Apple’s Creator Studio May Be the Best Case to Ditch Your Adobe Subscription

Do you even need to ask? Yes, Apple’s new $13-a-month or $130-a-year Creator Studio bundle is a great deal. It packs in Apple’s image editing, video editing, music editing software into one package and throws in a few “freemium” takes on classic apps to boot. The other major creative app subscription—Adobe Creative Cloud—will cost you $70 a month. If you’re a student, paying just $3 per month or $30 a year for Creator Studio is well worth the cost, the equivalent of three Starbucks coffees and a snack.

And if you came here to hear me complain about the new icons for apps like Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro, then here’s your free catharsis. They’re ugly and confusing. Pixelmator Pro’s icon is an especially strange case. It’s trying to insinuate it’s a layers-based app, but nothing about its selection of lines and squares reveals that it’s built for both art and photo editing. Apple has maintained that the whole point of the new icon selection is consistency. But you don’t have to be too mad. Each app is still available for a one-time purchase. Hell, if you have a legacy purchase of any of these apps, you’ll still have access to the same icons in their own separate app, even if you subscribe to a new Creator Studio account.

Creator Studio still won’t be the perfect equivalent to Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription. It lacks some InDesign-like features for layout or some of Adobe’s Firefly AI-centric features that touch up images or generate them whole cloth. There are other apps, like Affinity Suite, that may fill the void and help you avoid paying the exorbitant Adobe tax on its subscription-only software products. And if you want these apps permanently on-device, you can spend $300 for Final Cut Pro, $200 for Logic Pro, or $50 for Pixelmator Pro. There’s no option to subscribe to only one of these apps. It’s all or nothing.

Apple granted me early access to the Creator Studio suite before its full launch on Jan. 28. It finally allowed me to leave Adobe behind for the sake of editing my photos. Despite the odd and pointless freemium features in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, there’s a lot to like here. If Apple keeps expanding features for its creative apps, Adobe will have a tough time arguing you need to spend $240 per year or more for access to Photoshop.

Pixelmator Pro just makes sense on iPad

Hate those new icons? If you subscriber to Creator Studio, what you see is what you get. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

Not much has changed in these apps, even though they may look completely different. Pixelmator Pro now sports a Liquid Glass look. Before you start imagining that all the app’s text has become as illegible as on your iPhone used to be before Apple let you change the UI’s opacity, the actual app itself is relatively clean. With the default dark gray background, the toolbar is still perfectly legible with a similar layout to before the update. You can change the background color to something lighter, though that may impact how well you can see your work.

Apple imagines today’s “creators” are increasingly multidisciplinary. That, in effect, is admitting that specialized jobs by industry experts are being replaced with a do-it-yourself attitude. Hell, if it’s made for TikTok, who cares if it’s the best quality? I can bemoan the state of the creative industry all I want, but it doesn’t actually change what I do. I’m a sub-amateur photographer who’s recently grown obsessed with a Ricoh GRIIIX point-and-shoot camera, so Pixelmator Pro’s photo touch-up capabilities are a godsend. I previously paid $20 a month for Photoshop to access much of the same feature set for handling my RAW photos and settings to achieve the right look. Of course, I don’t have access to some Lightroom features that would help me apply settings to hundreds of RAW photos at once. If Apple ever adds such specific features for mass exporting files, I’d be in a much better position.

Templates in Pixelmator are a great way to get started if you don’t know what you’re doing. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

The big new edition for Pixelmator Pro is an iPad version. So if you have a Mac and an iPad, you can swap between your projects seamlessly with an iCloud account. I’ve perused the app on Apple’s tablets, and the UI closely resembles the Mac version down to the default orientation of the toolbar and layers window. The big difference is that you could use an Apple Pencil for drawing out images, stenciling, or outlining. Apple scaled the UI on the iPad for a smaller screen, though there is still enough functionality on an 13-inch iPad Pro M5 that I didn’t have any issues. I still prefer using my MacBook Pro for photo editing thanks to the quick access to an SD card reader.

Pixelmator Pro works great in either setting. And that makes sense, because Pixelmator—before Apple bought it—used to exist on iPad. That legacy app is now called Pixelmator Classic. Its only lingering use is for light editing. Hence why this new app is so important for iPad’s app lexicon. What’s more, Apple added a selection of templates if you want to make a poster or your next resume. There are quite a few example templates available, though there likely aren’t enough for most expert creatives to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Apple also added Photoshop-like transform and warp tools, useful for bending images around objects for when you’re mocking up a new t-shirt or mug design. Inevitably, Pixelmator Pro tries to do too many things, and it loses some focus on finer features. Lacking those Lightroom features for large-scale editing will be a dealbreaker for many users. The funny thing is, Apple could have included its Photomator app within the bundle—maybe with some UI improvements—which would have sweetened the deal. That app is still separate and costs $34 per year for a subscription or $120 as a one-time purchase. Some users will appreciate Pixelmator Pro’s capabilities and lack of bloat, while others may find they miss that one Illustrator feature. It’s certainly Adobe’s biggest Photoshop competitor. For my uses, I’ll have no reason to return to Adobe’s expensive ecosystem.

