, though, is that every time I resize the app window it completely glitches and just makes the entire UI a white screen. So at the moment I can barely even try to use it.
Free is cool, but not at all a priority, and honestly I think I’d rather pay because that way I know the company is making money and can continue to pay engineers to update the software.
In my searches, I’ve found a few potential candidates, and I was wondering if anyone has any info about these apps when it comes to privacy?
Affinity Photo has a decent privacy policy. They were recently acquired by Canva so I am slightly concerned about future versions being more cloud-focused, but at least you could continue using the current version for as long as it runs on your computer. I bought both V1 and then later the current V2 version and use them almost every day (mostly Designer though, not Photo).
Right, another thing I like about Affinity is the perpetual license, so I don’t have to worry about constant updates where they might sneak something unsavory in.
The only cloud features they seemed interested in implementing were cloud storage. They got a massive amount of backlash when Canva just bought the company, and it seems they’re being careful about adjusting the business model in any way. Affinity users are twitchy and usually come from Adobe; they don’t want to see the same thing happen.
It’s a little unfortunate Canva doesn’t seem interested in bringing the Affinity Suite to the web to compete with Adobe.
Re: GIMP - the UI in 3.0 is still not great, but it is much improved with some necessities finally included. Give it a few more years; it seems promising.
Unfortunately, I’ve found it unreliable and slow with the files I work with. This is more than I can say for Photoshop’s official webapp, which is notably worse than Photopea at the moment.
I also gave Viva Designer a go, but the inDesign import does not work very well. It’s impressive it works at all (more than you can say for any other inDesign competitor), but I need it to work great.
It would be nice to get away from Adobe (realistically, that’s not happening), but I’d settle for being able to use Adobe applications on the web. It’s not there yet.
Yeah, well this has happened enough times for me to know it is never about what the customer wants. I think either Affinity has to become more like Canva, or Canva will become more like Affinity, and I can only hope for the latter to be true. Only time will tell.
Well, for better or worse, I took the plunge and bought the Affinity universal license with all three of their apps.
I also did a pretty good read of DxO’s privacy policy and it seems like they were a better contender for privacy than Capture One. In particular I like that point #6 says explicitly:
We will not access your Product Data except in the following limited circumstances: (1) to provide you with technical support, solely at your request and with your permission; (2) on a limited-access basis to install updates, produce regular backups, or restore data from backups at your request. We will not provide your Product Data to any third party or permit any third party to access your Product Data, except by your permission or to comply with valid legal requirements.
Affinity’s biggest selling point is its perpetual license for a low cost. Canva is a SaaS company that makes money from subscriptions. They’ve made numerous promises to keep the perpetual license, but it’s obvious they’re losing out on money that way.
The cloud storage model is an attempt to start hitting up users for monthly bills without impacting the core product proposition. As you say, time will tell where they go from there.
for the latter to be true. Only time will tell.