I figure I'm not alone on here:

I've been banging away on the same copy of Adobe Photoshop for ages. I'm an amateur. I design fliers, maybe an album cover or two here and there.

Upon looking into a new computer I discover you can't own Photoshop anymore. You have to rent it for a couple hundred bucks a year. That's way too high for how often I use it.

What is the Reaper of graphic design software?

Gimp?

Yeah I used to use this program called "Seashore" on Mac OS.... Switched to Windows... I now use GIMP.

ErickC wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:27 pmGimp?

And Inkscape, which is also free.

The Logos by Nick YouTube channel is an invaluable resource. He also has paid courses. The price of the whole bundle is fairly reasonable from what I remember.

Tangential, but...

In the 90s I did a lot of Photoshop and vector work (nowadays it would be Illustrator, but back then it was a product called Freehand) for print, and a little later, for web. The 2000s took me deeper into the business software world, but I'm taking on some freelance stuff with more design/ui aspect. I still can make Photoshop and Illustrator work for me, but I feel like I need a refresher on where stuff is, how to do stuff fast, and some best practices. Any pros out there have any thoughts? I also want to work with InDesign. Used Quark back in the day but haven't touched layout software in decades.

I do have Adobe CS which is not fun to pay for, but I wouldn't want to take on client work with non-Adobe products.

You can buy Photoshop Elements without a subscription, it's not everything (obviously), but if you are doing the basics you can get by. Not a perfect solution, but if you don't want to pay monthly it is an option from Adobe.

twelvepoint wrote: I also want to work with InDesign. Used Quark back in the day but haven't touched layout software in decades.

I used Quark for years and then avoided InDesign for the first few years. One day I made the leap for one specific project and never went back.
It's better. And the learning curve was very short. All the concepts are the same, but some of the tools have different names, etc.
And INDD can do a bunch of stuff Quark couldn't do, or did badly.

Adobe sucks now. I had to upgrade to Creative Cloud at work. My employer pays the monthly licensing fee. But I was also running CS5 until last week, when that version of Photoshop kept crashing, forcing me to upgrade to the Photoshop 2021 version in Creative Cloud.

I absolutely despise Creative Cloud. I have no desire to save my files to the cloud. Such a pain in the ass to use. My computer and backup drives were working perfectly fine. All the updates from Adobe are just to keep introducing planned obsolescence, rendering perfectly functioning software useless so you have to keep buying their crap.

The move to a subscription service is a clear sign they haven't had a compelling reason to upgrade for years (decades?). Yeah, it sucks. Chiseling bastards. Their time will come.