I'm very much an amateur but Krita is a great piece of software for me and does everything I need so far, for free. Much easier to use than GIMP, seems quite comparable to Photoshop and the development is going strong.
It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.
I like good tools as much as anybody, but I am always impressed with what a little talent and practice can do with existing tools. This story was in the news lately, about a woman that uses nothing but MS Paint:
That’s actually an important and counterintuitive point that many newbies don’t understand. Eg, someone wants to learn to play guitar, so they go to the store and buy the cheapest, shittiest guitar available. Then they fight with it for a year and give up. It is true that a genius like Jimi Hendrix could, if he were still alive, take the exact same shitty guitar and make a 50k audience scream, but, crucially, you’re not Jimi, and as you learn, you’d very much benefit from having a good instrument. It doesn’t have to be a $10k custom or anything, but it has to be solid and enjoyable to use, because learning to play is frustrating enough as it is, and you don’t need to make it even more so.
I think a better analog might be: If you're newbie, don't start with a 42-string guitar like Pat Metheny plays sometimes. Start with a 6-string guitar. Part of the challenge of being a newbie illustrator is learning a tool used by professionals. A tool designed for amateurs might be easier for a newbie to get started with.
Its not so much the complexity of the instrument, but rather the quality. Most cheap beginner guitars have badly cut nuts, or warped necks or sharp fret edges that just make it so much harder for beginners to adapt to the instrument. Finger or hand pain is almost guaranteed.
Picking a better made instrument (substitute software dev tool, graphic design platform, cookware etc. here) will just make the process much easier, no matter your skill level.
As a counterpoint, I see lots of "all the gear no idea" kayakers who think that buying the newest design will improve their paddling, when they would be better spending more time on the river than in the shop.
Though I discussed this with someone else fairly recently- as kayaks become more idiot proof, there are a lot more incompetent people on the rivers now, "surviving" rapids that are really beyond their ability. A "worse" kayak will likely make you a better kayaker. (Though there is probably a lot less difference between the quality of kayaks and the quality of guitars).
The point is less about features, but more about quality. You don't want to fight the tool every step of the way as you first learn to use it, just because it was the cheapest thing that could still be theoretically fit for purpose.
That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made their lives more difficult by purpose.
I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.
Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a different mindset than you're used to.
I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered capacity free of such artificial handicaps.
Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very evident when they're unplugged:
Regarding the “making composition difficult on purpose” I suggest the book “Trust the process: an artist’s guide to letting go” (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570) which has lots of interesting material on how to stimulate creativity, and explicit advice about how to use the limitations you have as stepping stones to move forward instead of like constraints that impede your progress.
Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself
Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time.
And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.
I think you fail to appreciate that learning a new skill requires some kind of connection to an already learned skill, and that this connection becomes harder to establish at old age.
The old lady's choice may have made perfect sense from her point of view.
Pretty sure whatever she knew already (e.g. oil painting) at least had anti-aliasing; what I mean is that there are tools that are even simpler than MS-paint but produce better results ("better" as in art more likely to be liked by more people)
I think I learned the ins and outs of coding a lot better by doing it by hand. Perhaps it helps reinforce and understand what you're doing. But, I see it being the same as being forced to do your math exams without a calculator in school: almost no one works that way, but if you can work that way, then when you use the calculator you become much more effective. It's more of a learning or training exercise so that when you are doing other things, you have a foundation to build on.
digital painting is fundamentally very simple; if you put the right shapes of color in the right places, you can create a visual representation of anything.
robh rupple's process is a good visual representation of this idea imo
>http://graphicla.tumblr.com/post/68284245282/ive-been-rethin...
the underlying knowledge as to what makes pleasing shapes and the interactions between colors is the source of complexity. many brilliant pieces are created with oekaki programs far more limited and simplistic than ms paint, pixiv and 2ch are full of artists that are a testament to this. anything that can make shapes and colors of some description is capable of producing great art, good software simply reduces the number of necessary headaches required to do so.
I'd say krita and gimp fill different needs. Krita is for artists and Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids. I frequently use Gimp to crop images, make memes, etc. When I used to draw with my wacom tablet, krita was the tool of choice.
Oh yeah, if steroids bring layers, masks, paths, a shitload of selection, transformation, and cropping tools, a whole lot of filters and loaders for all sorts of image file formats, complete color management support, 32-bit per channel processing and suchlike, then you might be correct :)
GIMP still only half-supports CMYK in 2018, though. But as someone who uses it professionally, I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint. I'm guessing that the user you replied to has only used it as such and hasn't dive into all the tools and features it offers. With all the bugs and half-broken tools it has, I still think it is a great piece of software, and my life would be much harder without it.
> I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint
Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing.
Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering.
As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release.
I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.
