25 Years of Krita(krita.org)
krita.org
25 Years of Krita
https://krita.org/en/posts/2024/krita-25-years/
100 comments
Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could.
It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF.
Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.
It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF.
Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.
More recent versions of Photoshop have a frame-based editing setup that can be modified by hand, allowing use of filters and similar tools. This feature has essentially been ignored by every commercial alternative to Photoshop (Affinty, Pixelmator, etc.), which is why I don’t use them. I edit a lot of GIFs.
Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.
Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.
I bet the UI is nicer for Krita gif editing than the GIMP animation plugin. Time to spend time learning it for a few GIFs I’d like to make.
My recommended strategy is to create a document to your preferred size and then go to File -> Import Animation Frames. You can import video or existing GIFs from there. The animation workspace is good for this, of course.
Wow. I could've sworn Krita was only around 6 years old. I've only very recently started hearing about it.
While Krita has been pretty good for most of its existence it really wasn't until about ten years ago that it started having a life of it's own outside KOffice, then add some time to pick up more features and gain a reputation and you're right at 6 years or-so.
There seems to be a phenomena I observe in the FOSS community where we reflexively respond to suggestions despite them being far beneath their FOSS alternatives. Only after digging or running into issues, do you find the good stuff.
Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned
Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita
Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora
I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.
Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned
Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita
Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora
I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.
David Revoy doesn't recommend Fedora 40 for digital artists any more. The main reasons are regressions in tablet software with Plasma 6, and Krita not being a Wayland app.
[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-...
[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-...
He added an edit that the tablet software in Plasma 6 still works as it did before when run in X11. Only if you switch to Wayland, or your distro does it for you by removing X11 packages, will you get the (for the time being) less capable version.
Yeah, sadly tablet support is one of the areas where wayland has been particularly slow in terms of getting its act together (it's explicitly disabled in krita because of this, which I think is a combo of standards not existing, compositor support, and Qt support). It's definitely the main reason I'm still on Xorg.
Which is hilarious when you realize that wayland started as an automotive infotainment project.
> automotive infotainment project
I haven't heard that story before. Got any references?
I haven't heard that story before. Got any references?
You are right, your theory works but it looks like you never tried OpenSUSE. It’s basically Fedora but with great administration tools, a better package manager (but it also uses rpm packages) and with optional AUR-like community packages.
OpenSUSE >>> Fedora >>>> Debian Family
OpenSUSE >>> Fedora >>>> Debian Family
I wonder if there OpenSUSE distros for the RPi or if I’m best sticking to Raspbian due to the hardware quirks.
Fedora and Debian (stable) are not really directly comparable, they have different goals. Fedora is essentially a beta channel for RedHat, equivalent to Debian Unstable/testing. Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers and/or users who don't need the latest Gnome.
> Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers
This is the problem, people are recommending Debian-family for desktop.
I don't think people are really talking about server linux, that is almost a solved problem.
This is the problem, people are recommending Debian-family for desktop.
I don't think people are really talking about server linux, that is almost a solved problem.
Last time I wanted to try Fedora, it didn't ship some packages I wanted to use that Debian sid shipped, and Debian sid is similarly up-to-date in many stuff (they don't ship plasma 6 yet though, even in sid).
I think Debian sid is underappreciated as a decent rolling release distro. I get that Debian doesn't advertise it that way, but it virtually never breaks for me.
I think Debian sid is underappreciated as a decent rolling release distro. I get that Debian doesn't advertise it that way, but it virtually never breaks for me.
I used fedora 24 for a few years in the mid-late 2010s. Now I've been using Ubuntu for the past 4 years and I don't see too much difference in my daily use.
I mostly use it for development - backends and data/spark mostly, nothing lower level. What does fedora do better? Is it something that was introduced in later releases?
I mostly use it for development - backends and data/spark mostly, nothing lower level. What does fedora do better? Is it something that was introduced in later releases?
Ubuntu tends to push their proprietary snap format, even replacing some dpkgs with secret snap shims.
Fedora will usually push major Linux changes before other distros; systemd, wayland, cgroupsv2, btrfs, etc.
