Agreed - Scribus is a very capable application, but you can’t expect to use it well just by knowing principles of desktop publishing. There’s a lot of adaptation required to apply those principles using the Scribus interface.
Same could be said of Gimp, and even Inkscape - all of these applications start with “capabilities first” in determining what the application can do, and then how to do it. The “human first” principles of design don’t tend to be well developed or well applied to open source development projects - it’s a luxury FOSS hasn’t had in the budget for some time.
That said, I use all of these, support them, and am grateful for them. For the Audio side of things I’ll also throw Ardour in there - with all of the same caveats as the above: extremely powerful, frequently frustrating.
I’m another one who uses Audacity on a fairly regular basis. For my rather basic work (almost always stereo recordings of live performances), it works quite well, especially after they added a easier-to-use “crossfade clips” effect. It also isn’t too difficult to set up a parallel compression scheme, which is sometimes necessary with classical unless you’re playing the recording back on a heroic audio system.
Back when one of the old Adobe Creative Suites leaked out, I gave Photoshop a shot for a short while, and ran screaming back to GIMP. I’d have to take a course to really get the most out of PS, and that’s not going to happen if it’s only going to be a subscription-only thing.
On the other hand, if the software does what you want, it isn’t going to stop working one day - unless the publisher gets evil and puts in an expiration date. The main problem there, though, is security issues, but how much of a problem that might be depends greatly on what the application does.
GIMP as replacement for Photoshop? Nope nope nope.
Inkscape as replacement for Illustrator? Triple nope.
Blender as replacement for AfterEffects? As awesome as Blender is, a big fat NOPE.
May I suggest Aldus Pagemaker* as a good replacement for Adobe InDesign?
Scribus’ document XML layout is a huge blessing: I can manually edit, or write scripts to perform manipulations that are not in available in Scribus proper.
That said: I like your perspective, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
for SVGs. Inkscape is great if you want to transform a bitmap to vector, but is such a pain on osx for it to be too useful for me. Generally I’ll use BOXY for the little I need. I’m not a heavy user, but I have a set of icon packs that we use and I occasionally need to change a name here and there.
Resolve is free with a blackmagic camera too, so that’s a really great ecosystem to get into. I will say though, Fusion is closer to Nuke than After Effects and so isn’t quite a smooth transition when it comes to motion-graphics.
This. I don’t like our company being locked into Adobe, however thanks to smart objects, Adobe Library, and Generator inside of Photoshop, we are able to get our work completed in a fraction of the time it took before those features arrived. I can’t even imagine manually saving out every version we need of a digital ad anymore.
Also, all of our templates are PSDs. It will take a lot of effort to disconnect our workflow from Adobe.
However, if Adobe is going to increase the cost of CC, I really should start seeing if it’s a possibility.
For our workflow, using Photoshop, I don’t agree. CS6 was good, but the addition of the things I listed above along with the workflow I developed has cut our design time for certain tasks to a fraction of what they were before I was hired. Literally from around an hour down to ten-ish minutes per task.
While I’m open to something new equaling or surpassing what we are doing now, I’m not willing to go backwards.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but I have to disagree.
At least compared to their Adobe counterparts I don’t find Scribus/GIMP/Inkscape harder to use/learn. If I imagine sitting a newbie (with knowledge of the “principles”) in front of Photoshop, I don’t think that the interface/workflow is in any way “human first”… Heck, GIMP might be easier since it’s less powerful. Same with Inkscape - Illustrator is a freakin beast! And to get a ready-for-print PDF from Indesign, you need intricate knowledge of both DTP and Indesign.
(Sidenote: Adobe’s interfaces, especially Photoshop, are truly great - but I had to become a power user to really feel that)
HitFilm is a great video editor/VFX tool to replace AE. They have both a free version and a Pro version. Also, they have an image manipulation program, but I don’t know anything about it.
I used Audition a lot in the past and eventually replaced it with Reaper. The full-featured trial is free and can be used indefinitely, and a full license is $60 US. I know plenty of people who have ditched ProTools for Reaper as well.
One thing I have noticed over the past ten years is that it is easier to work with a print shop using consumer grade software. The first time I dealt with a printer, they couldn’t even print a PDF produced by InDesign since I hadn’t set some magic export options. Now, I can just export from Apple’s Pages and get surprisingly good results.
My preferences on the Mac:
Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo
Affinity Designer, Inkscape or Graphic
Affinity Publisher, Scribus or even Pages
Cheetah 3D for parametric 3D
For web design:
BBEdit, TextWrangler, EMACS or VIM
Rapidweaver or Sandvox for quick and lazy ones (iWeb, but modern)
When I moved to Mojave and started bracing myself for 64 bit code only, I thought I would miss Office and Adobe. I really haven’t, but I’m not a professional designer. I suppose if I were making my living using these tools, I’d have to seriously consider paying $600 or whatever a year for an Adobe subscription. I tend to use $200-$400 cameras and upgrade every three or four years. If I were a professional photographer, I’d probably have a bunch of $2000-$4000 cameras and lenses priced to match.
I just switched to a machine with a high res screen, and Adobe Pro 9 wouldn’t render fonts acceptably on it, so I “upgraded” to Acrobat DC. It is just awful. Besides needing 2 or three clicks for everything I could do with one click or keystroke in the older versions, it is really slow, far slower than 9 running on my 2008 machine.
For just displaying pdf files (and marking them up) the Edge browser on W10 machines is surprisingly good.
