Are There Viable Alternatives to Adobe?

I, and from what I read on the web, a great many people are not happy with the direction Adobe is going. If you want to upgrade past any of the Adobe Studio's CS 6 pieces, you will have to pay a monthly fee and use and do everything with the program in the Cloud. This has not been met with joy and exhalation! In fact from what I read its being met with howls of anger and rage. Just think of the possibilities of malfeasance! You are doing a blockbuster project for a new client and just before you go to press or online or TV, its displayed for all to see on some ragtag Web blog. Or worse, your clients biggest competitor gets a hold of it and comes to market before you can. After the NSA revelations and hints at the power of snooping, governmental or otherwise, the web is just not very safe. And that my friends is where you will be doing all of your Adobe CS7 work. Even for your Etsy store.

I just upgraded my Quark Software and they have since sent an email to all new and I gather old (and for awhile lost) Quark customers telling them they will own their Quark software and there will be none of this cloud stuff except to download the original software (they show you have to burn a backup copy) and updates. You pay for it and its yours. Period.

Talking to customer support, he noted that yes, many of their old customers are returning after Adobe's move. I told him, its their chance to recapture a market they were #1 at but stumbled not once but twice when their updates forced us to run on OS 9 when everyone else, including Adobe, had shifted their "new" programs to run natively on Apple's new OS X. It was a mistake they never recovered from.

I gathered the old regime is gone because I hear from them all the time now (never in the old days) and they are supplying lots of videos and how to's to help us move forward. One of the reasons I went back, besides ease of use I clearly documented, was that I can create pages in Quark and export them in HTML I think you can even create links in Quark and not have to even touch Dreamweaver, the program, for me at least, from hell.

Quark isn't the only program though,

if you want to get away from Adobe. For Mac users, at least, there is a nifty little photo editing program that is surprisingly powerful called Pixelator. It costs a whole $14.99 and can be downloaded from their web site. While it can't do everything PhotoShop can do, it CAN do an amazing amount of editing if that is your thing.

To be fair, I haven't used it much yet and so can't say just how much it can do but the reviews are good and at that price, the price of lunch, it certainly pays to give it a try. It certainly beats the $620 it will cost me to upgrade to PhotoShop CS6 and probably has so many options I will never use all of them in Pixelator as well.

As crafters and painters, photographers for artistic AND for showing our products to their best advantage, we need to be very aware of what is out there. Adobe, like many other companies, is still living in the past. The good old days of being just about the only game in town are gone.

I will follow up with Pixelator and give you a much more in depth review from the real world, not the kind of reviews we read about from some geek who spends all day in front of computer.

See the latest at my store on Etsy - KrugsStudio.etsy.com.