Krita 4.3.0 | Hacker News Reader

Krita 4.3.0

krita.org

370 pointsdragonsh83 comments

Krita is absolutely incredible FOSS, really well polished, feels a joy to use, very intuitive.

There are a few quirks, such as changing the colour of a vector, you have to 'stroke' it (i.e. turn it into a raster) with a particular colour -- the feedback loop for this is fairly painful, but admittedly there's lots about the software I don't know, so there may be a better way.

You can easily change color of a vector (stroke or fill) in the Tool Options docker.

Krita is one of my favorite open source projects. I discovered it by accident while learning about pixel art, it's quite popular for Indy game development. I really appreciate it's polished interface that is not always a priority in OSS.

> I really appreciate it's polished interface that is not always a priority in OSS.

What you would say about AzPainter UI?[0]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter

I love AzPainter, it's very reminiscent of PaintTool SAI on Windows. It's one of the snappiest programs I've ever used, it starts faster than vim. This is no doubt because it is written using its own simple UI toolkit. But it's significantly less powerful than Krita/Gimp and the UI is quite quirky sometimes, for example the way cropping works in the B version and the normal version are completely different. But I use it despite these things because I find it quite charming.

> I love AzPainter, it's very reminiscent of PaintTool SAI on Windows... and the UI is quite quirky sometimes

To be honest, AzPainter2[0] (legacy version for Windows-only) had different UI & toolkit from actual AzPainter V2[1] (for Unix-like OS).

Actual AzPainter V2 UI has modern look (single window & multi window mnodes; light & dark built-in themes), which could be customized additionally with user created themes.[2]

> But it's significantly less powerful than Krita/Gimp

It really depend on what you needs from painting app.

AzPainter has wide range of features & is 10 times faster in comparison to Krita/GIMP.

Also, if compare AppImage package size: AzPainter binary size is less than 3.0 Megabyte, where size of each binaries for Krita/GIMP actually reached near 200 Megabyte.

There is wiki-page (WIP) with comparison of AzPainter Vs GIMP & Krita.[3]

> for example the way cropping works in the B version and the normal version are completely different

AzPainterB V2[3] is fully diferent from AzPainter V2 by design.

[0] http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA033749/

[1] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainter.html

[2] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Themes

[3] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Compare-AzPainter...

[4] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainterb.html

Yep, I'm only familiar with the V2 one and I never used the old Windows app.

It's true as a painting program it is more comparably powerful. One thing I have to be careful of when using it to edit existing images is that it doesn't support colour profiles AFAIK, so edits can be lossy if the image isn't sRGB.

> it doesn't support colour profiles AFAIK, so edits can be lossy if the image isn't sRGB.

To be clear, AzPainter V2 actually in under heavy rewriting (next generation would get new toolkit with Wayland support & more features).

As for now you could add feature request & bug reports for AzPainter V2 here.[0]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues

Krita is awesome now, but it definitely wasn't showing great promise back in its early days. Years and years ago, it was meant to fill in the image-editor hole in the KOffice app suite. Basically, it was trying to be GIMP-but-KDE even though it was doomed to have fewer development resources because GIMP already existed.

I tried to use Krita back in its KOffice days. It felt like a bunch of toolbars slapped together around an a basic image editor, and it was unstable and missing features. Imagine my surprise when it reappeared years later and looked and felt like a completely different program.

Around 2009 (according to Wikipedia) they decided to focus on one particular niche - digital painting, and the goal went from "be GIMP but for KDE" to "be the best digital painting program" and it's been a night and day difference.

I started working on Krita end of 2003; long after the application was added to KOffice and had gone through the KImageShop and KRayon names. It could do nothing but load images... In 2004, people had joined me to hack on it. We had the first release in 2005, and honestly, if it hadn't been for Krita... KOffice 1.5 would not have been released. After 1.6 we realized we needed a new direction, though... And I never was the first maintainer of KImageShop/Krayon/Krita, of course.

It would be fun to see some screenshots with the evolution of Krita.

I like that there is a paid version through Steam and Windows Store just to support the developement. More FOSS projects should do that

Are there any additional features in those versions? I get the impression there are not, in which case I'd rather just donate, so Valve don't take a cut.

