Adobe Takes on Canva With Freemium Offering (ft.com) 36
Adobe unveiled its first comprehensive package of design software for non-professionals on Monday, taking direct aim at a booming market that has turned Australian start-up Canva into one of the world's most valuable private tech companies. From a report: The service includes versions of widely used professional design tools such as the Photoshop picture editor, Illustrator graphics tool and video-editing service Premiere, behind a simpler interface that analysts said bore a striking resemblance to Canva. The move follows a leap in the valuation of companies that have extended the market for design software with tools aimed at non-expert users. Canva's fundraising round in September valued it at $40bn, more than double what it was judged to be worth five months before. Figma, which makes software for product designers and more general business users, saw its value rise fivefold in little more than a year to $10bn. Adobe's move is partly defensive, since it could face disruption as Canva's simple tool moves deeper into the business world, said Liz Miller, an analyst at advisory firm Constellation Research. Adobe's new service, called Creative Cloud Express, is likely to appeal to many people in small or medium-sized businesses who might have been thought of before as customers for Adobe's more expensive software, but who are happy to use simpler design tools with fewer features, she said. [...] A basic version of the new service would be available free of charge through app stores and its own website, Adobe said, with a premium version priced at $9.99 a month. [Editor's note: the aforementioned link may be paywalled; alternative source]
Adobe Freemium = pay to any work! (Score:1)
Adobe Freemium = pay to any work!
Pricing Comparision (Score:2)
Canva - A$13.74/month = US$9.78/month
Adobe - US$9.99/Month
I'd still go Canva
Re:Pricing Comparision (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't I just buy the product once.
I miss the days where I could had purchased Photoshop for $300 and use it for 6 years, then upgrade to the newest version for $100 where I get 6 more years out of it.
I am not a "Professional Creative" I sometime would prefer to go into Photoshop perhaps 8 hours a month, to clean up an image or do some alterations for a PowerPoint at work, to give my presentation a little more umph. However this isn't part of my job, work won't give me access to the software so I would be using my home PC to do the work, which I am OK with being that it is just me trying to be more impressive beyond what I need for work. However after they went into the subscription model, I cannot justify paying a monthly fee for a product that I wouldn't use all the time. I don't need the newest version, nor all the bells and whistles.
So I have switched to the Open Source alternatives which is good enough, for me, but still I would prefer to have actual photoshop.
Affinity & Corel (Score:2, Troll)
Affinity (Serif) has you covered and is the first serious competitor in the digital publishing design space to come along in at least two decades, after the last diverse market was eventually gobbled up by Macromedia and Adobe, with Adobe finally incorporating Macromedia.
Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are pissing into the stale and stinking Adobe stew as we speak and once again customers can benefit. Their offerings are affordable, pay once and offer real competitive value.
Corel an
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Which one can replace LightRoom, and is there a *nix version? (I'm trying to get off Windows)
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https://www.darktable.org/ [darktable.org]
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Disclaimer: I've never used LightRoom.
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You can even export Indesign files to IDML and import them into Affinity Publisher. (I have an issue where textboxes need to be adjusted afterwards, but everything else just seemed to work.)
Affinity Photo imports PSD files, although it's recommended you save them back ou
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Because they ran out of ideas on how to add features that are worth upgrading for and they need to show their shareholders a steady increase in the revenue stream.
If you're a studio, paying the Adobe tax and the Autodesk tax is just the price of doing business.
If you're a freelancer you need to supply files in the format the client expects.
We just started doing motion capture where I work and it's even worse, you have to pay an exorbitant price for the hardware, and then you also need to pay a recurring lic
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This.
I have that with video editing. I need it once every few months for a day or two. Never, ever, is a subscription model going to fit my use case. Fortunately, DaVinci exists as an alternative to the Adobe products.
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Is the subscription model actually more expensive for you or is it cheaper?
More expensive. Subscriptions have a tendency to be forgotten, run when you don't need them or have limitations on how you can activate and pause them. A perpetual license is fine for many years, you don't forget to disable it and then pay another month, etc.
