1047: Adobe has a big problem

Wes Bos (0:00)

Adobe is in trouble. This company has taken the entire Adobe suite and clean room ported every single thing. Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Lightroom, Print. What is that? InDesign. What's their animation? After Effects and DesignCraft. Maybe that one is InDesign. Anyways, they have like Vibe, Slop, Forked, whatever you're gonna call it. Every single Adobe app from the Adobe suite. And normally, I see this type of thing and I go, yeah, right. You know, it's not any good, you know? And before you turn this off, because I hate how obnoxious all these AI bros are. We're like, X just killed Y. And then it turns out the person talking doesn't know anything about X or Y.

But I have been a Photoshop user for 25 years. I've tried all of the alternatives, you know, Photopea, GIMP, Affinity.

I have I've tried them all and they're not as good. Believe me, I would love to stop paying $80 a month for the Adobe suite. I just nothing has has come close to it. However, this thing rolled out yesterday and I installed it. I was like, yeah, right. Let's open it up. I threw some of my biggest Photoshop files that I have, or maybe not biggest ones, but some of my more recent ones.

Let me tell you, it worked very well. I was very surprised. First of all, it opens faster than Photoshop. It implements, we'll talk about the feature parody. It's not quite there just yet. But to tell you, I'm shocked at how good and fast this is. I had another one of those like, holy smokes moments with this type of thing. The show today is we're going to have a conversation about where we're at with our industry. Is this stuff okay? Should you even be like, vibe coding an exact copy of something? Or is the next iteration of software just something totally different? So I think it's going to be kind of a cool demo and a good conversation about like, where is software even at? Where you can make something that is significantly better than any Photoshop alternative I have ever seen in, I look back at the commits, two weeks, all while doing the rest of the Adobe Suite, which is absolutely nuts.

Scott Tolinski (2:22)

Yes, I'm so excited. I'm a famous Adobe hater. July 6th, 2017, I published a video on the Level Up Tutorials channel, How to Mostly Ditch Adobe.

Because I was fed up with Adobe and it's funny, Wes, I don't know if you would believe this, but I have not opened Photoshop on my computer since 2017, which is when we started this podcast and I made that video because I was so annoyed with the Dune Creative Cloud thing that's always running and the updates and the logins and the dark patterns around cancellations. So me, I've replaced all of my things in the Creative Cloud with kind of worse alternatives, with the exception of that being DaVinci Resolve and Figma being better than Illustrator to me and Premiere. But the other ones, Photoshop, that's never really had a good replacement. I've tried Affinity Photo. I've had that installed forever now. I've tried GIMP. I've tried all of the ones that people say to use. And I've never been super happy with any of them. So I'm really interested to see how good this is. Maybe this is the alternative that I've been waiting for since 2017

Wes Bos (3:41)

Yes.

And like, I love Figma. I use Figma for most of my web design stuff. But Figma is not a raster tool. And if you want to make nice blending modes and things like that, there is no equivalent tool with this type of thing.

Yeah, there's no raster-based alternative in Figma for this type of stuff. And for a lot of the designs that I do, whether it's t-shirt designs or whether it's just little textures and whatnot, or even for the Syntax website has a lot of texture on it. That stuff does not look good as a vector. And same thing with all of the print stuff. We have a Syntax skateboard. The whole box is designed in Illustrator. It's not a good, you can't design print in Figma. The whole thing just spins away and crashes. And anybody who tells you that there is better alternatives is not actually a professional user of these types of things because it's just not a good alternative. So when I cracked this thing open, I was like, yeah, right, it can't be that good.

But I opened it up and I opened up quite a few of my existing Photoshop files and all of, like this is one thing that I have. This is a custom like half tone thing. Let me turn off all of my visuals on here. Right, like this is just a stupid little thing. This is not actual design, but I have all of these filters that I layer on top of each other to get the sort of like half tone effect on here. And this is eight stacked different effects of patterns, gradient maps, levels, black and white, variants, random variants. These are all things that are in Photoshop. And then each of them has different blend modes that blend into each other. And then one of the layers is masked over top of it. And it exactly, perfectly, right? Like if you look back at our Mad CSS thumbnail, the only thing in this thumbnail, right? There's lots of masks in here. There's lots of effects, drop shadow. The only thing is that it didn't get the texture on the drop shadow exactly how it would look like in Photoshop. So like I'm surprised at how good this is. It opens up faster than Photoshop. And I've just been having one of those mornings where I'm just looking at it and being like, holy smokes, this is amazing. And I went on the GitHub and looked at the commits for this type of thing. And they don't go past two weeks ago, meaning that somebody recreated probably like 80% of the Adobe Suite, maybe 70%.