Wow I could understand that mentality about the Microsoft store, but steam? They are the most indie friendly platform.

Maybe ppl still upset that HL3 was the biggest hoax since Duke Nukem Forever? But before I let you finish, TF2 hats and the steam platform were the two best things Valve ever did for the world.

I didn't read parent comment as "Microsoft and Valve are bad and I don't want to give them a dime, ever". I read it as "I want to direct 100% of my donation to the project I'm looking to support, Krita". Which sounds reasonable.

Microsoft only takes 5%. That's a good deal for the ease of installing and updating.

Valve take a significant cut, even for independent titles. Apparently it's 20% to 30%. Why wouldn't I just donate directly to the Krita project?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-gam...

Yes, it's still 30%, which is really a ridiculous amount.

I would argue that itch.io is the most indie friendly platform https://itch.io/

This is correct! You can choose the cut that itch takes, as low as 0% if you want.

Microsoft's cut is pretty small (5%, or 15% if the software is discovered through the store [1]). I think there's a more important consideration though: buying Krita through the Windows Store makes it more popular on the Windows Store, which means it gets recommended (advertised) to more people. I think 5% is arguably worth it to grow the user base.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-windows-10-sweetene...

Paint.NET is also on the Store.

Krita is an excellent piece of software.

A year ago I transitioned from the Adobe suite to FOSS. To replace Illustrator, Inkscape was perfect, but it took a while before I found a good Photoshop replacement. Tried GIMP, Paint.NET and Seashore. All of them had issues either with stability, feature set or UX.

When I finally tried Krita, my search was over. Even if it is clearly aimed at digital painting (which I don't do a lot) it is great for general bitmap tasks. And incredibly stable. It just feels like premium software.

On some level it is subjective of course, but I think everyone should give it a try.

Thanks Krita!

I've always thought Krita is a painting app. My image editing needs are pretty modest developer tasks: cropping, scaling, exports to different formats, occasional curve edits on photos. So no painting, just editing mostly designs, sometimes photos.

I've really been pretty happy with Gimp. Would Krita also cover these tasks?

Absolutely. Krita easily has all of these features and more.

I honestly don't like how it calls itself "just" a drawing/painting program as it seems to be just as capable as Photoshop if not better. Also waaay better UI/UX than GIMP. Give it a go.

Thanks! I will. I'm already using a KDE based system so being Qt app Krita would fit in just nicely.

I find this drawing program simpler to use than GIMP, while having lots of advanced functionality and maturity.

GIMP is a general image editing software while Krita focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art, so it is not surprising that you find it more ergonomic for drawing.

Yep, https://alvinalexander.com/gimp/gimp-how-to-create-draw-circ...

Alternately:

Select circle brush, set outer size, paint circle, set inner size, erase circle.

Not that the UI isn't terrible.

How do you align the centres doing it that way? Carefully watch the pixel coordinates in the status bar?

Edit:

Simpler than this or the linked instructions is to use the Ellipse selection tool with shift to select a circle, then do Edit > Stroke Selection.

Still pretty wacky.

One of the recent features I most love in Gimp is "/" to search through the commands.

(More and more graphics programs are adopting it.)

Once you're used to it, you can create the ellipse selection and type "/stroke"...

I guess that unless the Gimp developers change their mind and allow for vector drawing inside of Gimp, it's as comfortable as it can get...

I don't to digital painting and art and I still prefer Krita. Although prefer is the wrong term, I despise GIMPs botched, unituitive and cumbersome UI so much, I'd rather code a figure in html/javascript and canvas or svg, before I'd use GIMP. Krita on the other hand is relatively nice to use.

Initially it took some getting used to Gimp, but that was years ago, when I had not used any GNU/Linux distribution and was still a Windows XP user. Now I find Gimp's UI actually pretty logical and everything has its place. Not sure what people talk about when they complain about Gimp UI. Perhaps you can shed some light on the details you do not like?

It's been many years since I've used it the last time but I can remember that even the simplest tasks required googling and actively remembering how they were done because nothing was intuitive or logical. And the layer system was virtually unusable, I couldn't figure it out. In Krita or inkscape, the UI just makes much more sense so they are not as infuriating to work with.

