Photoshop's newest terms of service has users agree to allow Adobe access to their active projects for the purposes of "content moderation" and other various reasons. This has caused concern among…
At this rate my owned outright copy of Adobe that requires no internet access, with hacks, will become a generational heirloom I can pass down to descendants with immersurable value.
In a world long gone you could buy a physical copy of a program and black list it from your internet connection. And it didn't care, it just did it's thing. No hacking or Piracy needed, just legacy software.
What about sending a certified letter to the company in question stating they better reverse the idiotic decision or be prepared to face a lengthy prison sentence for it?
Same choice as normal: whine about and then tolerate a change you don't want in proprietary software rather than spend time learning to use a software-freedom-respecting alternative.
Hey, a lot of people have deadlines and can’t just drop everything to spend a week learning if GIMP even meets their needs when Adobe is knocking their door down with this EULA change right the fuck now
And Adobe is counting on that. They knew this was bullshit and people would be made which is why the dropped it with (what seems like) zero warning
A lot of us should be considering graphite.rs Once it has raster support, which is in the pipeline, it is shapingshaping up to be a pretty good UI compared to GIMP.
The question I'd like to ask them is WHY they want to get involved in Content Moderation. They make a toolset, nothing more, so why do they care what someone is using the tools for? What could they possibly get out of this that makes it worth the time or expense?
I imagine it's because of the generative AI stuff. If they're using their servers to generate, they're going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it's just responding to user prompts.
It is always the stuff that they mumble and handwave that you have to watch out for. The Moderation part is just to get everyone all talking about that. The scary part is the "other stuff". They probably want access to everyone's data so they can train their AI on it.
As someone who’s used their tooling and the generative tooling… I have to admit trying to push its limits for giggles. It is VERY conservative already so I don’t see why they’d need additional moderation privileges.
The content is being uploaded to Adobe's servers, they likely have the right and may even be legally required to moderate it to some degree.
This yet another reminder that the cloud is just somebody else's computer. Somebody who might want to impose some degree of control with what is done with their computer, for whatever reason.
It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.
To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP's mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can't support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there's an outside chance if it's going to be printed, Krita can't draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing...hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.
It hurts to say but you're right. I was like "can't you remap the right mouse button to another tool? Everything in the context menu is in the Menu bar regardless" and they responded with "nope, design philosophy"
yep. I feel like FOSS projects are always made by code monkeys who have no design sensibilities and designers do not touch any of these. a lot of them are not only unusable but uninstallable by the majority of the intended user base. whenever i find something i want to use it's like:
—cool software. can i double click on an icon and have it ready to use?
—umm, don't be ridiculous, normie. you gotta self host it and use the command line to enter some arcane incantations obviously. alternatively you can use these other methods you've never heard of. if you need any help you can refer to their respective indecipherable documentation.
—ok I'll keep what i have until i find something that's made for regular human beings, thanks.
Martin Owens is working on CMYK support for Inkscape as we speak, and Gimp releases v3 during the summer if all goes well. Still, they're small projects with very limited funding. Help them !
I use these tools everyday. Yes there are limitations, but for what MOST people need there are solutions. It just depends on what is important to you. Also, you can use the ellipse assistant.
I need it for work. It's the industry standard and when I share files between myself and other designers I could potentially bung up a whole project if I'm using GIMP or Affinity by Serif.
Because we, the individuals, do not have the power to change it with an individual boycott and need to keep our livelihood intact. Go try to break you unhealthy relationship with petroleum.
This is actually an excellent comparison. I don't own a car, and I advocate for the car free lifestyle. I also don't recommend people using Adobe if possible.
Adobe basically invented the SaaS model. It's not really practical to bootleg most Adobe products anymore either so most people break down and just pay the million dollar a year subscription fee so they can keep using it.
What can you replace Adobe with? Serious question. I despise Adobe, but every alternative I've tried throughout the years either cannot do the job or ends up disappearing.