Paint.net is pretty notable too. Windows only, but free, and halfway between paint and what Adobe offers. There are many plugins that either meet or exceed what you can find for Photoshop.
Both Pinta and Krita had really weird interactions with my touch screen the last time I tried. GIMP was the only one who worked correctly - I presume because it just treated it as a mouse (it may well be that my Linux configuration is to blame, not Pinta and Krita)
Seconding. I'm pretty happy with KolourPaint, but all I use it for is resizing, cropping, and blocking out people's names and pictures in social media screenshots.
That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Krita is fine for the "crop images, make memes, etc" use case and for most artist-like things, but I found Gimp had slightly better tablet support (at least on Windows).
Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally.
Linux desktop desperately needs:
1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities
2. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to)
If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something intuitive and stable! Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers... few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...
Check out Scribus. I'd describe it as more of a serious publishing app, where Inkscape may be more for artists. Scribus uses less resources and supports multipage documents.
I've also had issues with the cage transform in Gimp, but it's fixed now, so if you're on Ubuntu, just add a PPA with the latest version of Gimp.
> 1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities
I think Darktable does non-desctructive editing but I haven't used it myself.
> Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability.
I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those.
It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features. What are those features missing in Gimp? (Gimp does have CMYK editing, if you install the gimp-plugin-registry package.)
> Linux desktop desperately needs:
Those non-free programs you mentioned can probably be run with Wine on GNU/Linux.
TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that annoys everyone.
> give up your freedom for a few extra features
Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those features simply feel perfectly implemented, they just f work. Heck, I even use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more natural than Illustrator.
And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the day.
And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit. Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works. Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well built".
Gimp is just bad at... everything: (1) performance feels horrible, like doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from the layers panel etc.
I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it. But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non-destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and the job got done.
Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.
As xbkingx is writing, it would seem like Windows version of Gimp has some serious performance issues. I'm mainly running Gimp in Debian on a laptop with 512 MB RAM, and the performance is pretty OK (as long as I don't go above 150dpi on A3 prints).
Inkscape has also been crashing on me a lot in the past and was way too heavy, but since they released the 0.91 with the new Cairo-based renderer, it's been pretty fast and stable.
I've personally had a harder time with Blender. I've found it particularly confusing that about half of the functionality seems to just not work when using the game engine. And when importing a video for editing, the length of the video and the audio may not match up.
> Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.
Ugh, this is so true. I've never done professional graphics work, but I've used Photoshop on and off for small projects since they added color in version 2.0. I WANT to like Gimp and I give it a shot every year or so, but it never clicks. I mentally prepare myself for a different experience and try to keep an open mind, all while considering that my comfort will change with use, and I always leave disappointed and frustrated.
I mean, how do they make simply selecting something difficult? Even layers were unintuitive last time I tried Gimp. I've used a lot of janky software, but Gimp is the most bewildering case. You immediately see really good ideas expressed in the UI and then you interact with it and the whole thing collapses.
I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, so I fired Gimp up for the first time in months (v2.8.22 - I keep it updated with Chocolatey). It took 2 minutes to load (no image) from an NvME drive on a quad core system with a 1080Ti. That's 1.5 minutes longer than any other program I have installed. Probably not optimized at install-time, when the user has time to burn, and instead opts for optimization at first launch, when the user actually needs to use the software. Bad start.
Open image. Select part and adjust brightness. Click OK. Click and drag outside selection... and the brightness dialog pops up? But, wha... B/C is a tool. Weird but okay. Apply filter, click and drag, and B/C again? Undo, wait, no, have to cancel. Alright, let's move this selected area over... Why is the entire canvas being moved? Undo. Trying rotate... 3 icons from the move tool on the same line, but it only rotates the selection. Of course. Rotate selection and hit enter... nothing. Oh, the rotate dialog isn't in focus. No, wait. It is. Enter does nothing. Unfocused? Now Enter works.
Adding a layer. First click on new layer button not detected. Second works. Select background layer and marquee a small part. Ctrl+C. Select newly made layer. Ctrl+V. Probably can't see it because it's pasted on top of the exact same part of the image. Select move tool, click and drag, no, nothing was pasted. Click and drag again to be sure and the part I rotated earlier now moves across the screen. Hide background and 'floating selection' to confirm nothing pasted.
3.5 minutes and about 15 undos/cancel button clicks to do 'all' that. I repeated the above in Paint.NET, including launching, in 15 seconds and 2 undos from one minor quirk.
It's like a luxury car assembled inside out. In theory, you have a luxury car, but in practice you're sitting on cold metal with an engine block obstructing your view of the road. Sure, a bunch of mechanics could take pieces off and attach them properly, but you've been driving the car around town for 22 years and this is the best they've managed so far.
