Cheap or free alternative to Adobe Creative Suite?

As above. Can anyone suggest a Cheap or free alternative to Adobe Creative Suite?
My wife wants to create designs for print marketing material without paying out an arm and a leg.
Kinda like openword but for designs. Thanks.

I haven’t tried Affinity but it is on my list as updating Adobe software is out of the question.

Depends what you want…

General image adjustment, drawing, vectors???

It’s not hugely expensive if she’s in that game. Plenty of offers for CC come up. I’d look out for those and go with it.

I think on my current deal it’s about £25+vat a month.

You can of course just rent one element.

Just be aware if you rent from Adobe, you are tied in to a fixed term. If you cancel, they’ll bill you for the full term.

Krita?

Inkscape and/or Scribus?

I’ve been using Affinity Photo as a replacement for Photoshop and I haven’t found anything I used to do in PS that I can’t do in AP. Don’t know if that would be true if I were an advanced user, but for me it’s fine.

Did affinity photo have a content aware fill equivalent?

As Rone said, you don’t need the full creative suite. Just get the elements you need

I assume that if she’s wanting to produce marketing material she’ll be wanting Indesign.

So just get Indesign. I think you can still get a free first months trial on the Adobe website. Try it and see how you get on

At the end of the day it’s in it’s totally dominant market position because it’s fantastic, intuitive software that does exactly what it says on the tin, developed over decades.

If you wanted some spanner’s to work on your bike would you go for Park Tools or just buy a set for a couple of quid from a stall on the market?

Linky for your free months trial

If you need any pointers on getting started, plenty of us Adobe users on her happy to give advice, but as with most things YouTube is your friend

Did affinity photo have a content aware fill equivalent?

Yes – they call it “inpainting”.

Photoshop and equivalents aren’t much, if any, use for producing print marketing materials. It’s photo editing software, which is a very different animal to Indesign, which is the right tool for the job

Affinity is fabulous in my opinion.

Affinity have a new product called Publisher which I believe is an InDesign competitor – could be mistaken, but it may be sufficient for your purposes.

GIMP (not that kind) is great to replace the photoshop element
http://Www.gimp.org

Looks interesting that, DrJ. I’ve never heard of it.

Might have to download a copy and have a play, just out of interest.

I’ve recently been freelancing at a huge publishing place that was still using Quark Express. Nice to see that years after everyone moved over to Indesign, it’s still as awful to use as ever. I was amazed they were still going

At the end of the day it’s in it’s totally dominant market position because it’s fantastic, intuitive software that does exactly what it says on the tin, developed over decades.

Except it isn’t – overlapping software and expensive charges. We are trying to be more reliant on Sketch – it’s better in 9/10 ways but holding on to the silly expensive Adobe license just in case.

Gimp for Photoshop
Inkscape for Illustrator
Xara Designer Pro for Illustrator (£)

At home I use Linux and open source software for everything I do. But at work, I use indesign. I’ve tried to layout a page in inkscape on several occasions just as an experiment and I never get anywhere, Indesign is miles better. Photo manipulation however and I use the gimp at work just because I know it.

At the end of the day it’s in it’s totally dominant market position because it’s fantastic, intuitive software that does exactly what it says on the tin, developed over decades

Completely with Binners on this.

Spend the cash, learn the industry standards, get paid more.

Clients expect it.

Just thought I’d put something together with Scribus just to see how I got on with it. I’ve never really tried to use it before. It’s not as nice to use as inDesign and it’s obviously missing features that inDesign has, but it’s free, and open source, so you either you just get on with it and accept it for what it is, or you help the developers make it better (which obviously takes time, energy, and skills).

I was hoping to come up with something better than this, but given the source material, and it’s my first time using Scribus, perhaps I can be forgiven 😂

+1 to Affinity. Really very good and the iPad app (Pro only from memory) is astonishingly good.

Dxo PhotoLab instead of Lightroom.

Looking just over £100 all in for both packages combined and will do anything PS/LR will.

Adobe CS for photographers though at c. £8 is very good value if you want to stick with Adobe though.

Thanks guys. Really appreciate the help.

It’s £50 a month for everything, that’s two hours work tops as a freelance graphic designer, 1 hour as a photographer. It’s even cheaper if you cherry pick the apps you need. I just don’t get the “it’s expensive” argument. It’s got a lot a faults that I wish they’d fix, but it’s not expensive.

Those are my sentiments exactly. I was concerned that once they’d moved everyone over to the subscription model that they’d use their market dominance to ratchet up prices, but they haven’t

I think 50 quid a month is an absolute bargain for the full CC. The interface between the software elements is absolutely seamless now, and there is simply nothing else out there to compete with it. Thats why absolutely everyone in the industry uses it, and I don’t hear anyone seriously complaining

CC is pretty slow and laggy unless running on decently specced machines. Fine that everyone in the industry uses it, but not everyone who wants to produce their own marketting material is in the industry or wants to be.

In which case, my suggestion would be (somewhat unsurprisingly) to pay said design professional for a few hours work to put your marketing material together in Creative Suite rather than fanny about for hours (possibly days) with some piece of Micky Mouse software that will give you results that are going to be nowhere near the same standard

Whilst I agree with binners, if it’s something nice and simple you want for laying out pages, knocking up basic logos and that kind of thing you could do worse than having a look at canva.com. There’s a free version, or you can upgrade to pro for more features. I’m not sure what you lose in the free version (and I hate using it because it’s not Indesign) but I know a few people swear by it.

It’s kind of like the print equivalent of making a website in Wix, which is no bad thing.

I’m with Binners on this – I’ve tried the Affinity software, but there’s just something lacking with it. Perhaps if you’re coming to it as a newbie you will be fine as you won’t miss any Adobe features or ways of working.

I’m not ready to jump from Adobe yet.