The last news of Adobe is that they are going to snoop your images that are in their cloud for AI training, true or not, this is the last drop on the vase and some people are serious to move outside Adobe umbrella.
Here we are going to take a look some alternatives for Adobe products, I personally moved outside of Adobe a few years ago, But I still use Photoshop, an old version, no AI, no subscriptions, but works fine for my work.
Photoshop alternative
If you are looking for a free alternative, Gimp one of them, it has a lot of features similar to photoshop, (check the list here), also supports PSD format and if you still don’t want to learn a new software, there is a plugin that will change the interface almost like Photoshop.
PhotosGIMP is a great solution to make look Gimp like your very used interface of Photoshop, to install follow the instructions careful, for Windows, follow this tutorial.
One plugin that is very good and has a bunch of effects is G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing), quite interesting program that has a lot of artistic effects and strange image processing.
GIMP Resynthesizer is another plugin for Gimp that is similar to the content aware of photoshop, work very good and is free.
Hugin – Panorama photo stitcher, is a free plugin and also runs independent for making panoramas, take a few photos and stich them together.
Comics and Drawings
If you into drawing, Krita is one of the best software for that and is free.
It has a huge selection of brushes, also a something called stabilizer that if you lines are shaky it will fix them automatically. It also has great tool to make comics, with word bubbles and panels. It even has a simple 2D animation timeline tool if you want to animate things there.
It supports PSD and all the standard formats.
Raw processing.
RawTherapee is a free raw photo processing system, that is compatible con variety of programs like Photoshop and Gimp. Non-destructive, 32-bit (floating point) processing engine, modern demosaicing algorithms, and advanced color and detail editing bring you the best tools to develop images of the highest quality from your raw files.
Panoramas:
Autopano is one of the programs I use for real state and panoramic images, now is free, bit old but works very good, I still use them today, also can export in different projections that is quite interesting
Vector Images
Inkscape, is one of the best free software to work in vector images, like Adobe Illustrator, It has all the profesional tools and can import a huge range of image formats. I use it quite a lot for doing logos and moving from .ai to other 3D applications like 3DsMax, is one of those apps that is been a decade in my desktop.
AI generation
For AI, there isn’t any easy option like Firefly, this is because AI uses a lot of CPU power, also needs to train images and those things cost money and time, is very unlikely somebody is going to put that for free.
But if you have a good computer with a nice GPU and RAM memory (at least 32gig), you can run an AI locally in your computer, there are plenty options in the internet for this, but the easier one I tried is Fooocus, is very simple to install, just download it (is quite big), extract to a hard drive that has plenty space and run the .bat it will auto-install, download the images and checkpoints and is quite easy to use, their output is similar to Midjourney, it has styles that simplify the prompts you need to type, has some tools to replace things and faces, backgrounds, etc.
There are more applications, actually there are a bunch them that run on the web, most of them are freemium, but if you want to use their pro tools is going thru subscriptions plans. Here we are looking at the free options, in the future I’m going to look more to the pay software.
