Adobe provides many applications under their Creative Cloud suite, that is not just limited to Photoshop, but contains various other software that helps primarily in web design, logo making, video editing, PDF editing and more.
However, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite is proprietary software, costing you a good amount of your money per month. If you are a Linux user, and you are willing to spend that money, the apps under it are just not natively available for the platform.
In this article, we are going to cover some of the best Adobe products alternatives for Linux that should be a good fit for your use case. Let's begin without any further ado.
1. GIMP: Alternative to Adobe Photoshop
When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, GIMP turns out to be the best replacement.
GIMP is a free and open-source image editor available for GNU/Linux, Mac, Windows, and other operating systems. It provides a handful of sophisticated tools that make a graphic designer and photographer’s work easier.
From high-quality photo manipulation to original artwork creation, GIMP includes options to create icons, graphical design elements, color management features etc. and the customization options along with third-party plugins make your work a bit easier.
Most likely, GIMP is already installed on your system. If not, then you can search for it in the official software repository to install GIMP.
2. Inkscape: Alternative to Adobe Illustrator
Inkscape is a very competitive, free and open-source tool to Adobe Illustrator. A powerful vector editor, Inkscape has flexible drawing tools, expansive file format compatibility, powerful text tools and support for bezier/spiro curves. It supports advanced scalable vector graphics features like markets, clones, and blending.
3. Scribus: Alternative to Adobe InDesign
When it comes to an alternative to Adobe InDesign, Scribus is a compelling and easy alternative that is free to use.
Scribus is a free and open-source application available for all major operating systems and is based on the free Qt toolkit. From creating layouts to type settings, to creating animated/interactive PDF presentations and forms, it is used to write newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, and books.
4. OpenShot: Alternative to Adobe Premiere
OpenShot is a powerful and easy to use video editor which serves as the best replacement for Adobe Premiere Pro. With a simple user interface, it provides many features.
5. Synfig Studio: Alternative to Adobe Animate
When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Animate, Synfig Studio is a remarkable open-source replacement.
Synfig Studio is a free and open source 2D vector graphics and timeline-based animation program for animation, designing and rendering. The goal of the application is to provide quality animation with fewer resources and provides manual inbetweening, hence saving you from the pain of drawing each and every frame.
It can also simulate soft-shading using curved gradients and provides a wide variety of real-time effects which can be applied to layers or a group of layers. You can control and animate the width of lines at their control points and link any related data from one object to another.
6. darktable: Alternative to Adobe Lightroom
darktable is a photography workflow application and raw developer which manages digital negatives or RAW images, lets you view them and gives you features to enhance them.
When it comes to an alternative to it, darktable is one of the best free and open-source options that you should consider.
It provides basic image operations like crop and rotation, highlight reconstructions, white balance, invert operation and exposure control. Tone image operations include modification to the exposure, level adjustments, changing lightness, recreating contrast for HDR images, etc.
darktable also includes color image operations for correcting overexposure and color, contrast, enhancing saturation and manipulation of RGB channels. The correction modules help you manage sharpening of details, noise level, spot removal, chromatic aberrations and more.
7. Natron: Alternative to Adobe After Effects
Natron provides a perfect alternative to Adobe After Effects with motion editing and multi-view workflows. With an intuitive user interface and quick rendering, you can work with key frames with a very accurate curve editor.
It can be used as a command line tool, and the command line version is executable from ssh on a computer with any display. It supports smooth zooming and panning for large images, and includes a full-featured dope-sheet to quickly edit clips and key frames in time-space.
8. Ardour: Alternative to Adobe Audition
When it comes to an open-source alternative to Adobe Audition, Ardour is an excellent application.
Ardour is a free and open source, cross-platform application to record, edit and mix different audio files with ease. It offers many features, with things like a dedicated note tupling feature, a no-strobe option, soundtrack editing, MIDI editing, and more.
9. Master PDF Editor: Alternative to Adobe Acrobat [Non-FOSS]
It’s difficult to find a fully functional open-source PDF editor. LibreOffice can be used to edit a PDF file with some limitation, and so can Inkscape. However, Master PDF is a powerful proprietary software in this list for Linux, supports all the features for editing a PDF file.
It allows creating, editing, encryption, and signing of PDF documents with ease. You can comment on documents, add stamps, notes, text underlines and fill PDF forms easily.
There are both commercial and free versions available for Linux.
You can also check some other PDF editors for Linux if you are looking for FOSS options.
Ankush Das
Final Words
Adobe Creative Cloud is a commercial product with continuous development and releases.
But, when it comes to open-source alternatives, we have several choices, with some of them being at par with the Adobe products while some fall short in terms of features.
However, there is always an application which can make things work for you, you just have to find it and use it.
💬 Let us know in the comments, which open-source product you use as an alternative to any Adobe products.
