Finding Adobe Alternatives

After four long years, I’ll finally finish my apprenticeship this July. I’ve learned a ton about design and all that good stuff — but the hardest thing I’ll have to face? Losing my precious free access to Adobe Creative Cloud. Tragic, I know.

That’s why I’ve bravely set out on a quest to find free (and hopefully open-source) alternatives to Adobe CC programs like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro. My wallet simply can’t handle the subscription life.

¶Raw Photo Editing (Lightroom)

Sometimes I like to take photos with my camera and edit them afterwards. I used to use Lightroom for that, and it worked quite well for my needs. But now I have to find a suitable alternative.

At first I tried Rawtherapee, but I found it to be quite complicated and not very user-friendly. Then I moved on to Darktable, which has a more intuitive interface and offers a lot of powerful features for editing RAW photos. Also I really like the way it goes about shortcuts. Maybe I’ll stick with Darktable for now.

¶Photo Editing (Photoshop)

Photoshop wasn’t really my most used Adobe program, but I did use it from time to time. Funnily enough I mostly used it for graphical design, which it’s not really meant for.

That said, I did find a few alternatives that might work for me:

• Photopea: A web-based alternative that closely resembles Photoshop in terms of interface and functionality.
• GIMP: A powerful open-source image editor that offers a wide range of features, although its interface can be a bit daunting for newcomers.
• Krita: Primarily aimed at digital painting, but it also has photo editing capabilities and a user-friendly interface.

Out of all these Options i think the User Interface from Krita looks the best. Besides it supports effect/filter layers, which I use somewhat often.

¶Audio Editing

I also didn’t do a lot of audio editing, but I did use Audition from time to time. I found it to be a powerful tool for audio editing.

I think the most famous free audio editing tool would be Audacity. Despite its outdated interface, it gets the job done. If you even want to get into producing music, you might want to check out: Cakewalk.

¶Video Editing (Premiere)

For personal projects I did do a lot of editing, be it Vlogs for me and my friends or videos for our Party. I tested these two alternatives:

• Kdenlive: A free and open-source video editor that I found to be quite powerful but not that user-friendly.
• DaVinci Resolve: A professional-grade video editing software that offers a free version with extensive features. It does focus more on color grading, but it also has a decent video editing interface, that feel like their holding you by the hand a little bit too much.

Having said all this, I really miss Premiere Pro. At the moment this is the only program I would buy the licence for if my video cutting occasions werent purely recreational.

¶Vector Graphics (Illustrator)

At times Illustrator was the Adobe Software that I used the most and I have to say I really like it, the only bad things about are maybe the new AI Features that never helped and thats like all other Adobe Programs more on the slow side.

Having said that there is Inkscape, that i found is a really good free alternative to illustrator. It has a really nice userinterface with most of the features you might want from a vector graphics editor.

There is also Affinity Designer, but I havent tried that one out since I’m searching fully free alternatives.