2d ago

Has anyone used Photoshop lately? Holy shit it's terrible.

Just tried the 7 day free trial of Photoshop and deleted it like 10 minutes later because it was so awful. Here are some highlights:

AI, so much AI.
Advertising, so much advertising.
Why yes we steal your data.
$40 a month for the cheapest option.
"If you cancel your subscription you will no longer be able to use Photoshop. No, there is no way to own the product outright.
Why yes we will include a bunch of programs and cloud services that you don't want and will never use. No, there is no plan that is just Photoshop.
Sign in to your Adobe account to uninstall.

52 comments

its wild how much companies are going out of their way to make
a better experience than actually paying them lol

My high school digital media class taught us how to use the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I fell in love with it and have used it while vehemently not using PS.

Literally all my college professors struggle with Adobe's PDF reader since it bombards you with pop-ups and terrible UI design. It's depressing to watch.
- I had to download Acrobat in order to use a proprietary feature a couple months ago. The process to start a free trial, download the creative suite installer, run the installer, open the suite, find Acrobat, download Acrobat, figure out how where the proprietary tool was, figure out how to use the tool, and finally, uninstall it all — it took me like 30 minutes. And I consider myself good with computer.
  Adobe is beyond bad. It’s a farce
  
  NAPS2 can do a lot of what Acrobat does, and it's cross-platform and open-source. And unusually for cross-platform open-source, it has a really great interface. It's easy to teach.

I'm still using a weird pirated 2015.5 version of photoshop. I've used the modern versions for professional stuff and genuinely the only thing the 2015.5 version is missing is the mirror function. All other improvements have been incremental.

I've been sticking to http://photopea.com/ which does everything I need it to do. It is also usable on phone, which makes it great for quick memes

I am cursed to use adobe products for my work as a teacher. I have to suffer through the new AI bullshit, AND Photoshop 7, which came out in 2003. I didn't learn photoshop until about 2013.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find teaching supplements for PS7 in 2025?

meanwhile my gf bought Pixelmator Pro on sale for a one-time $20 license and that software kicks complete ass. it's so good.
- mac only? boo

gimp has done everything I've needed it to for many years. Now that I have a pen tablet, Krita is growing on me

My partner is a professional photographer and is pretty much locked into the Adobe ecosystem. It's fucking shit. Its the slowest buggiest piece of shit software I've ever seen. The PC runs like absolute shite because of all the bloatware that comes with Adobe creative suite.

I use it at work from time to time to create door badges for coworkers. This morning I used it and had to click out of 3 AI prompt prompts just so I can do the 1 fucking thing I went there to do.

I have a legit license for the last non-cloud version that you could own outright (CS6) and they've made it such a pain that I find it easier to outright pirate it despite having the physical disks

I have not pirates a copy of it in years. Does it have more features than gimp?
- Gump is sadly a real clunker to use
  
  Yeah it can really double or triple (or more) the time you spend on a workflow because it's not great. Not a fan of how hard it is to do something like select in motion hair (including strays) and change the color of it in gimp. PS is really in another league for intermediate or advanced image editing and manipulation.

It seems like they even made pirating it harder. I torrented a copy of cs6 and it still didn't work.

I opened the latest illustrator and it is the first time that it buffered for a good 1 minute. My previous pirated version never had that problem

I would really like to be able to use machine learning tools for content-aware fills or easily masking out a figure that has transparency. I have yet to figure out how to do that easily in Krita. Sounds like it's not worth risking the adobe fishhook to see what they've got though.

52 comments