I use gimp semi frequently. It's never taken more than 10-20 seconds to start up. 2 minutes sounds like a huge outlier...
I'm running on a x230 (over 5 year old laptop with an i5) w/ Fedora.
Just ran it again. This time it took 23 seconds. All these on Win 10 x64 1709 using the highly accurate "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi..." technique.
PC: 6700k OC @4.5GHz, 32GB/1TB NvME (4x PCIE mode), 1080Ti, most background processes off:
GIMP 1st run: 90 s.
GIMP 2nd run: 23 s.
Paint.Net 1st run: 3 s.
Paint.Net 2nd run: 2 s.
Paint3D 1st run: 2 s.
Paint3D 2nd run: 2 s.
Krita 1st run: 7 s. (v3.3.3 first run ever)
Krita 2nd run: 4 s.
Gravit Designer: 6 s. (first run ever)
Visual Studio 2017 takes 18 seconds with a handful of extensions.
Ugh, VS2017 update out...
Outdated version of Photoshop WHILE updating Visual Studio, 1st launch: 17 s.
Krita WHILE crypto-mining on 3/4 logical processors (pinned to 100% usage): 4 s.
Paint.NET while opening 30 tabs in Chrome: 4 s.
GIMP while opening different 30 tabs in Chrome: 25 s. (reduce the chance of cache loads, not scientific, Chrome finished loading first, by about 10 seconds)
On a Surface Pro 3 (Core i7)...
Krita while installing Windows updates, 1st run ever: 17 s.
Krita 2nd run, updates still installing: 10 s
GIMP, no updates installing, clean GIMP install, 1st run: 243 second. Yes, 243.
GIMP 2nd run: 17 s.
Tried GIMP again on my desktop, no unusual background processes.
3rd launch: 18 s.
4th launch with mining pinning 3/4 CPU: 23 s.
So, overall, one of the most often recommended FOSS alternatives, even by ME, is a distant last place in these extremely ad hoc, unscientific, off the cuff tests across 2 machines. It also made me hate Mississippi. I was really hoping GIMP would have some trick up its sleeve to surprise me, but it did not. And this is not far from my past experience on Windows.
Maybe (hopefully) it's better on Linux... one sec...
Mint in VirtualBox:
GIMP 1st run: 5 s
GIMP 2nd run:2 s.
Hahaha. That just tickles me. It appears GIMP is the iTunes of graphics programs on Windows.
Down the rabbit hole...
Within Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu with vcxsrv as X Windows server)
GIMP 1st run (with some bash errors related to OpenGL): 43 s.
GIMP 2nd run (still some errors): 5 s.
It's like they anti-optimized the thing for Windows.
Take away: I'll never recommend GIMP to a Windows user again. Linux? Sure, if the UI doesn't bother you, enjoy! But, it's a miserable experience on Windows compared to every other option and should only be used if a particular function can only be performed in GIMP.
It's more than that. Sometimes the tools act as if they are aware of the context - something is selected, something was previously used, something is often used following the current state - and other times it completely ignores all context.
Like the way it pops up dialog boxes for most of the geometry manipulation tools, pulling focus from the canvas where you have to hit Enter to commit changes. If I'm dragging with the mouse, I want to simply drag it into position quickly and be done, not search for an OK button or swap focus. It's fine to add some form of fine tuning, but that's usually done with either a menu command or a tool information bar within the GUI. It's functionally the same thing as asking "Are you sure?" at the end of every action.
It violates basic UI assumptions, so unless you use it constantly, you're going to forget which tools operate on which elements in which state. Other graphics programs follow logical flows that are intuitive - select layer, select area of picture, copy, select new layer, paste = selected area in new layer. GIMP wants to buffer every action with an intermediate state that allows some further manipulation, but then provides no intuitive way to take advantage of that state. Like the retention of selected areas as 'floating selections' (or whatever they're called) in the layers list.
Here's a rough analogy: You crack an egg on the edge of a bowl. GIMP wants you to hold onto the egg because you might want to smush it in your fingers or whisper a secret to it now. If you try to put it in the bowl, GIMP ignores that there's a 99% chance that the recipe doesn't call for eggshell bits, so your first attempt results in having to clean out the bowl and crack another egg. Then you realize you first you have to specify that the shell should be removed, with options to change the angle of the shell crack relative to the bowl and the height from which the egg innards are released. Completed, you choose to crack another egg, but because you had not changed focus from the bowl, you proceed to smash the bowl on the counter.
I'm sure there are legitimate cases where having access to those intermediates can be useful, but they shouldn't interrupt every logical step in a common process.
Inkscape is actually pretty good for basic vector manipulating and making SVG files, but yeah, it's pretty basic. The handles are much larger to click on than Illustrator though.
"I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those."