Fedora will usually push major Linux changes before other distros; systemd, wayland, cgroupsv2, btrfs, etc.
I wish I'd knew of Krita sooner. Genuinely one of the main drivers of my switch to Mac OS was Affinity Photo (which is excellent btw), because I was driven half insane by GIMP's frustrating keyboard controls. Need it be that difficult to unselect something?
> Need it be that difficult to unselect something?
What's difficult about Ctrl-Shift-A? If it's a problem for you, it's easy to change the keyboard shortcut. You can also just click away. GIMP certainly makes some things unexpectedly challenging, but that seems like a strange example to pick.
What's difficult about Ctrl-Shift-A? If it's a problem for you, it's easy to change the keyboard shortcut. You can also just click away. GIMP certainly makes some things unexpectedly challenging, but that seems like a strange example to pick.
There is a lot of overlap, but I’d hardly call GIMP low quality.
I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use.
Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.
I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use.
Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.
Compared to Krita's interface, abstractions, and capability, GIMP feels pretty archaic. It's a vaguely capable photo editor but it's awful for digital painting.
Well that might be because, well, GIMP is made for photo editing, not for digital painting. Of course, GIMP does have some drawing tools in it, but that's clearly not the task it was designed for.
Fedora >> Debian is an interesting take. I've never particularly got along with rpm-based distros, and they always seemed much the same quality, just different. What makes the difference in your opinion?
Copypasted:
"Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows."
"Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows."
Krita > GIMP, absolutely, but unfortunately both of them are centuries behind any proprietary software despite only being decades old. And I'm not even talking about PAID proprietary software. Free apps are also better.
A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.
They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.
It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.
A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.
They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.
It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.
Which proprietary free app is better than Krita?
Depending on your use case, fire alpaca, azpainter, graphics gale.
The problem is that Krita/GIMP have many features that very few people use. Like you have digital artists who don't need CMYK, but the entire application needs to support it. Or you have people who want to write text on images. Or people that want to do photo manipulation. Or people who need to make assets for games. Or even doing something weird like saving a PNG without pre-multiplied alpha.
So whenever you compare it with something else, you're able to point out to all these features they accumulated through the years.
But if you started making an app today for a specific use case, in 1 month you would be able to add features that these applications have lacked for decades, and these will be just the first features you'll be able to think of.
So it's always this strange feeling where an application clearly has had a lot of work put into it and yet seems to lack something extremely basic you would expect to find in an application that has had a lot of work put into it.
The problem is that Krita/GIMP have many features that very few people use. Like you have digital artists who don't need CMYK, but the entire application needs to support it. Or you have people who want to write text on images. Or people that want to do photo manipulation. Or people who need to make assets for games. Or even doing something weird like saving a PNG without pre-multiplied alpha.
So whenever you compare it with something else, you're able to point out to all these features they accumulated through the years.
But if you started making an app today for a specific use case, in 1 month you would be able to add features that these applications have lacked for decades, and these will be just the first features you'll be able to think of.
So it's always this strange feeling where an application clearly has had a lot of work put into it and yet seems to lack something extremely basic you would expect to find in an application that has had a lot of work put into it.
Wait, can you explain Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian? Should I be looking at switching?
I lost confidence in Fedora when they made the incredibly weird decision to disable swap by default based on the flawed argument that memory compression could replace it
How is Fedora better than Debian? (genuinely curious)
It's not, it's just different. You mostly get newer stuff and more breakage.
> more breakage.
NO! STOP!
Seriously, don't spread rumors. Debian "Stable" has bugs and issues that up-to-date distros have solved.
The word "Stable" has 0 correlation with bug-free. It is entirely meaning "outdated/old" and used for bug consistency, not OS stability.
NO! STOP!
Seriously, don't spread rumors. Debian "Stable" has bugs and issues that up-to-date distros have solved.
The word "Stable" has 0 correlation with bug-free. It is entirely meaning "outdated/old" and used for bug consistency, not OS stability.
Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows.
