Cutting the Adobe Cord

For several years, I’ve looked for viable substitutes to the Adobe Creative Adobe Suite (Adobe CS) of products, particularly Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver. These graphic design applications are industry standards but were discontinued as standalone desktop applications in 2013 in favor of a monthly cloud subscription model. Like many other users, I’ve not migrated to the online Adobe application to avoid the monthly premium subscription fee; however, as a result, I also have not upgraded my iMac operating system since the discontinued Adobe CS does not work on newer operating systems (I stopped updating with MacOS Sierra.)

These Adobe applications have been essential to my comics work: Illustrator for lettering; Photoshop for coloring, zipatone graytone/dot patterns, corrections, and assembling and saving the final pages in digital form (i.e., TIF files); InDesign for print projects like flyers and the text pages of my publications; and Dreamweaver for my website.

Knowing my days with these applications were numbered, in recent years I intermittently explored potential alternatives, including open source software like Gimp (for Photoshop) and Ink (for InDesign). Initially, none seemed ready for prime time or as robust as Adobe’s products…that is, until late last year, when I finally came across programs that fit the bill and, nearly as importantly, allowed me to access older files created with Adobe.

I’ve now nearly fully migrated to the following applications:

Clip Studio Paint (CSP)

I purchased an earlier iteration of this software application years ago for my daughter, when it was known as Manga Studio 5. Over the years, it obviously has become more robust, but for some reason, probably because of its initial manga focus, I never seriously considered it an option. So while exploring other graphics programs, on a lark, I downloaded the trial version. The more I played with it and learned its features, however, I was quickly won over.

CSP is a fairly full-featured program geared towards comics professionals and artists, combining together functions for which I traditionally used Photoshop and Illustrator, such as coloring, dot shading, post-production corrections and lettering. I feared the learning curve was going to be a lot steeper, but felt fairly comfortable and proficient within a few days. It helped that I decided to jump into it feet first with a whole new issue of Rob Hanes Adventures. I also had to color some commissions in full color and used it for these jobs. 

Among its advantages, CSP has a more direct way of applying classic dot patterns and the ability to directly apply special effects (both built in and as add-ons). With Photoshop, I often had multiple files for a single project (or comics page) that was later saved into a master document, so that I could easily go back and make changes; this was on top of a separate lettering layer created in Illustrator. Now, I pretty much can do it all within a single file with Clip Studio Paint!

Affinity
During my research, I also discovered a U.K. company called Affinity that offers three applications that are clearly intended to be affordable alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign: respectively, Photo, Designer and Publisher.

They are very reminiscent of the early editions of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign when they were standalone programs. But they nevertheless have their own little quirks and approaches, which can be occasionally frustrating and non-intuitive. So thank goodness for YouTube (which also has been helpful in learning Clip Studio Paint).

Better yet, I discovered that Photo preserved all my layers of my old Photoshop files, which was the tipping point, and a priority for me. Strangely, this was not the case with the trial version of the application, which was an initial concern and possible deal breaker; but when I purchased and downloaded the full version, discovering this capability was an incredibly happy surprise.

A minor tick is that Clip Studio Paint for some reason does not like TIFF or EPS files created within Affinity, so the two programs don’t play well together. Fortunately, a workaround is to save the file as a PNG instead, which can then be imported into Clip Studio Paint.

I also subsequently learned that Publisher can't open older InDesign files. This is not as high a priority and something I can live with. 

That said, although Photo still comes in handy for other types of projects and for opening old files—as does Designer for more customized lettering that CSP can’t handle—CSP is now my primary comics post production tool.

Bonus Workaround Programs

BlueGriffon

My WCG Comics website was built from the ground up, using Adobe CS's Dreamweaver, a web design editor that allows for both WYSIWYG and html code editing. After downloading and playing with trial versions of other software, I found BlueGriffon to be a pretty good alternative. Though not quite as comprehensive as Dreamweaver, and also a bit quirky and clunky, it nevertheless has a similar feel and features, and it enables me to edit and tweak pages as needed. 

That said, I’m not sure the software is as conducive as Dreamweaver in building a website from scratch. But for now, I simply need a program to help maintain my current site, so I’ll cross that bridge later. (I last gave my website a major design overhaul in 2017.)

UPDATE (July 2022): Researching this application more, I subsequently learned that it has not been updated since 2019 and, worse, also likely would not work on newer iMac operating systems. I've since migrated my entire site to WordPress.

LibreOffice

Though I’ve moved most of my writing and spreadsheets to GoogleDocs, like many people, I am a longtime Microsoft Word user and occasionally still need a dedicated word processor for writing and opening old documents. (GoogleDocs also can't access the fonts on my computer, which is an occasional need of mine on some projects, and only uses only a standard family of fonts within the program.) Word also now has an online version, but it's not as full-featured as the regular program and is too dependent for my taste to Microsoft's cloud service, OneDrive.

Again, while looking into ways to free myself from the Microsoft Word environment, I came across by happenstance a terrific open source program called LibreOffice which can seamlessly open my existing Word (as well as Excel) documents (including password protected documents!) And not only can it save documents as native Word and Excel files, I was even able to open old WordPerfect documents that I hadn’t been able to open in years! Wow, score!