Just the hassle of dealing with the shit is an issue (and has a cost).
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If it works for you, that's fine.
Subscription models are popular among service providers exactly because people (as a whole) have a tendency to forget about them. One company I worked for had a whole class of subscribers that had apparently forgotten about it (their product no longer even worked!) but still paid their monthly fees.
How am I losing? (Score:3)
Re:How am I losing? (Score:5, Interesting)
All that said, I love Inkscape; I think it's a far better, more friendly program than GIMP. But someone who lives in graphic design would find it incredibly frustrating, and its lack of CMYK support make it completely unusable for professional print work.
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GTK UI elements jealously hold keyboard focus at random, inconvenient times requiring you, vi-like, to repeatedly hit the ESCape key to get back to the main canvas.
Never had that.
When creating Text elements, insists on forgetting which font you just used.
Does "Last used style" not work on text? I've not tried it.
Need to read pages of documentation to get pen tablets to work properly.
I was lucky and it all worked pretty well instantly.
But someone who lives in graphic design would find it incredibly frustrating, and its lack of CMYK support make it completely unusable for professional print work.
I have done a little bit of professional stuff with it; CMYK is not the total requirement it was 20 years ago. Colour correction and spot colour handling is a bigger issue, especially with newer presses which can't be told "treat cyan as Pantone 527" (there's progress for you).
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I don't need an account or pay a fee for Inkscape. Tell me how I'm losing?
Without knowing what you do that's not really feasible but I suspect what you're trying to say is that Inkscape works for your use case. Just like I'm hardly going to bother with a word processor, free of charge or otherwise, if notepad does everything I need.
Subscriptions (Score:1)
Canva and Adobe both cost $100/year.
Tell you what, fuck off. I'm sick and tired of this shit. CAD software, 3D software, media production software, all have moved onto a renter business model. Eventually music software will follow suit. Monthly payments for Ableton or ProTools, monthly payments for each VST plugin.
Now tell me how this free market is benefitting me?
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Well if you are professional, The software would cost you $1500 and you would probably need to upgrade for $250 every year.
So the $100 a year is actually a value.
However for Amateurs like me, I was able to get my Adobe Suit for $500 (back in the olden day, where I purchased the older version of the Box set after the new version came out) then I paid the $250 for the upgrades every 4 or 5 years (where my old version would just go out of support for my hardware)
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Totally, Adobe was never targeting home users with their offerings. Their subscription actually makes it more accessible to home users now though. My subscription gets paid for by the company and if I need anything beyond that then there is always GIMP or the Affinity products, there are far more capable alternatives than there used to be back when your only option was a VERY expensive perpetual license for an Adobe product.
Photoshop for iPad Pro is included in my subscription but the low price of Affinity
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Sorry, Pro Tools already does that! I'm not even sure if Avid sells perpetual licenses any more.
So far, Ableton seems dead-set against moving Live to that model, as far as I can tell. And if they did, it'd probably push their userbase on to Bitwig or similar.
Just stick with CS6 (Score:1)
No subscription needed
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Exactly what I'm doing. I'm actually frustrated that the old Lightroom can't support the newer camera raw formats, but I'm still hanging on to that before renting the software. Otherwise CS6 for photoshop and premiere for the occasional videos. The Creative Cloud systems cost more per year than I'm wiling to pay, and cost far more than the occasional updates I used to buy in the 90's and 00's.
When I can no longer get my camera images into it, I'll likely be moving to DarkTable, it looks pretty good but I'
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Use what everyone does - dcraw [dechifro.org].
Or, as dcraw development has stalled, LibRaw [libraw.org], based on dcraw.
Most products processing RAW actually uses one of the two internally so you're not missing out. And it's command line based, so trivial to add to your processing workflow.
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Davinci Resolve is probably best for video. I'm going to try Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher as Adobe replacements
Not Renting Software - Still On PS5.5 (Score:2)