As somebody who has the family using debian for decades now, I am very averse to trying out a new daily driver. Of course if it really is better and not just a different way of going about things, it is worth a try. But this comment gives me no real information, just an opinionated take without pointing to anything specific other than I might need to use apt, which I like. The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date, since I rarely have trouble with any of that and many vendors focus on publishing Debian compatible drivers / software as their only Linux contrib, so they actually get things before other distros in many instances.
You are probably the worst person to ask about this topic because you are used to a poorly performing distro. You already learned all the terminal commands to fix things. You already know all the stuff you need to upgrade.
Most people havent been using linux for decades, and Fedora takes care of things you 'deal with'.
> The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date,
Sorry dude, this is just wrong. You literally could not run Nvidia GPUs on Debian last year due to Kernel 5. Your ignorance doesnt make this problem go away. Any new laptop + debian is a disaster.
"Don't use Nvidia, don't use laptops, learn the terminal, its not that hard to upgrade X, its not that hard to install Y, its not that hard to change Z setting"- Debianer
Most people havent been using linux for decades, and Fedora takes care of things you 'deal with'.
> The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date,
Sorry dude, this is just wrong. You literally could not run Nvidia GPUs on Debian last year due to Kernel 5. Your ignorance doesnt make this problem go away. Any new laptop + debian is a disaster.
"Don't use Nvidia, don't use laptops, learn the terminal, its not that hard to upgrade X, its not that hard to install Y, its not that hard to change Z setting"- Debianer
The main one for me is not pushing snaps and other weird canonical ideas.
Canonical is Ubuntu not Debian.
Why do you think Photoshop is low quality? In my mind Photoshop is very high quality. It just costs money and isn't open source.
In their example Photoshop was "brand name", while Gimp was "low quality" and Krita was "high quality".
I see that now. For some reason I read the first arrow as the arrow of implication.
Photoshop is also low quality, in its own special ways, but it's a different topic.
They were saying the Photoshop is the brand name and gimp is it’s low quality replacement.
You have converted me.
I'm impressed by the quality of programs that are coming out of the KDE ecosystem. While KDE is known for its desktop environment, many of the applications that come out of this organization are simply awesome.
This has always been the case to be honest, and I say this as a gnome fan and user. Kate better than Gedit. Konqueror better than Epiphany. Dolphin better than Nautilus. Amarok better than Rhythmbox, and so on.
I wish I liked KDE proper better, because their apps are too notch.
I wish I liked KDE proper better, because their apps are too notch.
In my opinion, that is due to Qt being such a complete and well documented framework.
One thing I particularly like about Krita is its wrap around mode. Very useful when making seamless textures! Another thing is that its file format contains a merged image, which can easily be extracted (.kra and .ora files are zip archives). I've used that to add native .kra/.ora support to a game texture conversion tool. .psd support took a lot more work in comparison.
Wow, is it just me or does that screenshot of 2005 Krita 1.4 UI[1] look absolutely amazing?
All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect.
Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....
All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect.
Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....
The different icon colors and shapes help a lot. It doesn't look uniform, and this is actually a big plus, as there's less thinking required to identify the target. The new interface looks nicer, but interfaces should focus on being usable, not just look good. Sometimes this means getting out of the way and being unobtrusive. Other times, it means standing out more.
The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.
The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.
Agreed. I suspect the shift in design occurred when the base assumption moved from "most users have never used a computer before" to "most users are familiar with computers".
IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
And since the new generation of users is growing up with mobile touch devices, we're coming back full circle to "most users never used a computer before".
To be honest, I still reference my paper copy of the Windows 1995 Interface Guidelines from time to time, when people propose new features for Krita. They are not always useful, but at least they don't change all the time.
Kudos for finding a screenshot on Wiki that hasn't been downsized to a postage stamp. For some reason they aggressively enforced a new policy a couple of years ago, and now many of the screenshots are tiny.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vchat.PNG
What a shame to lose useful illustrations of software history.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vchat.PNG
What a shame to lose useful illustrations of software history.
It says there the policy for shrinking down that screenshot is due to it being Microsoft copyrighted content. Probably for other copyrighted content as well. But Krita and other FOSS don't enforce this rule.
Seems a strange rule though, there are countless other websites hosting screenshots of copyrighted software. Surely it is well covered under fair use, if there needs be any legal basis.
