Ask Lemmy

Yes it is.

Look into Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives. You can just do an internet search for "____ foss alternative" and you should be able to something useable. You might have to learn different hotkeys or workflows but it's better than paying a creativity fee in my opinion. Note that the free in FOSS is for freedom, not $0.00. Some FOSS tools might cost money or might be financed by paid support.

All the posts I've ever made here have been created using FOSS.

Another thing is to prioritize things that you can run locally or self host. An offsite storage backup that you own won't be used to train a generative model, but the same can not definitely be said for onedrive or gcloud.

Your specific questions in this post can't really be answered however unless you state your medium. There is a big difference between feilds like photo editing, game development, and music creation.

Before monthly subscriptions there were yearly ones of several thousands of dollars, and before that it was a huge lump sum in the tens of thousands for most software with one off costs which in some cases included purchasing proprietary hardware to actually use the software. Subscriptions and start up entry costs have always been bad.

The legal way is to be affiliated with an educational institution as they take on those costs and you can use the software they purchase. Or in some cases you get access to educational licenses to learn a software that you can then credit to your portfolio and CV so you can be employable.

Though these days free open source and piracy are easier than ever, so it’s more about finding a workflow with a set of tools that you can do what you need to do, to create what only you can create which in the end is what will set you out from the rest.

It’s rare these days that someone is going to ask for files in a proprietary format, so it’s actually easier to produce a result that someone is able to consume, technically speaking.

• For print and digital images both bitmap and vector, https://www.photopea.com/
• For 3d/2d rendering, animation, compositing and video editing https://www.blender.org/
• For motion graphics, editing and compositing https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
• For audio https://www.audacityteam.org/
• For programmatic image editing and conversions https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenImageIO
• For programmatic video editing and conversions https://www.ffmpeg.org/

You could try tell what paid tools are limiting you and see if people can help you find free open source tools to substitute them.

I do my great deal of creative work and it's all done in free open source tools.

Piracy or FOSS are your two options. After you've finally stabilized in a good career with decent income, you may start purchasing licenses for better convenience.

As everyone said, FOSS is the way to go for all of your concerns, and most likely won't be paying a dime.

A non-FOSS alternative for video edits is Davinci Resolve; there's a free version that is absolutely amazing. Discovered it when looking for an industry standard platform that runs natively on Linux.

Its pretty much just like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. The non-free functions have so far not felt necessary because of the multitude of free plugins that could be used for the rare occasion I definitely need something that's otherwise behind a paywall.

It certainly makes things more difficult but there's usually a free tool that will do the job well enough. Gimp can be used to remove backgrounds for example.

If you absolutely want to use websites, there's usually multiple options available so it's easy to cycle between them. There's hugging face spaces that I use as well for the more complicated stuff.

The Fragmentation Trap If you try to do everything yourself (the “solopreneur” route), you theoretically need a “tech stack” of 4-5 different subscriptions.

I'm not sure you appreciate how amazing it is today that a single "solopreneur" can actually perform all those roles all by themselves with software and skills of their own. Each one of those used to be an entire profession that required years of school and tens of thousands of dollars of tools and materials.

That said, there are good free open source tools that do most of those big things you cited. Examples include

• photo editor - GIMP
• Kdenlive - video editor

Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating this expensive landscape.

Starting any business requires money and time. You can "buy" shortcuts in time by spending money on more expensive tools. Alternatively if you have more time, you can do things more manually.

its not just graphic design either. The heavy push for monetization on sites like youtube and twitch is also impacting new creators as well. Like for example twitch forces a pre-roll (an ad that plays before you can even see the content) for anyone who doesn't run at least 3 minutes of ads an hour manually. I sometimes click on a creator out of curiosity but, all interest is lost as soon as I see the 40-60 second pre-roll ads. This impacts newer creators a lot more than big creators, but it seems they are the ones hit the hardest with said ads.

At this point, it absolutely is killing the creator economy, especially considering that you won't use many of these proprietary pieces of garbage for software due to their malicious pricing schemes designed to suck money out of you. This has to do with ownership becoming a myth, and instead, controlling what one bought and paid for is the way to go for the future.

That's where Free Software comes into play, when applied correctly.

Whatever I need I either can find an open source alternative or I just pirate the commercial stuff.

These companies have more than enough money, my $10-$300/month sub ain't gonna change a thing for them

It’s killing my desire to participate in so many things.

Maybe your idea of what a "basic" tool should be is dramatically different than mine. I've never really used anything other than the open source tools (GIMP/Inkscape/Kdenlive/etc.). I don't expect a "basic" tool for graphic design or video editing to have any templates genuinely useful to a professional. I expect automatic background removal for an image to be at tech-demo quality and require a lot of manual cleanup, and to be in general impossible in video. I expect chromakey to work terribly unless my scene is lit professionally. It looks like you could do 2D tweening animations in Synfig, but I don't know how one would do "motion graphics" in anything. (I guess you mean that animated infographic-of-text style stuff? Maybe by making each word and animating it manually in something?)

So it sounds like you're reaching for what are actually highly advanced tools without a lot of competitors, which may be "simple" to use and produce simple-seeming results where things "just work", but which are themselves very complex. I've seen stuff coming out on YouTube now where title text is embedded in the scene, and moves with one object and has some other object pass in front of it. It's undeniably slick, because the words are "just there" in the scene, and I can see why you'd want to deliver that to a client. But I'm also sure the tech behind it involves a team of highly paid devs, a lot of proprietary code, and probably some beefy ML models, and so nobody's going to actually be able to use that technology for real, outside of fancy-subscription-world, until someone organizes a huge push to try and clone it. If you don't pay the subscription, you indeed can't feasibly deliver that thing to a client who's asking for it.

But the good news is that you don't need those tools for "basic creativity". You can do "basic graphic design", in terms of coming up with an idea for somebody's logo or something, on a napkin with a tube of lipstick. You can draft things to professional quality with pen and paper if you have practice.

The other good news is that working within constraints will improve your creativity. Your tools and their limitations necessarily inform your artistic output. If everybody else is working in AfterEffects End of History Edition, they'll all be making samey art that looks like what that tool makes. If you act out whatever was going to be in the motion graphic with condiments out of your fridge and edit the footage together in Windows Movie Maker, I guarantee you the result will be interesting. Will it be what every client wants? Of course not. But somebody out there wants what you can deliver.

I have no idea what you're subscribing to for "market research" or what kind of "platform" is "speeding up" your "SEO" or "brainstorming". If you're a one-artist operation, you don't need a platform for market research and SEO optimization, you need to track down your sales leads artisanally, one at a time. You personally will never be the top Google result for "graphic design", so don't try. You need to write your own copy, without help (and honestly you shouldn't think of it as "copy" anyway; you just want the speeds and feeds for your services and a portfolio of your work). And if you do somehow need to brainstorm marketing ideas, you'll need to do it the slow way, because you indeed don't have the budget to pay to speed it up. But that doesn't mean it can't be done, or even that it's infeasible.

Obviously, yes

For years I did just fine editting and drawing using a cracked version of Photoshop CS2. I think I used it up until 2017 if not longer. There's also a lot of free alternatives out there. Sometimes the free alternatives don't look as good, but often they have all of the features you need, if not more.

I currently use the free video editing program on windows for my shorts and reels. It's not the most feature rich, but it works for short videos. I also use canva for some things. If you know where to look, you can get canva pro for free by joining a school group.

The real barrier imo is time. It takes a lot of time to plan, create, edit, advertise, interact with the community, find free resources, etc.

this is the way with SCIENCE papers, its all paywalled, well most of them. unless you work at a university or a student there, it will be free.