Krita 4.2.0: First painting application with HDR support on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Krita 4.2.0: First painting application with HDR support on Windows

krita.org

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Krita is such a great example of a successful cross-platform app using KDE frameworks[1] and Qt

[1] https://kde.org/products/frameworks/

I love Krita, and have recently taken to painting much of Bob Ross's stuff with it to learn... painting. But I do wish I had time to fix the performance issues. It destroys my surface book I paint with.

Weirdly enough, it works fine on my ancient Surface Pro 3. So check https://docs.krita.org/en/KritaFAQ.html#krita-is-slow

Yeah I've gone through that a bunch and it did help, but it seems to be mostly "slow brushes"... but like every brush is slow. The work to add AVX support on the brushes helped those brushes, but not nearly enough. And even fast brushes are perceptually laggy.

Really Krita would benefit massively from brushes being implemented on GPU but the developers (rightly) are worried about the massive complexity gain.

> you can export your animations to mp4 and H.265. You need a version of FFMpeg that supports H.256

I believe author meant 265 not 256. Typical programmer typo.

Ha, now I'm wondering how many times I've typed it wrong as well.

Does anyone have experience with how Krita compares to Corel Painter?

I've long been using Painter for hobbyist digital painting, but I'm not very happy about the price, the occasionally shoddy stability, and the in-app purchase upsell Corel is nowadays pushing in every upgrade. I don't use the crazy artistic brushes very much because they're so slow — just looking for something with a decent set of customizable gouache/acrylic type brushes.

Krita doesn't do the impasto-style stuff, though with the Digital Atelier brush preset bundle, you can come close. There are a lot of brush engines, and the brushes are very customizable. And it's free (donations accepted, if you want automatic updates, go to Steam or the Windows Store), open source, and there are no in-app purchases whatsoever.

Sounds great, thanks a lot!

I've never liked Corel Painter, I've always used Photoshop, but for painting I can at least tell you Krita beats Photoshop in almost every way. It feels like it's built by digital painters for digital painters. I've stopped using Photoshop except for an older version I have for photo editing. It used to be that it had a few performance issues with big canvases, but they've been mostly fixed.

And the brush system is amazing (it also has nice auto-smooth options). You can customize everything. There's things Krita can do with brushes that Photoshop can't which allows me to use my pen with tilt support to the fullest. You can tweak the properties of any brush individually, even invert them. The only thing Photoshop has is real dynamic brushes (similar to Corel's simulated brushes but not as realistic, although faster), but because of limitations in what you can customize about the properties I could never get them to work how I wanted, plus the useful brushes (with more than a couple of bristles) were too slow to be of much use.

Regarding brush presets, I don't remember what presets come built in (I removed 90% of them) but there are nice brush packs out there that people have created that have all sorts of brushes to help get you started.

Well, I am one of the developers :-). There is one situation where I do see brushes not being as responsive as they should be and that's on the test Mobile Studio Pro with Windows 10 we got two years ago -- but only if it's not connected to the power supply!

This is so cool! This makes Krita an even more attractive choice for color grading and compositing CG renders. Great work Krita team!

I wish Krita photo editing toolset will be good like painting, then I'll be not forced to use Photoshop under wine :)

Lots of people trying to make graphics for set-top boxes and TV playout suddenly looking at Krita I expect.

Krita is a amazing tool. Hands down my favorite 2D image tool. HDR support will make it even better! (Though I can't take advantage of it yet in my environment!)

One feature I love is its coloring tool, which you only need to make a stroke or two on a part to specify how you want color it.

I've colored this in about 5 minutes...

https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_i...

Sweet! Now I would want this on Gimp as well :)

Thank you for the effort of getting HDR to work on Angle.

With GEGL at last being implemented into GIMP proper, I would hope we're at least a good step closer on that front! :)

Congratulations! I'm not that much into the buisness -- I wonder why the market-dominating Adobe photoshop software didn't support this first?

It's possible that it's because they are market dominating, that they have a different focus on which features to bring first than Krita. BTW I have been using Krita for about 2 years, and used to have a dual-boot with Windows, just for a better experience using Photoshop. I now actually like Krita better than Photoshop, so don't use the dual boot anymore. It's that good. My version of Photoshop was a bit dated that I am comparing it to, but I have been a Photoshop user since the late 90's, so I'm pretty familiar with their pace of advancement.

Demand wasn't high enough? Perhaps in part because people didn't realize that they "need" it. Now the feature is out there and being talked about PS will no doubt support it PDQ, directly or via a plug-in.

There's definitely a level of demand.

