“I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop since 1996,” Suzette Franck told XBiz. Franck is webmaster of AdultBroker.com and other sites. “My drive to switch to another program would come not so much from ease of use but an understanding of which way the industry is going. Right now, the industry standard is Adobe.”
As a vector-graphics program, Acrylic’s functionality is much more similar to Adobe’s Illustrator.
Long Island-based affiliate program MobBucks.com COO Mark Tiarra said that his company’s designers constantly keep up with new technology. “We try to dabble in the big programs as well as the smaller ones, the shareware or freeware ones,” he said.
Tiarra agreed that industry standardization of Acrylic would be a major point in favor of a wholesale switch, but that pricing would be the primary reason. “There would be no real reason to go that route if the price wasn’t right,” he said.
Tiarra and others interviewed for this story have been using Photoshop for most — if not all — of their professional careers. Franck started using PaintShop Plus and Corel Draw before making the move to Adobe products, and Tiarra started with Photoshop 2 in 1995.
Adobe’s current Photoshop release is version 7 and is bundled in a package called Adobe CS [Creative Suite].
Stan Fiskin, CEO of New Jersey design firm EnvisionextAdult.com, does not see Acrylic banging nails into Adobe’s coffin anytime soon. “We have a staff of designers who have multiple proficiencies,” he said, “so there is no reason to switch, [especially] if the next version of Illustrator can export into a Microsoft format.”
Adult studios are even more entrenched with Adobe products, designing boxcovers and DVD labels with them, and seeing no reason to make a move to an untested program.
“We’re using Adobe applications for everything,” PurePlay Art Director Jodi Lindquist said. “The main problem is the many different versions of [page layout program] Quark that our clients use.”
Many in the art world still profess a distaste for Microsoft products, too. “Adobe has really kicked it up on their design software packages,” Lindquist said, “and I don't really think Microsoft can compete, especially customer service-wise.”
Lindquist added that the majority of adult studios have Mac-based graphics departments. And Metro’s graphic designer Alaska, who also has designed boxcovers for VCA and LFP, extolled Photoshop’s intuitive learning curve and features.
“I can take a picture of the crackling paint on a wall and make a brush out of it in Photoshop,” Alaska said.
In general, Acrylic’s entry into the market does not spell doom for Adobe. If anything, designers will acquire copies and learn its tricks, incorporating them eclectically with the features of other graphics programs. Acrylic's public beta expires in October, at which point it will either go on sale or be discontinued.
“If there was one program that did everything,” Alaska said, “I would buy that. But there isn’t.”