IDK what Microsoft though, it could just be some trigger happy lawyers justifying their paychecks the same way Nintendo's do by aggressively defending any an all IP even if it's obsolete, since I doubt Microsoft and anyone there really cares that much about that V-Chat.
Krita at least can use any Qt theme installed on your system, so you can make it look like that (and actually i think even that specific theme is ported to Qt5).
I use a theme called "CDE-esque" that adds little bevels where appropriate. It isn't really CDE/Motif, if anything it is closer to Plastique (which i think is the theme in your linked shot) but it isn't overly flat either.
The icons are still monochrome but they look distinct enough for me to not bother me (and i tend to use the shortcut keys for most things anyway).
I use a theme called "CDE-esque" that adds little bevels where appropriate. It isn't really CDE/Motif, if anything it is closer to Plastique (which i think is the theme in your linked shot) but it isn't overly flat either.
The icons are still monochrome but they look distinct enough for me to not bother me (and i tend to use the shortcut keys for most things anyway).
I never knew that the project has been around for so long, let alone that its older than myself.
But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...
But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...
Qt hasn't been terrible in terms of upgradeability between major versions for many use cases, but Krita got the short end of the stick.
Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.
As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.
As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
By going full Vulkan, you mean do nothing at all in Qt, or do you mean a particular way to use Qt but not some parts of it?
Sounds like developing in QT is awful. They have had to do so much work porting it to new versions of QT.
That's just any big framework. Porting a large codebase between major releases of GTK (or Javascript frameworks) isn't much better.
Depends on the framework.
Qt5 was released in 2012. All of my LCL/Lazarus projects from that time open in modern straight-out-of-git Lazarus just fine. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of my LCL/Lazarus projects from 2005 (when Qt4 was released) also work out of the box, with the exception of those that tried to use strings as byte buffers (fixing this is a quick search and replace) since the datatype changed (this was a compiler/language change though, not a framework one). Retaining backwards compatibility is very important for LCL/Lazarus.
That said Qt has been better than other frameworks when it comes to backwards compatibility, after all you can use the Qt5 docs for Qt6 code and vice versa and things work 95% of the time. Actually i was working on some Krita plugin recently and i only had the Qt6 docs around but i never encountered any issue with what i was using.
AFAICT Krita's issue is mainly on the lower end of things and how they integrate with their custom OpenGL code.
Qt5 was released in 2012. All of my LCL/Lazarus projects from that time open in modern straight-out-of-git Lazarus just fine. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of my LCL/Lazarus projects from 2005 (when Qt4 was released) also work out of the box, with the exception of those that tried to use strings as byte buffers (fixing this is a quick search and replace) since the datatype changed (this was a compiler/language change though, not a framework one). Retaining backwards compatibility is very important for LCL/Lazarus.
That said Qt has been better than other frameworks when it comes to backwards compatibility, after all you can use the Qt5 docs for Qt6 code and vice versa and things work 95% of the time. Actually i was working on some Krita plugin recently and i only had the Qt6 docs around but i never encountered any issue with what i was using.
AFAICT Krita's issue is mainly on the lower end of things and how they integrate with their custom OpenGL code.
Yeah. We need to do lots of low-level stuff, and things related to GPU have changed a lot from Qt to Qt.
Honestly the major open source native Widgets frameworks suck (for C/C++)
MFC is slightly better, and MFC sucks (at least on MSVC 6.0 era)
WxWidgets was one of the best/easiest OSS ones.
The best library hands down was the one used by Borland C++ Builder (Windows only), VCL.
QT felt like going around in circles and a bit like those "useless superpower" charts, GTK like nobody had invented C++ yet.
MFC is slightly better, and MFC sucks (at least on MSVC 6.0 era)
WxWidgets was one of the best/easiest OSS ones.
The best library hands down was the one used by Borland C++ Builder (Windows only), VCL.
QT felt like going around in circles and a bit like those "useless superpower" charts, GTK like nobody had invented C++ yet.
