Bye, Bye Adobe
After 40 years – seriously, 40 years – using Adobe Photoshop and decades using Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, and as an early Adobe Creative Suite subscriber, I have finally cut the cord and abandoned Adobe products for my creative design applications. I am not a professional designer but I am a power user (especially with photo editing and vector design) but can no longer justify the high cost of Adobe’s subscription-only model, especially now that there is serious competition from Serif with their Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher apps. I switched and have not looked back.
I purchased Affinity Photo and Designer when they were initially released in 2015 but wasn’t motivated to really learn them given 30 years of Adobe muscle memory I had developed. Affinity Photo and Designer are similar to, but not exactly like, Photoshop and Illustrator. They have some features that are superior and others that are just a little different. But with the new v2 apps coming out earlier this year, I decided to take another look. All updates for the v1 apps were free but v2 does have an upgrade cost. A perpetual license costs $70 per app or you can get all three for $165. It was a no brainer and I got a reduced cost to upgrade to v2 as I had previous v1 releases.
Spoiler Alert: read to the end to get 20% off on Photo 2, Designer 2, and/or Publisher 2!
In February I committed to using the Affinity apps exclusively and not touch Adobe. It took all of 2 weeks to get very comfortable doing 80-90% of what I use these apps for. On occasion I still have to chase down a feature in the docs or videos on how to do something but this is decreasing significantly.
But the real reason I bring this up is to highlight how difficult it is to actually REMOVE Adobe Create Suite from your system (both MacOS and Windows in my case). It took about 45 minutes on each of my two Macs and 55 minutes on my Windows system. First, you have to delete each app in the Adobe Creative Cloud application. Only after all apps have been individually deleted can you then delete the Creative Cloud app itself — BUT this is done with an uninstaller that is very persnickety and took at least 5 tries to get it to actually uninstall. It continued to report that I had Creative Cloud applications installed on my computer (although I did not). Only after rebooting was I able to use the uninstaller on each computer. That is just crazy.
So, goodbye Adobe. Perhaps hardcore professional graphic designers and artists working in teams or with clients need Adobe products but prosumers and casual users now have a serious alternative. And Serif’s recent acquisition by Canva should prove to be a good move for the market.
I have been so impressed with Photo and Designer that I contacted Serif to see if they would offer my subscribers/members a discount code. And they did! I can pass on to you a 20% discount for all Affinity apps sold in their online store. I don’t make a commission or any money on this, I purchased my Affinity applications at the market price (that was before I got the discount for all of you!)