That is probably the most ludicrous statement I've heard today. Being "free software" does not shield you from criticism. And it is not Adobe's fault that the developers of that software do not have a feature. That's entirely on the developers of those programs.
And most people do not care one iota about whether a piece of software is "free" or not. They care if it makes their life easier, and allows them to get a task done. If free software isn't up to it, and a piece of proprietary software is, then the proprietary software is what gets the nod.
"It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features."
No, it means I want to get my shit done. Just because you are willing to wait does not mean anyone else is.
> And most people do not care one iota about whether a piece of software is "free" or not.
Can "most people" afford paying $600 yearly fee to edit images? Are "most people" concerned if they fail to make a yearly payment and loose access to all their projects because of vendor lock-in with Adobe's products? Most people I speak to about this are very concerned about this, although they may not know that these problems are caused by Adobe apps being non-free. (But not knowing the cause of a problem doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist)
> Being "free software" does not shield you from criticism.
I agree totally. I just don't think that suggesting proprietary alternatives in this context is particularly helpful as they also lack features of freedom, e.g. sharing, privacy and absence of vendor lock-in.
> And it is not Adobe's fault that the developers of that software do not have a feature. That's entirely on the developers of those programs.
If Adobe freed the source code of Photoshop, how long do you think it would take for missing features to make it into Gimp?
> They care if it makes their life easier, and allows them to get a task done.
... except if the task involves working with other people who may not have access to that software, or may not want to run proprietary software, or may not want to give up their privacy or freedom.
Considering Adobe's Creative Cloud is pretty popular, it seems that yeah, they can. But that's irrelevant to whether a piece of software is FLOSS or not.
"although they may not know that these problems are caused by Adobe apps being non-free"
How dare those bastards ask to be paid for their work!
"I just don't think that suggesting proprietary alternatives in this context is particularly helpful as they also lack features of freedom, e.g. sharing, privacy and absence of vendor lock-in."
In this context, nobody gave a shit about that. They wanted the features that let them get their work done. If FLOSS doesn't have it, it doesn't get used. End of story.
"If Adobe freed the source code of Photoshop, how long do you think it would take for missing features to make it into Gimp?"
Irrelevant, cause that's not going to happen. If the Gimp developers aren't good enough to make those features themselves, without copying off of Adobe, perhaps they should work on something else.
"... except if the task involves working with other people who may not have access to that software, or may not want to run proprietary software, or may not want to give up their privacy or freedom."
So, nobody? Photoshop is the industry standard. If you're not using it, you're the one who's the odd person out, not them.
> How dare those bastards ask to be paid for their work!
Totally fine with people charging for their work. Fact is, however, that for half the population of the world, Adobe CS's pricing $50/month is at least 2/3 of their total earnings[1]. By that definition, it's just wrong to say that for "most people" it's an valid alternative to Krita or Gimp.
Photoshop + Lightroom cost 12 euros. The CS price you mention is for all the apps in the creative cloud, not just the raster image editing bit, so that's unfair to compare $50/month to "alternative to krita or gimp".
12 euros per month is just 2 euros more than many of us here pay for lots of entertainment, such as music streaming services. It's well worth every penny spent just to not have to deal with the horror that's GIMP's UI.
It's a lot cheaper to get access to Photoshop than it used to be before the monthly licensing scheme.
On top of that, the keys for all Adobe CS2 products have been openly released since they took their activation servers online. I would argue that most people don't need most or many of the new features added since CS2.
> good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities
RawTherapee and DarkTable are both excellent (I prefer DarkTable), and in some cases have much better plugins and algorithms than Adobe has to offer in Lightroom or Photoshop. Which one works best mainly depends on your preferred UI set-up, but I'd say they're easily at Adobe's level:
Not sure how serious you were, but AFAIK Rust's ecosystem for GUI programming is extremely immature. (Hopefully this will improve, seeing that the Gnome project is investing in Rust [1,2,3].)
One could just use OpenGL like Blender does to great success, maybe add something like Kivy on top. "Native feel" is not really the most desirable feature for a graphics app, especially since both (1) Linux users are used to non-native looking stuff (even Qt in GTK or the other way around is always at least a bit off) and (2) most native-looking apps, especially the GTK ones, have horrible UI/X, hence users don't tend associate "native looks" with "uuh, this is gonna be a smooth experience" (like Windows users are used to).