I really think it's holding desktop Linux back. I was making windows apps when I was kid using Visual Studio. There is no way I'd be able to with any of Linux frameworks. The closest thing would probably be to use Java.
qtcreator actually supports a workflow quite similar to Visual Basic 6 in terms of making guis/adding functionality to buttons, etc
*right clicks* *context menu covers entire screen*
You can't drag and drop widgets in the hierarchy view, which sucks when a container has a width/height of zero because it has no widgets inside of them yet.
It's not terrible, but it could be better.
I can't be the only one feels this is weird, right? Like, you have a team who can create an entire IDE, even rendering widgets and dragging them around, but somehow things like organizing a context menu in submenus and making the designer intuitive is too hard. And this is a consistent theme in every one of these apps. The things that should be the hardest to program are programmed, the easiest to implement quality-of-life improvements are lacking. GPU-accelerated video transitions in a timeline based video editor? Easy peasy. A status bar that actually displays statuses? Absolutely impossible to implement.
You can't drag and drop widgets in the hierarchy view, which sucks when a container has a width/height of zero because it has no widgets inside of them yet.
It's not terrible, but it could be better.
I can't be the only one feels this is weird, right? Like, you have a team who can create an entire IDE, even rendering widgets and dragging them around, but somehow things like organizing a context menu in submenus and making the designer intuitive is too hard. And this is a consistent theme in every one of these apps. The things that should be the hardest to program are programmed, the easiest to implement quality-of-life improvements are lacking. GPU-accelerated video transitions in a timeline based video editor? Easy peasy. A status bar that actually displays statuses? Absolutely impossible to implement.
Theoretically. In practice it was much more clunkier.
GUI development is awful in general tbh, outside of basic stuff anyway.
Imagine porting a web app to new frameworks over 25 years or keeping up with Macs ui Framework over that time frame ...
Every time I try Krita I bounce off of it because the controls are too different from Photoshop. For my relatively simple use cases, Krita could be a replacement for Photoshop, which I've been using on and off for roughly 30 years. The muscle memory runs deep. Just something simple like holding alt to toggle the magnifying glass between zoom-in/zoom-out doesn't work in Krita and the configuration doesn't allow for this.
I am glad the KDE/QT applications are being developed. gimp is good, but my concern is the still rumored move/merge of the gtk into gnome lib.
When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well.
I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)
When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well.
I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)
Started using Krita heavily since the local generative AI plugin is available (3rd party not official). Awesome and works perfectly.
The text in the "Choose your membership" column at https://fund.krita.org/ is broken for me, it's not visible.
Krita is a great replacement for photoshop.
> Krita is a great replacement for photoshop.
No it is not.
Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1].
And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more.
I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life.
Krita is a great paint app. It's not a Photoshop alternative.
Photoshop is a great image manipulation app. It's not a Krita alternative.
Krita absolutely is a Painter alternative.
Painter is no longer a Krita alternative, if you need certain features (that's a topic for an entire blog post).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter
No it is not.
Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1].
And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more.
I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life.
Krita is a great paint app. It's not a Photoshop alternative.
Photoshop is a great image manipulation app. It's not a Krita alternative.
Krita absolutely is a Painter alternative.
Painter is no longer a Krita alternative, if you need certain features (that's a topic for an entire blog post).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter
Would it be accurate to say that Krita is a Procreate alternative?
I don't know Procreate well enough to answer this conclusively.
But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper.
Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq).
I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative.
But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience.
That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps.
But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes).
As is the case with Procreate.
But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper.
Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq).
I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative.
But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience.
That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps.
But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes).
As is the case with Procreate.
Conceptually yes (and Krita might be more feature rich than Procreate), but Procreate is an iPad only app and Krita is not available on that platform, unfortunately.
Maybe if you use Photoshop for painting or art. If you're a photographer who mainly uses Photoshop to do RAW conversion and global adjustments to exposure/colour/saturation/sharpness with a bit of local dodging/burning/healing then Krita doesn't seem to be set up for that sort of workflow.
If you're creating digital art / painting. It's a good program, but it doesn't do everything Photoshop can (nor does it try to).
Call me paranoid, but I think it's harmful for Krita when someone frames it as a Photoshop alternative - because it really isn't.
