Coming from the world of audio software I've always wondered why it seemed like Adobe has such a stranglehold on visual work and nothing really catches up to photoshop or illustrator. In audio there are several big DAWs (digital audio workstations) that I would classify as popular and competent enough for serious work, each of which has artists or producers that have built successful careers around. Yes there are endless wars about what is better but more or less can do the same things and most experienced people say, choose one, learn it, decide what works for you. I feel like with photoshop it's always like "oh it's missing critical feature x, y, and z compared to photoshop so it's a dealbreaker". The closest analogy I could think of is pro-tools being a popular "de-facto" standard in many pro recording studios, but most hobbyists don't use pro-tools and agree that it's popular in pro studios mostly due to tradition.I'm surprised there aren't at least a handful of adobe competitors that carved a niche and are significantly popular because they made some key workflows faster, more intuitive, or more powerful.
Maybe this difference is because of ubiquitous plugin formats like VST that translate across different DAWs?
dagmx|1 year ago
1. It's significantly more standardized and straightforward for data interpretation. MIDI is standard (and OSC sort of fizzled), and audio clips (wav, aiff, whatever) are also very standard. You don't have the issues of color science, and you have a much smaller range of transformations that can be done to an audio clip.
2. A lot of infrastructure is standardized. From hardware interaction, to key mapping, but also things like plugins (Audio Units, VSTs, RTAS/AAX). It's so much simpler to go between apps.
3. A lot of audio workflows are treated as procedural and non-destructive.
Compare this to images:
1. Color science is horrific. Even Adobe often get it wrong (Krita was actually the best for a long time). D
2. Plugins are very application specific. So biggest marketshare often wins.
3. The range of transformations people want to do is massive. Each of them need very bespoke workflows, and due to the lack of standardized plugins, they're rarely shared.
4. A lot of image workflows are destructive by nature. A lot of image plugins as well are destructive.
5. Document interchange still sucks. For raster, you'll be plagued by color science issues. For vector, you'll be plagued by nobody implementing SVG the same.
6. Hardware APIs also vary wildly. For a long time, you had to target every vendor of pen you wanted to support for example.
I think a large part of it is due to the industries behind it. Video and Audio need to scale massively within a single project, across a lot of hardware devices, and production houses. The data is massive in comparison. Issues cost a lot.
Images are smaller in scale. An issue can be fixed very cheaply.
The Video and Audio industries fixed this by putting effort into standardization, education and interoperability. Images never had that attention.
robenkleene|1 year ago