(Also, anything that move people even the slightest bit away from Gnome and GTK is a win my book ;) They may feel like the standard now because of Ubuntu, but imho the people working these technologies are totally tone-deaf to what constitutes good UX/I and they are moving further and further in the totally wrong direction... Thank god we have KDE/Qt, and Xfce if you need some "retro but sane" experience in the Gtk camp.)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-GUI-library-used-in-creati... check out this explanation of how Blender's UI is implemented - same approach would make sense (maybe even reuse same "toolkit") here because you'd have "drawing code" in you app anyway, so why not use it to draw parts of the UI too, and you'd also want graphics card acceleration for some operations too
I feel neither of those statements is accurate. While Linux users may have had to put up with non-native stuff, that doesn't mean they like it. And using OpenGL to draw your UI has just made your task several orders of magnitude harder.
Exactly! Most examples of horrible UI/X I can think of in Linux land are from the Gtk/Gnome camp. Qt seems to have much better UX/I sense, and some successful apps like Blender just use their own separate thing.
> Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it
Stabilizing in what way? I did all the artwork for my last company over the course of ~6 years and can't remember the last time I had a crash. Debian packages.
You'd honestly be surprised by what Aegisub can do. I recently got into fansubbing, mostly as a typesetter, and I'm honestly floored by some of the things I've been able to pull off. I can add text to scenes and make it look like it's part of the video... my favorite effects are the really subtle ones, and it always feels fulfilling whenever I pull something off.
Rotation along the X, Y, and Z axes with the ability to place the origin point anywhere (even off screen!), shear on both the X and Y axes (so useful!), gaussian blur with the ability to blur the border separately from the text (blur is the single most important part about getting text to blend into an image, and it's also a great way to generate glow effects), clipping effects, etc. There's even a drawing mode to work with arbitrary shapes instead of text. And on top of that Aegisub comes with support for scripting effects in Lua, which helps smooth over some of the rougher spots.
I think the next time I want to shoop some text onto an image, especially when I need to match blur and rotation, I might just convert the image to a short video, load it into Aegisub, typeset some text, and screenshot the video.
Disclaimer: I freely admit that I'm a freak and that this probably won't be what most people want. But I find it amusing that a subtitling studio can actually do decent vector graphics, especially with text.
Sword Art Online Abridged and Aegisub are evidence that top-flight engineering university anime clubs are collections of the most creative, intelligent, resourceful people to be found anywhere in this universe. Except possibly model railway.
I’m just going to note that Illustrator is thirty years old. While you do get the advantage of having a large feature set to imitate, rather than figure out from first principles, there’s still a ton of work there!
Have fun implementing everything it can do from scratch in your “hipster” language that nobody is going to want to touch two years from now when everyone’s looking for excuses to work in the next hot new language.
The next hot new worthless language is inevitably interpreted or built on the JVM. Always. Every single bloody time. Rust is a different animal. Firstly, it was conceived by a guy with the name Graydon Hoare, which is a very robust name. Nextly, it's already 8 years old. Finally, it's a fast, compiled language with excellent concurrency and safety. I still do all my HPC work in C++ with lots of template meta programming, but I'm a masochist. I'm confident that most coders do not actively gravitate towards suffering, although it would explain a lot if they did. You know what? Now that I think about it, I'm not confident about that, at all. Still, this new Krita release looks pretty sweet, even if it's not written in Rust. Good Lord, what are we even talking about, here?
I don't think any of these apps are the way they are because of a lack of help. Specifically, GIMP's gui is the way it is because the leaders of the project want it that way.
Yup - it turns out pulling out the core of your graphics in a graphics programme can take a lot of time to get right (certainly took years in my own small project).
Who knows, maybe GIMP will jump straight to Gtk4.
There's a good roundup of happenings in 2017 in GIMP here:
They just need to do a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign like Krita did, and hire a full time developers to those money. I bet they would be able to success.
Krita puts a heroic effort into bug workarounds for faulty graphic tablet drivers. Porting to Wayland/libinput will be very much nontrivial for them. They're guaranteed to run into Qt and KDElibs bugs as well. At a minimum, they should wait until Plasma is Wayland by default. Otherwise they're just slogging into a buggy mess.
Just from someone who has dug too deep trying to figure out what it would take to make this happen, KWin on Wayland right now does not support graphics tablets at all. It needs to be wired up to support them still. And we still don't have a Wayland input KCM, but I think someone is working on that for 5.13. I think.
That being said, I have a Monoprice tablet I use through libinput. I used the wacom driver for a bit but libinput gives me enough to do what I want (I have to say having to do matrix math to constrain the screen size so the tablet is in 1 to 1 correlation to the screen was a bit rough on the UX front). Libinput is pretty feature complete on tablet support in the basic use cases, it is just missing a bunch of the tunables from xsetwacom. The Digimend project has done an amazing job providing driver support for a lot of non-wacom tablets as well. It will be interesting if its Wacom tablets that are the pain point on Wayland. I don't have or know anyone with one to confirm or deny if the libinput support is up to par.
