Adobe and its seeming monopoly on image editing software

Icalasari · 2013-03-31 23:04:05

No company that would use image editing would take you seriously if you use free stuff

Adobe is the only "professional" one out there, with that stupid price tag

And of course everybody talks about it

;~; Currently I just want some decent video editing software for my project. Not another money pit ;~;

Saigyouji · 2013-03-31 23:32:31

...There are plenty of non-Adobe video editing programs.

Icalasari · 2013-03-31 23:50:34

^ I'm trying to find a decent one currently. Still leaves the issue on it's seeming monopoly on image editing software

Bee · 2013-04-01 00:34:49

GIMP is basically Photoshop minus the perspective projector, and the cage transform can do pretty much the same thing. The functional differences at this point are pretty much nil now that they've properly implemented layer grouping. Though yeah, employers will still laugh at you for not having Photoshop instead.

Icalasari · 2013-04-01 00:51:44

Which is absolutely insane. Adobe KNOWS it can get away with that insane price tag just because nobody can use their competitors and be taken seriously

Bee · 2013-04-01 04:34:46

The worst part is that Adobe isn't even that good. I mean Photoshop at least earns its reputation and was definitively superior to open source competition until not too long ago, but their other software is crap. InCopy is a buggy disaster (especially for as relatively little as it's actually supposed to do), AIR obstructs your access to some very important Flash overhead, and Flash itself is computationally bloated shit for anything that isn't prerendered animation.

Nyktos · 2013-04-01 04:42:37

People actually pay for Photoshop?

Fuschlatz · 2013-04-01 04:53:01

and Flash itself is computationally bloated shit for anything that isn't prerendered animation

Well, one could argue that it's been like that ever since Macromedia days, but yeah, Adobe's had ¾ of a decade to properly streamline it and they still haven't done so.

glennmagusharvey · 2013-04-01 04:59:09

And this, boys and girls, is what the free-for-all market does. Someone squats the intellectual property, then proceeds to not really do much as long as they can carve out a niche without much competition.

Profit-maximizing markets do not by themselves drive innovation. They can frequently be counterproductive.

Bee · 2013-04-01 04:59:43

^^ AIR actually makes it even worse. This for instance is a collection of Flash games from like 2006-2008, and was ported to Steam using AIR. It's completely unplayable because the environment introduced a tremendous amount of overhead and input bottlenecking issues that weren't present in the original browser apps, and blocked the developers' access to optimizing steps or even stage quality.