It seems our designer team doesn't really use Photoshop. They switched to Figma from XD and most of their workflows don't use Adobe software. They still use Illustrator occasionally, but they're looking at Inkscape atm. If you have Photoshop in your workflow, you're kinda fucked. https://www.photopea.com/ might be an option, but it's not a 1:1 replacement. If you need Lightroom, then Darktable is a good alternative. It's a bit janky here and there, but fully functional and stable. If you're using Premiere then for fox sake switch to DaVinci Resolve already, it's so much better than everything else and is free for many workflows and even for commercial use.
I bought the Affinity Suite which has been great for me. Sadly they don't have a Linux version, which is what I'm moving to. Krita covers some other of Photoshop's features as well. And people who say Gimp is a Photoshop alternative are crazy. Gimp uses destructive editing which is clown level in image editing and makes it completely useless imo. But supposedly non-destructive editing is coming.
I use Krita professionally on a daily basis, it's fantastic. It has some rough edges but absolutely nothing that prevents you from having work done. It also beats the Adobe suite hands down when it comes to ergonomy, and the performance with big files is really good (I work on formats up to 14k*7k for print, no issues).
Expect a LOT more companies to do stuff like this. Because "deep fake" porn is a plague and nobody (reputable) wants their software to be the go to for violating people.
Sufficiently large orgs probably will be eligible for exemptions under the theory that they are agreeing ahead of time.
But also? The Adobe suite are just leagues better than anything else in that space. Smaller companies with smaller contracts can get away with, frankly, lesser software. But at scale? You need stuff like the "Oh shit, we should stop calling it AI" plugins. And workflows matter a lot when the vast majority of your applicant pool have been using Adobe software for literally decades.
A decent number of the tech youtubers have done "We tried to not use Premier for one week" style videos. And they usually end up coming out with "I guess we could maybe make it work but it just isn't worth it"
Much like with "this is the year of gaming for linux", it is going to need massive amounts of grass roots effort to actually focus on UI/UX over "We don't need that because we are smarter" bullshit. And, eventually, it will be good enough for influencers/taste-makers to give it a chance.
I love FOSS alternatives, but let's not pretend that GIMP is anywhere near being a viable alternative for professionals, unlike Blender who has got their shit together. I wish GIMP figured out actual decent UX.
Wild. My old place we relied on this despite me urging us to use Figma/Sketch and Blender (amazing for 2D art). Naturally logistics factored into it as our clients relied on Adobe as well, but there were plenty of projects that didn’t need it.
We also had the dumbest guidelines to ensure no leaks. I would routinely get app requests refused despite the fact their source was right there on GitHub.
So now what are they gonna do? Because if they use Adobe, they can no longer ensure that a clients work won’t hit the net. May not seem like much for small indie projects but if we snagged the next GTA or Valorant, you bet that would attract some serious lookiloos.
Not sure if a client would find “it wasn’t us it was Adobe” all that comforting!
We use Figma for UI design at work. I really like it.
I'm not a designer, but I'm a developer that has to build the system. It has our internal UI library integrated into it, so the mockup looks practically identical to the actual implementation. When I click on a component, it shows the component name and a link to its documentation. Runs great in a browser without having to install an app. Really nice piece of software.
I'm glad the Adobe acquisition didn't go though... I was scared Adobe would ruin it. I feel bad for all the Figma employees though... They were going to all receive a lot of money as a result of the acquisition, and everything was going well until it was blocked :/
Yeah totally agree. Figma removes a lot of the translation between design and implementation so design and dev are most always on the same page. Ps is an image program. It’s not meant for UI design. At all. Adobe tried to wedge in some UI design frameworks and flows but it’s Adobe. They could fuck up a cup of coffee. And no one uses Adobe XD. It’s too little too late. That’s when at my old employ I pushed for it. When I joined them, most of the designers were using Ai and Ps. Insane to me as Ai is even less suited for UI work. But they were like 20 and right out of school, which shocker, likely had a deal with Adobe so they pushed their software down their students throats.
I dreaded the sale of Figma. So glad it was stopped. Adobe already has such a monopoly on the design industry.
Can Adobe be used on a machine that's sandboxed / offline? That way you can do your projects while disconnected from their servers, once the project is complete, just move your files onto an external drive and away from Adobe access?
Yes, with a virtual machine. But the experience will not be the best because the VM will lack a GPU.
I'm sure there is ways to share some resources of the GPU with the VM to have a smoother experience but I have never done that on Windows