Adobe CS3 alternatives
 

as requested... :D

a thread for CS3 alternatives...... Adobe CS3 is SO STUPIDLY expensive its about time we had some alternatives!

QUARK!.... (stop laughing... Quark is now reasonably priced next to InDesign!)

Swift Publisher.... a consumer level page layout app.... no where near as many features as InDesign, but amazingly good value for money. (http://www.belightsoft.com/products/...r/overview.php)


anyone else?

Gimp? It's free, and with GimpShop it works kind of like Photo Shop. Yeah it's not the best program you will ever find, but it works for most purposes.

Edit: And a question, is there a such thing as an alternative to Flash? I don't know of any other way to make vectored animations for a web browser setting.

An old and oft discussed topic.
Even with this thead, people are STILL not going to search and STILL ask...
Here's the ones I know of.
NONE of them are as feature full as Photochop, but a person can check each one out adn see which suits their graphics/photo editing needs
Gimp (good: free. bad: needs X11): http://gimp.org
Seashore (a run at making an Aqua native Gimp. Not as many features as GIMP yet, but very spiffy) - http://seashore.sf.net
Chocoflop (Funny name. awesome program that supports CoreImage) - http://chocoflop.com

I really liked Seashore (the whole 'gimp without x11' thing), then I found Chocoflop. For my graphics and minor photochopping needs, it's perfect.
Sadly Adobe/Macromedia know they've got the market cornered on full featured photo and graphics editing.
They will continue to rape the consumer through the wallet until someone comes out with a comparable product priced that everybody ELSE can afford.
I mean, jeeeeez look now with CS3. They've got what 20 different versions of Photoshop with as many different price ranges?? :p

Chocoflop looks interesting, but they need to work on the name.

As far as pro editors goe, it begins and ends with ICC color management and CMYK support. There're a lot of editors out there trying to take advantage of Core Image, etc, but I haven't seen anything with color management.

Well, I found this via stumble upon extension on my firefox browser and it is not fully developed yet, but out of the box it will have tons of free video/grahpic/audio editing programs. If you don't mind tossing linux on your mac you can check it out here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio

I have not personally used it, just found it recently while surfing the web. It looks very interesting though.

Here is the homepage:

http://ubuntustudio.org/

I look at it this way, I have not upgraded Photoshop since 7 and it will cost me $200 to upgrade. I do not upgrade for years. The only reason I am this time is due to the Universal Binary, and next version will probably take me out of the upgrade limit.

http://www.scribus.net/

InDesign replacement. A bit slow (like NeoOffice)

That and raw processing.

The question is not whether there are alternatives to Creative Suite. There are many of them out there. The only question is how low your standards are. It's just like they say in the biz - Cheap, Good, or Fast: Pick any two.

As far as the product names, yeah, they need to do something. Saying "I use Chocoflop and the GIMP" does not exactly inspire confidence, even if the products are pretty good.

The big problem with looking for a CS3 alternative is user base. I'm a Prepress Tech, and most of our clients will probably end up moving to CS3 which means that in turn my shop will also be forced to buy CS3. I really wish it was priced at a more atractive level, but unfortunately we will still buy it at whatever prce we are forced to buy it at.

End result is that alternatives for us are only good if we can get our client base to use the alternative. Highly unlikely unfortunately.

styrafome & VegasMac, I am also prepress, and know very well that Quark, Indesign & Photoshop are THE final word in page layout and image manipulation.

but I thought it would be good to start a thread for people that cant afford Adobe's products since the price hike, hence the search for alternatives... I thought I knew of almost every graphics app out there.. but there are already 4 in this post I have never heard of! :D

Create by Stone Design looks interesting. I haven't tried it in a few years, but I think it deserves more attention than it gets.

http://www.stone.com/Create/Create.html

That raises an interesting point Photek: As a prepress tech, I wonder if I'll ever get a file from an alternative software vendor. I'd like to,j ust to show the other people I work with that there are other softwares out there that we can learn about. Most of the people I work with believe that there is no other life outside Adobe, Quark and our RIP software. I need to give them a wakeup call I guess.

Mate.... if anyone else gives me an advert as a Microsoft Publisher file I might have to end it all :D

interesting

http://news.com.com/2100-7345_3-6163015.html

Yea, Publisher is the worst of the worst of the worst. I'd rather jump into a swimmng pool full or razor blades than to deal with another publisher file. But that article that tlarkin posted sure has me interested. Good move on Adobe's part anyway.

People always complain about how expensive Photoshop is and yet they probably don't use most of its features. There is a lower priced option - it's called Photoshop Elements - it has the majority of what most people need. But for graphic designers - the alternatives (GIMP, Scribus, ect.) just don't make sense. Many open source projects are great, but they can take a lot of time to gain traction and I just don't think that anyone right now has what it takes to get close to what Adobe is offering. Especially given the fact that these apps (CS) have such tight integration that makes it so easy to work between them with multiple options for final output.

Personally - I think the Creative Suite is priced just right. It's just expensive enough to keep those that probably don't have any business messing around with it from getting it - plus the upgrade pricing is pretty good. I look at it this way - I upgrade from CS2.3 to CS3 for $400, so I get updated versions of all the apps I use day to day and get Dreamweaver & Flash on top of it.

Sure, it's expensive to buy for a full license of a single app. but they give you the incentive to buy a suite of products for around the price of 2 individual products.

PS Elements is a very good option to the full fat version of PS, as soon as it comes out as a Universal Binary I may buy a few copies!

The Creative Suite is priced fairly...for US users. A lot of the complaints are from Europe and other regions, where if a US user had to pay what those other countries do, they'd scream.

+1 to that.

I agree with this.

I work in prepress and after 20 Years (capital Y) of fooling around with most of the stuff out there (eg Quark from version 1 - the install disk was a single floppy) I have learned to JUST SAY NO to Publisher files. There is no way you can get a Publisher file to print to anything like an imagesetter or a platesetter. (Do they work on digital presses?)

Unfortunately there are people out there who spend hours creating newsletters and bulletins in Publisher (mostly estate agents for some reason) who then expect you to be able to print 2,000 copies on your litho press.

I've tried to get PDFs off these people, but Publisher can't embed fonts properly, or the pics are low res (and RGB) or you get some obscure postscript error.

With a regular newsletter (we deal with a few) I've had to recreate the template in Indesign and then each time it comes in just do all the layout again. We do charge for this, and its not quick, so deadlines have to be sensible.

There is probably a good reason why nobody has come up with a filter for .pub files - my guess would be that it just can't be done. http://forums.macosxhints.com/images...s/rolleyes.gif