alt Hacker NewsEveryone loves to hate Adobe because someone else does, but their products are actually pretty damn good.
And that is because they've had 30 years of effort thrown into them. It's not the big picture that's the issue, it's the thousands of small things. Stuff hidden in the menus that millions of people use. The corpus of educational material out there to help you get stuff done. And the flexibility which is really difficult to match. A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
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They are good only if you never seen anything else. I don't know a single image editor worse than Photoshop. Adobe Acrobat and the associated format is a blight on human civilization that needed invention of fricking arificial mind to untangle. Illustrator had idiotic bugs that surely costed millions in misprints.
And remeber Flash? The software that Adobe bought and murdered becuse of their software development inaptitude? If it didn't end up in their hands it would be part of web standards by now and all of the human creativity that this software spawned wouldn't end up smashed into smitherines.
Adobe is cancer of user facing software. Always has been.
Adobe is a company that firmly squats in few very large niches of human activity and despite its mediocrity and awefulness starves any other software that dares to venture into them. It should have been broken by anti-monopoly laws 3 times by now.
I don't know how somebody can look at how much and in what manner they are charging their customers with cancelation fees and such and think that it's an evidence of providing great value and not that's it's a sign of clearly patgological grasp on the market that they have.
I will never forgive them killing Fireworks and Flash and developing Acrobat, Photoshop and Illustrator the way they did.
I haven't touched any of their stuff since content aware resize. I'm sure that they learned to polish their turds, because it's 2020's, everyone did. I'll be celebrating their ride down as more and more people start banging out simple tools with AI agents to make the edits they need instead of digging through tons of documentation and "educational" materials to find the one almost correct option at the bottom of nested menus of Adobe crapware.
> A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
> LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
Do you know that an agent can build a simple Rust app for you that's going to be small, blazing fast and will implement for you the best 3 algorithm for that, straight from their respective papers and give you knobs for adjusting every parameter they have with any manner of precision?
Dude, have you seen Acrobat Reader "lately" - let's say, in the past 20 years or so? It's an unnecessary bloated and complicated product, nowadays slow as hell, and of course, the minute you open a PDF it starts with a compulsory "AI assistant" popup, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately corporate IT doesn't care - they are not using it. On my own systems I've long switched to alternatives.