Apple now lets you make ‘photorealistic’ AI images

If you want to phone in your next slideshow, you could get OpenAI’s models to write them for you. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

One of the hallmark features for the Creator Studio subscription is how it “upgrades” several Apple-made documents apps, namely Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. All non-paying users still have access to these apps, but for $13 a month, you get “premium” AI features stuffed into each. Don’t worry; if you’re not paying, you’re not missing much unless you have a need for royalty-free graphics.

Each app gets access to a library of custom themes and templates. These can prove helpful if you’re planning to craft a slideshow that isn’t built on the same old Canva theme you’ve seen a million times. If I wanted to craft some content in Keynote, the other big addition is the ability to use AI to generate content or images inside the app. Despite striking a deal with Google to use its Gemini AI model in Apple products, these AI features are currently still using OpenAI’s models.

So when I asked my Mac to craft a slideshow of “Why Cans Beat Bottles for Your Drinking Water,” it rounded out a half-dozen slides, trying its best to articulate why the iron taste of canned water in your mouth is better than a reusable water bottle. It even crafted a quote from “Anonymous,” reading: “Drinking water from a can transforms hydration into a refreshing ritual.” There was a lot of content missing, enough that you’ll end up modifying whatever the AI sticks in there anyway. It can give you a head start on a project, but I’d hesitate to leave any AI text in a slideshow, even if you’re only showing it off to your bored colleagues.

Content Hub is available across the Creator Suite’s ecosystem, though you may not always find what you’re looking for. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

Previously, Apple’s single AI image generator, Image Playground, could only generate cartoonish pictures based on preset themes and your own photos. Now, without any fanfare, Apple’s letting users generate “photorealistic” images through the Keynote and Pages apps. Compared to Google’s latest image models like Nano Banana Pro, the images created by these OpenAI models bear tell-tale signs of image generation, including missing fingers and plastic-looking skin.

So most people are better off opting for the new Content Hub. It includes a collection of various royalty-free images, graphics, and backgrounds for you to stick inside your pages to make your next work presentation minutely less dull. This will not be enough to avoid paying for a Getty or Shutterstock subscription. Despite having a wide assortment of images, you’ll inevitably be unable to find the exact image you’re looking for. I had a hard time finding stock photos when searching for specific subjects. You’ll find a lot more clip art than stock photos.

You’ll find some worthwhile features amid the AI junk. These apps now have access to Pixelmator Pro’s super resolution feature for 3x image upscaling. The Numbers app includes a “Magic Fill” feature that—despite the dumb name—can notify you if there’s missing information in some of your cells. If you wanted to avoid Pixelmator Pro entirely, you could construct a quick poster just using Pages and one of the available templates. Some of these features sound like the kinds of additions that would come as part of a routine macOS update, rather than as part of a paid subscription.

Still a good deal if you don’t use every app

There are some extra enticing features for Logic Pro, such as beat detection. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

Final Cut Pro also has a few extra features for this big subscription push. The biggest enhancements are transcript search and visual search. These use on-device AI to find specific footage or quotes inside your clips, which should make it easier to find the right section to drop into your timeline. The feature worked fast and seamlessly when I tried it on an M5 MacBook Pro.

The transcriptions were also on point based on the videos I plugged into it. The only thing missing is a page that would grant users access to full audio transcriptions. That would be useful for me personally in my work as a tech journalist. For now, I’ll have to stick with Whisper for on-device transcription without paying a princely sum to services like Otter or Plaud.

Both Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro now make use of a nifty beat detection feature. It gauges where each beat is in a piece of music and generates a beat grid along the timeline. This lets you auto-snap clips to the beat, making it far easier to create a professional-looking music video without minutely trimming clips for the edit.

I hope Apple eventually adds the ability to export video transcriptions as their own separate file or document. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

But I’ll admit, there’s going to be a reason for me to use Logic Pro. One of my two New Year’s resolutions for 2026 is to learn Korean. The other is to build a Nerdy Gurdy (a build-it-yourself hurdy-gurdy), learn how to play, and then use it to record some custom samples with the help of a Teenage Engineering EP-1320 Medieval. It’s the kind of ambition that’s either doomed for failure or at least a heap of consternation. Maybe I’ll have a reason to jump into Apple’s music editing software sometime in the future.

Which is the point of Apple’s creative apps bundle in the first place. If you use two out of three of these apps, $13 is still far less than you would spend from Adobe. That doesn’t mean there aren’t free alternatives available that may also tide you over. But there are amenities to sticking with Apple, namely access to your iCloud to maintain your documents across devices. More than anything, Adobe has the hard task trying to invite me back to a subscription-only model that costs more than six times as much as Apple’s bundle.