I suspect that some of it might be waiting for Windows and MacOS's support to become a bit more stable before writing too much code.

Windows has had HDR support for a long time, and Photoshop, too, allows you to paint in HDR.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/high-dynamic-range-i...

That's HDR merging into a low dynamic range output.

Quite the opposite of displaying HDR imagery on an HDR monitor.

Here's how to turn on a full HDR workflow in Photoshop, including displaying HDR imagery on an HDR monitor:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/How-to-enable-30-...

Again, that's 10 bit but still low dynamic range.

It provides finer gradations to reduce banding, but doesn't change the tone response curve to add more highlight brightness.

> Select at the top ‘H.265, MPEG-H Part 2 (HEVC)’

Can't it use H.264 instead for better performance? H.265 is so slow...

H.264 isn't capable of HDR is it?

Why not? For HDR you need two things: high bit depth and a transfer function to match. H.264 supports both 10-bit video and at the very least the Hybrid-Log Gamma function. H.264 also supports the Rec.2020 wide gamut colour space so I don't see why it wouldn't support the PQ curve as well. So I think HDR10 is also supported.

But at the very least HLG works on H.264.

Very few H264 decoders can decode those profiles. Basically anything other than Baseline, Main and High is going to be pretty hard to find. Hi10p, Hi422p, etc. are very uncommon in hardware decoders (no iPhone or Core i7 processors supports these).

That leaves software decode, which is pretty hard on phones and other constrained devices.

Can't you take that kind of HDR H.264 video and then convert it to baseline H.264 compressing the palette intelligently so it would look not exactly like original yet still very much alike with everything significant easily distinguishable visually?

Windows only.

To be clearer, Krita supports both Windows and Linux. HDR support in Krita is currently Windows only and they are waiting for Intel for HDR support in Linux.

> Of course, at this moment, only Windows 10 supports HDR monitors, and only with some very specific hardware. Your CPU and GPU need to be new enough, and you need to have a monitor that supports HDR. We know that the brave folks at Intel are working on HDR support for Linux, though!

> Of course, at this moment, only Windows 10 supports HDR monitors

Don't they consider P3 to be HDR, or is there something else that disqualifies the Macs that have Display P3?

Display P3 is a color gamut, it defines what color each number means. This is orthogonal to bit-depth, which is how many bits are used to represent each number. This means with the same color gamut but with HDR (more bits) you can have smaller steps between colors, improving color banding, gradients, etc. You can have any combination of (sRGB, P3) x (8-bit per channel, 10-bit per channel), 10-bit per channel being a common implementation of HDR these days.

I don’t know if Apple makes HDR displays.

I don't think they do. The 27" 5K on the latest models looks like it's their most advanced model, and it's 527cd/m2 and contrast ratio of 960:1, while the Ultra HD Alliance certifies HDR displays at a minimum of 540cd/m2 and 1,080,000:1 for LDC displays.

So they're super nice, I'm very happy with my 2017 model and it's the best display I've ever used, but not HDR.

They claim to support "one billion colors", which is roughly 10 bits per channel.

There was a lawsuit about dithered displays back in the 90s that made them write "millions of colors" instead of "16 million colors", so I'd say it's unlikely that they're not actually providing those 10 bits.

So their fanciest displays are both Display P3 and 10 bits per channel.

10 bits per channel does not necessarily mean you have HDR.

In the past, it was used to get finer gradations, which is in fact fairly important if you are working with black and white , to avoid banding.

HDR involves mapping the 10 bits over a different tone response curve that covers a wider output dynamic range.

The actual dynamic range of the displays, and the tone response curves mapping input number to output brightness.

Go used to not even run on Windows, Atom was only on Mac at first. It's not a big deal if it's on one platform currently. You need to get it working on one platform first, and then work on porting it to other platforms.

Which the post clearly states and is, as far as I can tell, because Windows and DirectX is the only platform that supports it.

That's not true; OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal also support HDR.

With currently shipping hardware and drivers? I know OpenGL can render HDR internally, but can you send that to a HDR-capable device today?

It just doesn't exist yet. There is a possibility that AMD might start supporting HDR this year. Intel is working on it. Nvidia hasn't gotten much further than https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2016/Program/xdc-2016-hdr.p... . It'll come, but we're not there yet.

Mind, even on Windows, it's pretty messy and you have to do a lot of figuring out and hacking platform layers to make it work.

not yet on linux sadly. Note that Krita works fine on linux - it comes from the KDE world anyways.

And it is shipped as an AppImage, so you don't need to wait for it to get into your package repo or deal with a lot of dependency nonsense.

So what? It doesn't need to be cross-platform at the beginning.

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