Making music artwork. Alternatives to Adobe?

[eLawnMust]

Here's a few bad examples of capturing screensavers... First is Maya Paint Effects Screensaver-

These look alot like 70's-80's album covers-











That was about 5 minutes of capture then switch out MEL scripts in screensaver config the sky is the limit on that screensaver...

The next is just a few from the 'Kinemorphic 3D Screensaver which is like 26 years old now...

Looking at this I see a band logo or cover with a song or band name of 'Sinister Sphincter', Coming to a concert hall near nowhere-







Just add your titling & you are done!

BTW the OLD Zbrushes were quite good at making 'pretty pictures' when you dropped to 2D canvas... Versions 1-2 were quite setup for this & after that less & less as it became a 3D sculptor hell most nowadays probably don't even know about that... The OLD Zbrush sculptors would sculpt in 3D as far as they could go THEN drop the model to canvas & go crazy with all the 2D tools to dress-up the image...

[BONES]

Every layer based application has layers. That's not my point.

Yeah but you use the layers in Photoshop to build up an image, exactly as you described for Affinity. This, for example, is something I was working on in Photoshop for our new album. It started as a photo of ICE agents beating up a citizen and I layered a whole heap of krap on top of it.

Screenshot 2026-03-26 225338.png

Yup, XSI was real good but it took like till version 4 before it became stable (and resolution independent) before that you had to be able the 1280x1024 rez for proper operation, there were alt GUIs around but they were always missing something... But, yes, best & earliest handle on Sub-Ds plus best/deepest integration of mental ray plus the rendertree was awesome making Maya's hypershade seem very strange in usage... XSI was always what you wanted to animate in as well...

Nah, it was always 3DS Max for me. Maya was horrid and I never so much as looked at XSI. The beauty of Max is that simple things are always simple, whereas in Maya everything was complicated.

But...BUTT!... Why all the fuss about an album/song that will most likely be crappy anyway, put more 'oomph' into the tune that's what anyone is there for not the cover art...

Especially these days where you need to think how it will look as a 120x120 pixel icon on a phone screen, which is how most people will see it. It's almost not worth worrying about, although Apple Music does allow you to upload a booklet with an album and you'd be stupid not to do it if the option is there, even if 99% of people will never look at it.

Easiest way without using any art program or friggin' AI is to collect up cool screensavers, personally I have a ton, plus many I have made myself...

None of those examples are anything even approaching "cool". These are cool screensavers, generated by Zune, but they aren't exactly useful as album covers -

Screenshot 2026-05-03 203300.png

Screenshot 2026-06-08 092841.png

[pekbro]

Generally, I find it difficult to fault BONES aesthetic sense as a fellow artist. Tho I am wondering why the ICE guys are driving a fire truck.

[eLawnMust]

Those screensavers are worse than mine & who gives a shit about being 'phone capable'? You see opinions vary still maybe because it's me I have not found much of what 'music' you make to be ingestible & I have heard it on-off for some years back before all the kill-kill what when you had the better VSTs I think the tag on them was Eric Langrou or Langou or something like that... At any rate spending hours on covers makes no sense...

As for 3DS max yea, it was for YOU... XSI was way ahead & Maya too... 3DS max was just popular & there was alotta plugins to bring it up a few notches...

[Tiles]

Yeah but you use the layers in Photoshop to build up an image, exactly as you described for Affinity. This, for example, is something I was working on in Photoshop for our new album. It started as a photo of ICE agents beating up a citizen and I layered a whole heap of krap on top of it.

But the logic is different, that's why you find it clumsy and cumbersome to use. You talk about layers, i talk about the logic.

In Photoshop, you could:

clone out pixels directly
apply a destructive filter
delete a selection
permanently alter the background

and still end up with a layer stack.

In Affinity, however, elements much more frequently end up in the document as editable objects:

Live Filters
Adjustment Layers
Masks
Procedural Layers
Live Liquify Layers
RAW development as an editable step

Maybe we're simply talking past each other again. You're describing a layered workflow. I'm describing how edits are represented and preserved within that workflow.

[ThomasHelzle]

You can do mostly everything relevant for music artwork you do in PS in Affinity as well. I don't find the difference that big actually - the main concepts are the same and you can rasterise edits and filters etc. in both.
The issue I have with Affinity is more it's slightly worse layout/organisation and that the filters are generally of less quality or more limited than PS was (I stopped using it with CS6, started using it with version 2.5 on floppy discs... ).

BTW. Not an Adobe Alternative in the strict sense, since Adobe doesn't have something like this AFAIK, but also very usable both for artwork and videos is "TiXL" (formerly known as Tooll3):
https://tixl.app
Free and open source realtime graphics for PC.
Node based and extremely capable and fast to work with.
Can do audio reactive things and export directly to video but you can also export PNG sequences.
C# and HLSL

Two examples from my own work:
Birth of a Universe:


TheOrb · Part V · Wisdom


Both run in 4k, 60fps in realtime on my older laptop with a RTX 3070 with something like 4 million particles...
Some of the particle forces used are custom-coded in HLSL by myself.