If I had the confidence to know what I'm doing (and I don't, I've never touched the Kwin / Wayland / input stacks on Linux at all) I'd try wiring in tablets to Kwin, but you probably want that first - which is still at least a release or two out at best - before you even think about trying to port your KDE Painting app to Wayland.
But I don't use it for painting with a tablet! I just want to crop screenshots and draw arrows on them. On a HiDPI screen, without the whole app being blurry.
Why not provide a --no-tablets-i-just-want-wayland option that would not force the X backend?
I've recently taken up drawing and animation as a hobby. I found Gimp to be perfect for what I need. It has good support for my drawing tablet. I didn't find it hard to use at all and I see the fact that the interface isn't completely revamped every 6 months as a benefit. Once I figured it out, the plug-in infrastructure is wonderful and allows me to script a lot of stuff in Python.
How does Krita compare to Photoshop? I use Photoshop Elements 15, which does for me almost all I need. If you go to Expert mode, it's almost like Photoshop CS2 or CS4, except for the bad UI, and I'm sure there are features in CS4 that are missing but that I don't use.
If Krita can replace Photoshop for the most part, it's a good alternative on Linux.
Krita is centered around digital illustration and painting. It can't really compete with Photoshop's advanced computer vision features like healing brush, quick selection tool and 3d panorama editing. But if you just need to do some color correction and light airbrushing, it can be used instead of Photoshop.
Also, if you can put up with the UI for the plugin, the G'MIC filters contain some cool stuff. You can do frequency separation and content aware fill.
My impression is that the American software community sometimes doesn't pay much attention to what's coming out of Europe. Have a look at other KDE-based programs if you haven't already - IME KVirc, Kile, KTorrent, and indeed Konqueror and KMail are best-in-class.
I accidentally installed the group of KDE applications on my laptop and am consistently amazed by how many cool/useful tools there are. It's better than MacOS utilities or similar windows tools by a wide margin.
Cantor is the latest one I found. It's basically a Jupiter notebook that runs natively instead of in a web browser.
A lot of the KDEPIM devs are working on Kube, which might be what you are after in... a long time. Whenever its ready. Though its been in development for two years and its soon to release 0.6, so it probably won't hit 1.0 for another two.
I think a large portion of the problem discovering things here is that they often have very counterintuitive names. Krita is very logical for me as swedish but outside Sweden not so much I guess.
Apache is a webserver? Really?
Konqueror is probably a game, right? :-)
Kritas first name was KImageShop, which got legal threat from a German lawyer for being too similar to Photoshop. They renamed it Krayon, which the same lawyer threatened over it being too similar to Crayon. So they then went with Krita, because it wasn't a name already associated to a popular brand having anything to do with art in Germany.
I use Materialistic[0] which besides the usual features has a "catch up" function which can be set to past 24 hrs, week, month, year. I don't use it much, but it just crashed when I did, so ymmv
"There are over 1000 bugs and 350 wishes reported against Krita per year, and that number is rising. The Krita developers cannot handle that stream on their own! Please consider helping out by triaging bugs. This document gives some simple guidelines to get started, and some common cases that can often be answered with a standard text."
She's more important than she seems - branding is everything, and Krita has one of the best mascots in FOSS, a field in which aesthetics has traditionally not been a priority.
How better to spread a program for artists than with a mascot that begs to be drawn?
Actually, for a digital painting program, I would expect it to be the case!
Usually, in my experience, the mascots of FOSS software were quite criticized as having too many features to draw, etc... Not easily recognizable as logos.
I have no idea whether this is valid criticism or not. But when you ask me about Krita, I think about Kiki. I can't tell what the icon looks like on the top of my head.
On the plus side, some say that we are much better mentally equipped to recognize faces than abstract figures. So, maybe this was just something not fashionable in the past few years in the flat corporate/branding/design world?
Holy cow, I had no idea... she's great! That's some Miku-level stuff there (Checks Wikipedia) ahhh, it's from the same guy that did Freedom Planet, I totally see the influence.
Maybe it's time to commission him for some other mascots for other projects that are sorely lacking. Inkscape, for example.
While it looks very powerful, does anyone know if the miserable light gray on medium gray UI can be changed? I despise this modern trend (Pixelmator drives me nuts too) as I have difficulty reading text with such low contrast. This is terribly unfriendly to people with vision difficulties.
That kind of justification seems completely reasonable when you're looking at different screenshots to decide which UI theme looks better, but turns out to be completely counterproductive when you actually try to use the product.
As a first comment on full version bump of a truly astounding application with a clear and accessible Themes in its top-level menu, this is perhaps a tad lacking in positivity.