That was my initial feeling about GIMP when I first tried to use it years and years ago. After many false starts and head scratching, the logic of it finally sunk in and now I find it pretty straightforward and logical. You just have to find a way to get over the very frustrating hump of understanding its basic design. But if all your needs are met by a program that doesn't demand that initial investment, all the better.

> I despise GIMPs botched, unituitive and cumbersome UI so much

Btw there is a new fork of GIMP, called "Glimpse" [1], that tries to improve the UI. Their first release was just a re-branded GIMP, but maybe they'll get something done someday.

https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse

even for simple photo cropping / transformation and adjusting brightness / contrast, Krita has a much better UI

Krita is nice to use, but for simple things I find Gimp's filters more useful. It now has much better scaling filters than Krita and the colour adjustment filters are useful, especially colour temperature adjustment and auto white balance I use a lot. Also some aspects of Gimp's UI are still superor, for example some filters in Krita only allow adjusting the parameters using text boxes, where in Gimp you can use a slider to interatively adjust each parameter with the mouse.

regarding the colour adjustments what do you think of G'MIC ? It integrates quite well in both GIMP and Krita and all the filters can be edited easily with sliders / text boxes / etc..

G'MIC is extremely useful and the algorithms in it seem very high quality. Indeed it works great in Krita does make up the difference for the most part, though I don't think it directly replaces the examples I mentioned in Gimp that I like, for example I can't see a generic scaling filter in there. I'm not sure it has a colour temperature adjustment specifically, either.

> GIMP is a general image editing software while Krita focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art

AzPainter is one more app which focuses quite specifically on digital painting and art.[0]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Tutorials

Confirmed. I also think so.

I find the two programs complement each other: Krita is amazing for creating artwork, while GIMP's strength lays in image manipulation.

Which ever you prefer, open source developers have created some great graphics software (and these two are far from the only examples).

Me and my daughters love Krita. Even with a cheap pen tablet it's a lot of fun. I set up a monthly payment of 1€, a small contribution to its development.

My kids use it too. Looking forward to the new watercolor brushes.

I do all my illustration work on Krita. I absolutely love it, after spending most of my career working on photoshop. I use a Cintiq Wacom tablet on Linux Mint and it works wonders.

I wish more open source projects have a focus on the user interface. Krita is really good in that.

Krita is absolutely brilliant and works really well with drawing tablets.

Can anybody give a recommendation? What would be the best Free tool for a kid interested in Modern Art [1] (generally abstract, she likes the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko, for example), who'd like to learn to do something like that digitally? Is Krita good for that?

Thank you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art

Krita has a lot of brush effects she would be able to use (like oil, chalk, watercolor) however you want to use a graphics tablet to use it in a natural and intuitive manner.

Thanks! Can you recommend a nice tablet with a quality display? She's obsessed with colors, color-mixing, tones, shades, etc., so I think a display with a broad and accurate gamut is a must-have for artists.

There is a list of supported tablets on the Krita website. I think Wacom and Huion are the most popular. Wacom is mainstream and well supported but more expensive.

https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/list_supported_ta...

Also check out David Revoy. He has a great deal of tutorials using Krita.

https://www.davidrevoy.com/categorie3/tutorials-brushes-extr...

In terms of displays, I just use a high quality IPS monitor. Some people use tablets with screens because I have no experience with that.

I use a laptop with a 16" pen enabled 4k display. Works like a champ, and is super portable... and folds into a tablet for even better drawing ergonomics.

Check out the works of Trish: https://twitter.com/geosi40 ! It's so awesome -- she made even me, who is a coder, explore abstract expression.

I highly recommend ArtRage. It works and feels like the real world and is very intuitive. The trial version is only limited to not being able to save, otherwise $40 very well spent. []=https://www.artrage.com/

Krita feels just better than GIMP + MyPaint. Also works better on HiDPI.

GIMP stuck at GTK 2 which prevents them to work properly on modern hardware. I hope they release 3rd version soon. They should have made Kickstarter campaigns like Krita did.

I'd definitely support this, but prefer Liberapay or other libre alternatives. It would suit free software projects better.