It is a program targeted specifically at digital painting. Yes, it can do some "basic" image manipulation like Photoshop does, and even you can do some animation stuff too - but it doesn't intend to target everything image manipulation wise as Photoshop does. I for one as a graphic designer use more tools alongside it, as GraphicsMagick or Digikam's Showfoto, because there's some stuff that it's easier to do with them, or they can do some stuff Krita can't.
People hears that Krita is "a photoshop alternative" in countless comments, blog posts and etcetera and can get frustrated when they find something is lacking. And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
It is a program targeted specifically at digital painting. Yes, it can do some "basic" image manipulation like Photoshop does, and even you can do some animation stuff too - but it doesn't intend to target everything image manipulation wise as Photoshop does. I for one as a graphic designer use more tools alongside it, as GraphicsMagick or Digikam's Showfoto, because there's some stuff that it's easier to do with them, or they can do some stuff Krita can't.
People hears that Krita is "a photoshop alternative" in countless comments, blog posts and etcetera and can get frustrated when they find something is lacking. And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
I’ve used Photoshop for 25 years, a decade of that as a professional designer.
I disagree. Krita is a worthy Photoshop alternative. It has things in areas software explicitly marketed as a Photoshop alternative does not have. Plus it feels intuitive, like Photoshop.
I sort of feel like this shield is unnecessary and in some ways harms Krita, a great tool.
I disagree. Krita is a worthy Photoshop alternative. It has things in areas software explicitly marketed as a Photoshop alternative does not have. Plus it feels intuitive, like Photoshop.
I sort of feel like this shield is unnecessary and in some ways harms Krita, a great tool.
> And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
I doubt they will bitch less if people recommend GIMP.
I doubt they will bitch less if people recommend GIMP.
Well, as Halla, the Krita maintainer, I kind agree. Image manipulation is not a goal. But for animation, we have a very specific goal. What we want to see is someone doing a looney Tunes like hand-drawn animation in Krita. And I've seen some, so mission accomplished!
I was (and sometimes still am) using Paint Shop Pro 7 even on Linux (via Wine) until recently, but at some point i wanted to do some texture painting and found the whole process of "paint stuff, export to PNG, switch to Blender, reload texture, go back, etc" to be a bit of a PITA. I looked into making a plugin for PSP7 to show the image on a 3D model in a window but PSP7 only supported Photoshop plugins and making Photoshop plugins (for the circa 2000 version of Photoshop) seemed very convoluted as it was a quickly hacked together port of the process used on pre-MacOSX Macintosh.
So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita's UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP's UI better but PSP7's the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i'm not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it.
I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i'd like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials).
I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like "paste into selection" to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7's UX much better overall.
From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to "monitor" an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i've seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of "the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2" event would really speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document.
I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i'd probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i'll probably try again though.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/
[1] https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw
[4] https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png
So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita's UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP's UI better but PSP7's the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i'm not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it.
I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i'd like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials).
I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like "paste into selection" to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7's UX much better overall.
From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to "monitor" an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i've seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of "the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2" event would really speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document.
I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i'd probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i'll probably try again though.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/
[1] https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw
[4] https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png
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What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.
Oh, noes... A post that has this in the second paragraph:
"I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show."
ended up in something "jmix" thought was "self-indulgent".
"I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show."
ended up in something "jmix" thought was "self-indulgent".
> constantly changing the name of the project
Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?
Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?
KImageShop → Krayon → Krita, according to this article from 2009:
https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr...
I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr...
I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
it's an anniversary celebration post, not a "what is krita" post. It's meant for people already following the project.
Krita is an application primarily aimed at digital artwork rather than editing images. So a strong emphasis on drawing and related tasks. For this, it is much easier to use than gimp. I won't necessarily say it's better, but every time I tried using gimp I gave up and I actually stuck with krita.
Krita is an application primarily aimed at digital artwork rather than editing images. So a strong emphasis on drawing and related tasks. For this, it is much easier to use than gimp. I won't necessarily say it's better, but every time I tried using gimp I gave up and I actually stuck with krita.
I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.