People compare Krita to Photoshop, and that's fine. There's another space where it shines and people might not know about that. It's animation. Friend and I have been working on a hand-drawn short animation (~10 minutes) for a few years now and it's just about done (final stages of sound editing). We started out in Harmony, but we were extremely disappointed with it. We tossed around the idea to switch over to TV Paint (raster based), but I thought that maybe there's an OSS something for it? Being an OSS fan and advocate, after all. If Toonz were released earlier, we might've tried that (not really, considering years of experience with it). We even considered Photoshop - it now has a nice animation workflow built-in, but I didn't want to go away from OSS until I explored all the options. So, there was Krita. Let me tell you, not only is it great, it easily cut down our animation time by a large percentage over if we were using Harmony. It's awesome tool for 2d hand-drawn animation with still A LOT of room to grow, workflow-wise.
tl;dr; If you want to animate by hand, give Krita a chance. It's better than Harmony and Toonz (again, for hand-drawn animation).
I'm aware of this tool, but this project isn't pixel art. Traditional animation. I've tried working in that style several times, but it's so damn consuming! Not that I won't try again.
It is really time consuming. But somehow more approachable for a non-artist like myself. I've tried freehand drawing but I wasn't happy with the results... I need more knowledge and more practice.
Based on the app description and homepage I always thought Krita can't replace Photoshop for the few things I need to do for basic webdesign stuff. But reading the comments here made me reconsider. Has anyone used Krita for web stuff (icons, headers, banners, editing screenshots, etc?
Since the developers are reading this thread: I saw that you have a simple press page [0], if you want something more detailed, I can hook you up with a free PressKitHero[1] account.
Krita is not targeted as a photoshop replacement. It was at one time, but 15+ years ago they realized that many people are willing to pay for photoshop and thus Adobe has a large amount of money to throw at developers (at least some of them good) and so they are unlikely to catch up. They then shifted focus to be the best programing for drawing instead, a niche that Photoshop can cover but it isn't what their customers want and so it isn't well served. Photoshop is mostly used by photographers who need to touch up a photo, this is art but a very different style of art from someone who starts with a blank page and draws a picture.
As an intermediate-to-advanced PS user, I found that it didn't fill the void too (but this was more than a year ago). It seems more geared toward traditional media emulation.
If you're looking for something designed to work like and solve the same problems as PS and Illustrator, Affinity Photo and Design by Serif are probably what you're looking for. They are around $50 each.
I have no idea about presskithero... But we can't just use a closed platform for our stuff. As for the first question: we, obviously, use Krita for icons, headers, banners and screenshots, but that's just because we're making Krita. It's not what Krita is made for :-)
And don't even think of trying to make mockups for whole websites in Krita!
I'm still a bit sad they decided to de-emphasize the photo-editing-targeted features - it was (and still is) miles ahead of GIMP in terms of deep color support.
A majority of the advances in Krita come from the crowdfunding campaigns, and those are centered around the painting part. I'm sure if there were a senior dev in the project who had the desire to improve the photo editing parts the foundation would let them crowdfund that independently of the drawing work.
I wonder why my Krita in Windows (3.0 - 3.4, also 4.0) has some lag (around 100ms or so) when switching presets. During that, I can't even move the cursor, which is quite annoying since I use switch presets shortcut very often.
I've got no problem whatsoever on Ubuntu though, aside from some random crashes when doing free transform.
That being said, Krita is still my main tool for painting/drawing and some picture editing. The interface is IMHO very intuitive (or maybe just more Photoshop-like) which is nice
Just installed Krita 4.0 on my Surface 4 Pro. Like many other software ported to Windows, it can't handle hidpi screens well, all the UI becomes so tiny that the program is not really useful.
Anyone has tips for running Krita on hidpi screens on Windows?
Changing the program compatibility setting 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour' may help with this (I haven't tried with Krita yet, but I had a similar problem with Matlab & Simulink which was fixed by this)
I really want to love Krita, and I sort of do. The only thing preventing me from doing so is the absurd amount of crashes on my macOS machine. Is this just a Mac problem? Has this been addressed in this update? Am I doing something wrong?
No, none at all, I'm afraid. That would need a really dedicated person interested in working on both Qt and Krita. We did have a summer of code project where a student updated Qt's painting code to work with Apple's openGL implementation, though.
And Krita shouldn't be more unstable on macOS than on Windows or Linux, but it doesn't get tested as well, and there are so few macOS developers who want to take a hand. Personally, I develop on Linux but use Krita on Windows, when I find time to work on my own comic. The macbook pro only gets opened to make builds or fix the occasional macOS-specific bug.
Lawd Jesus! Thank you for posting on this topic... all I have to add is ditto brother. I'm just here to support and defend you from what will no doubt be a wave of "you are stupid not krita" knee jerk reactions.
You ARE NOT the stupid one. The Krita UI/UX is stupid.
