Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom are the go-to apps for sex workers needing to edit their photos and videos before uploading them to the internet. While Adobe invented and pioneered what we consider digital media in the 80s and 90s, there's no doubt that today their software is the poster child of enshittification. It's also damn expensive when you're starting out or have a limited budget. Luckily, there are alternatives to Adobe's suite of software that don't break the bank and may even be better suited to your needs.
Alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud
Affinity Studio (Free - Windows & macOS)
The inspiration for this blog post was Canva buying Serif (the creators of Affinity Studio) and making the entire suite free to use. Affinity is now a giant app that can do image editing to replace Photoshop, vector drawing to replace Illustrator, and page layout to replace InDesign. Affinity is a high quality software suite that, for many people, will do everything Adobe's apps do. Many people even prefer how Affinity works and looks over Adobe, and there are countless YouTube tutorials covering how to do things in Affinity if you’re used to Adobe.
Affinity isn't an exact replacement for the entire Adobe Creative Cloud package, which these days is enormous and covers every sector of digital art you can think of, but it's also free instead of hundreds of dollars a year.
Apple Creator Studio (AUD$19.99/m or AUD$199/yr - macOS)
Apple bundled Final Cut Pro (video editing), Logic Pro (music production) and Pixelmator Pro (image editing) with some of their other apps and is offering it either as a one-off purchase or a subscription. Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are industry standards that have been around for decades and very capable. Pixelmator Pro is a Photoshop alternative designed from the ground up to take advantage of Apple’s hardware acceleration and software design guidelines.
It’s a little weird that Apple also bundled productivity apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote alongside these high end professional media apps, but if you’re all in on the Apple ecosystem it’s quite good value considering the subscription also includes the iPhone and iPad versions of the apps.
Alternatives to Adobe Premiere
DaVinci Resolve (Free/AUD$505 - Windows, macOS, Linux)
If you're familiar with Blackmagic's cameras, they've applied the same high-end features for very little money to their editing software, DaVinci Resolve. It would take a novel-length blog post to describe all the features in DaVinci Resolve, but it's just as good, if not better than Premiere and costs nothing to get started with. For AUD$505 you unlock DaVinci Resolve Studio that gives you features like 32K/120fps video editing, AI noise reduction, Dolby Vision HDR, and a bunch of high end features that, if you need them, make DaVinci Resolve a bargain compared to Adobe's Premiere. For the Linux users reading this (I love all three of you), DaVinci Resolve has full Linux support and is treated the same as Mac and Windows.
CapCut Desktop (Free - macOS & Windows)
Everyone under 30 already knows about CapCut; it's a video editing app made by the ghouls at ByteDance (the folks responsible for TikTok). If you can ignore where it comes from, CapCut is incredibly easy to use and perfect for simple video edits. Trim, cut, add effects, overlay text, export to social media, done. It's very popular on smartphones and tablets, but there's also a desktop version that's quite powerful and free to use.
Alternatives to Adobe Lightroom
Nitro Photo (A$5.99/m, A$49.99/yr, A$149.99 once - macOS)
Once upon a time, Apple made an awesome photo management and editing app called Aperture. It had many fans and was widely loved, but Apple had one of their infamous moments of pigheadedness, merging Aperture and iPhoto into one crappy app called "Photos". One of the lead engineers of Aperture left Apple and eventually made the photo editing app of their dreams, Nitro. It's exclusive to Apple's platforms, but it's lightning quick, full featured and is a one-off purchase–no subscriptions!
Dark Table (Free - Linux, Windows, macOS)
Almost an exact clone of Lightroom but open source and totally free. Except for the font they use in the user interface, you'd be hard pressed to tell Lightroom Classic and Dark Table apart. Another bonus–it works on Linux really well if you're in the mood to throw off the Big Tech shackles and go full live free or die with your choice of computer operating system.
Another Raw Therapee (Free - Linux, Windows, macOS)
A benefit of open source software is that, if you don't like it and have the skills,you can pick up the code and make your own app. That's what the Another Raw Therapee folks did when they wanted to improve Raw Therapee. They tweaked the interface to their liking–it’s quite similar to Dark Table–and some people consider the colour grading tools superior to anything on the market. Like Dark Table, it's also free, so try them both before making up your mind.
Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
Acorn (USD$29.99 - macOS)
If you’ve used Photoshop for a while, you may remember earlier versions where the interface was simpler and the list of features not so overwhelming. That’s the vibe Acorn gives when you load it up. Photoshop before it turned into the behemoth of an app it is today. The basics you expect in an image editing app are there, along with some nifty advanced features, wrapped up in a fast, modern user interface designed for macOS.
GIMP (Free - Linux, Windows, macOS)
The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP for short) has been around almost as long as Photoshop and is the free, open source, runs on every platform known to humanity, go-to recommendation for anyone that needs a Photoshop alternative. It's not pretty, but it’s packed with features, there's plenty of documentation and tutorials, and the price ($0) is hard to argue with. You also get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that you're using a community created, open-source project.
Canva (Free, AUD$20/m, AUD$165/yr - Web)
I can hear the purists screaming at me for suggesting Canva as a replacement for Photoshop, but hear me out! Many of the ‘basic’ things people do with Photoshop, like making social media graphics or adding overlays to photos, Canva does really well. It's easy to use and has many modern templates and layouts. It won't replace Photoshop for everything, but if your needs are more outcome/business oriented than creative, Canva could get the job done for you.
Which Adobe Alternative Should I Use?
Personal preference plays a big part here. This genre of software is designed for creativity, and we all work in different ways to achieve our unique outcomes. All the recommendations made in this post have free trials or are entirely free. Give them a shot and see which ones work for you. You might not find an exact replacement for Adobe's software, but you may end up liking the alternative more than Photoshop, Premiere, or Lightroom, while also saving money.
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