Even the simplest of tasks becomes a complete hassle. I want to love Krita too, BELIEVE ME I WANT TO GET RID OF ADOBE, but not at the cost of adding hours to my workflow.
Example: Today I wanted to delete some text on an image and add new text. This stupidity cost me an hour before I caught myself....
"NO! Just STOP, you do not have time for this shit!"
...I held my nose, opened adobe and got it done in 5 minutes.
M'kay?! Enough Said, I have no time for the fools who will no doubt defend this madness.
Krita + Gimp is a great combo - I'm extremely happy both exist in the OSS world! Hoping to use Krita more as I start getting into texturing models - it's been great so far for basic images though.
The linked page has a video on showing off the new features with the worst choice of music I think I've ever come across - it's like a dirge. I had to mute it; and usually I listen to anything.
Imagine an old, barrel-chested, brusque Frenchman smoking galoise at a roadside café; "merde" he says under his breath ... then they used that as a sample, and inspiration, and created a piece of music from it ...
We had two videos this time! I always give people who volunteer a free hand, but I have to admit, my computers are always muted. They should be seen, not heard, so I never listened to the music myself.
Wait, since when does Krita support Windows? Did they finally yank all the weird KDE dependencies so I can run it in an xfce environment? That would make me so happy...
Almost every KDE app for the last 2 years has been portable to other desktops and OSes since they broke up the kdelibs into frameworks and moved to Qt5.
the wasm work is official and is being mainlined (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-63917). I have a ~300kloc Qt app that compiles and runs with extremely few changes not related to Qt (but for now crashes after a bit of clicking).
1. Because clicking a link is quicker than `apt-get install krita`
2. Because clicking a link is quicker than: "E: Package 'krita' has no installation candidate"
3. Because clicking a link is quicker than `aptitude search krita`, seeing krita data files, but still no krita
4. Because I apparently have to open up a browser and type "Debian krita" to figure out how to install krita, so I might as well just run it in my browser
5. Because when it crashes in Chrome it's less likely to be a security risk
6. Because, unlike Linux distros, browsers have standardized on this system called a "link" to install new apps
7. Because I can run the program on someone else's machine without having administrator rights
8. Because I can run the program on someone else's machine without installing stuff to their user directory
9. Because I could probably even try it out on a kiosk where I have no rights at all (weak, I know)
10. Because, unlike Linux distros, browsers vendors as disparate as Mozilla and Microsoft were able to agree that clicking an "x" is the way to uninstall krita-in-the-browser
11. Because the web has at least two high-quality natural language search engines that I could use to discover this hypothetical krita-running-in-a-browser and they don't error out if I have typos
12. Because if I wanted to study how the GUI works I click a shortcut and an entire development environment inflates like a life raft on my machine, or someone else's machine, or any machine that runs a modern browser.
13. Because I could have spent this time using krita instead of writing thirteen fairly obvious reasons why clicking a link is preferable to screwing around in whichever Linux cult I happen to be stuck inside at the moment
and even then it's entirely broken because people making web UI cannot fathom why I would, as an user, be able to customize fonts of my system : https://imgur.com/a/kqZGT
Actually there is or was a WacomTabletPlugin for Firefox at least, but I have no idea about the state of that.
In any case, as soon as Qt (with support for threading), eigen3, exiv2, fftw3, expat, fontconfig, freetype, gmic, gsl, iconv, ilmbase, libjpeg, lcms2, libraw, opencolorio, openexr, libpng, poppler, pyqt, python, sip, libtiff, vc and zlib can be built using one of the compile-to-javascript whatevers, we can take a look.
So in your worldview, "Linux package manager" is literally the only alternative to web applications? I guess Windows and macOS don't have native apps at all then.
One more: I could try out/ use the app on platforms for which it is currently unavailable, such as my iPad Pro (with large screen and stylus) or Samsung Note 8 (smaller screen but also a great stylus).
Someone mentioned the lack of web API for stylus, which is a huge gap right now. I expect that gap will be filled sooner or later. Indeed with WebUSB it should be possible to implement drivers for the plug-in Wacom style devices for the web right now. Since getting these two great devices I haven't plugged in my Wacom once though.
The lack of a really good vector app for Android (like Autodesk Graphic for iOS) is what made me curious to check out these comments and see what Krita is about.
Yes the web has extra overheads, but it is the cross platform runtime with the broadest reach.
I did that for a while, actually. I was using cloud9 from a variety of (low-storage) netbooks. It did require a persistent network connection, but it was remarkably functional even on extremely tenuous wireless links. It was nice to have a dedicated workspace+vm for each project, without having to store everything locally, and the workspace was always exactly how you left it, even the running or half-typed terminal commands. I'm not sure I want to work that way by default, but it's quite practical, and potentially even preferable.
It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.