Github sponsers anyone?

Funny that GTK was originally created for GIMP (GTK was acronym of "Gimp ToolKit"), and now they are 10 years behind the latest version of their own toolkit.

This shows how crazy the GTK rewrite was. Not even GIMP was willing to rewrite its code to use the latest version.

There is a standalone MyPaint program that improves the HiDPI experience, but not having the rest of the features is wack.

It would be cool if Krita's continued excellence encouraged other user-facing open source to focus on usability. They could push software to be better the way Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle and focus on desktop usability/stability pushed Linux in general to get better.

My favorite in this space has always been Paint.net, but it is Windows only. I tried Krita a couple years back and it was too buggy to become my OSX alternative. But reading in this announcement that they've spent a year focusing on bugfixes warrants giving them another try.

If you find that Krita doesn't work for you, you may want to try MyPaint, it's also a cool open source project

There is a Linux-first clone of Paint.net called Pinta[1], but development stalled a few years ago[2] and the lead developer was asking for contributions to the codebase as of six months ago[3]. It has since been pulled from several distros' repositories, though it can of course still be built from source. It was a fantastic alternative to Paint.net when it was in development, but the last official release was quite buggy. Thankfully, work has resumed on it[4] and hopefully it will have another stable release soon.

[1] https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/

[2] https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/releases/1-6

[3] https://communiroo.com/PintaProject/pinta/discussions/370/pi...

[4] https://launchpad.net/~pinta-maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/pin...

On the other side, I can say that Krita has definitely improved over the years; it's stable enough now for me to use at work as a Photoshop alternative on Windows (though I still do most light editing in Paint.net).

Paint.net’s my favorite too, I wish more software animated the selected area and had their interface in small windows.

I only recently discovered Krista, during the pandemic my son was not at school. I wanted to encourage some creativity and had a old pen tablet.

What an amazing software. Thank you.

I've used Krita a few hours and it's very stable.

Are there any guides on how to get started with this?

I found this YouTube a week ago: https://youtu.be/TH2EDTNjvBw

Thanks, I'll give it a look. I can draw cartoons by hand but have never tried on a computer before short of trying with a mouse which never works.

Amazing piece of software, with pleasant UI and really great funcionality.

The only thing preventing us from pushing Krita instead of GIMP on laptops is the anime startup splash.

Well, if that is SO important, you can, on windows, create your own .lnk file adding the --no-splash startup option, on Linux add it to the .desktop file and on MacOS do whatever people do on MacOS.

But honestly... I cannot imagine any environment where Tyson's Kiki splash images are a real problem.

Just FYI folks this is quality assurance, when one of the main devs is replying to the bottom comments on the HN thread.

Honestly, I really like them.

I like the splash screens too. But they're also not professional. If I'm showing something to the big boss, and the first thing they see is an anime splash screen, he's going to look at me funny.

GIMP I don't have that problem. Yeah I 'could' mess with custom shortcuts for all of our devices, but why (also irrelevant since we're all OSX)? GIMP serves well enough and it's one other thing I don't have to do.

I am sorry for you, you have a boss who judges book by its cover. Well you can always call him after the program is started and show him how it works :) that may change his mind if he is really wanting to change it that is.

Of course, other people complain their boss cannot handle the name "gimp" because it's unprofessional.

In any case, I've given you a solution. And, of course, it's not something you have to do on all the devices, you download Krita's portable zip file version, if using Windows, adapt the .lnk file one, and then roll out the update by creating a new Windows image with the modified version of Krita.

At least, that's how professional organization handle OS and application provisioning.

I think I have two reasons not to roll Krita now. Thank you for your time.

I like Krita. I use it regularly. But the anime splash is unprofessional. The big boss is NOT a tech. If I open it up to show him something, and the first thing he sees is Kiki, he's going to have opinions on the subject. Company of <100 people I don't need problems with the CEO who is already somewhat iffy on tech folks (even for a tech company).

If there was a flag in the settings to turn off the splash I'd be fine with it. As it is I just install GIMP and move on. I have limited time and patience for IT work (details about link/desktop files don't fly anyway since we're 100% Macs) and anything that expends my time or patience faster tends to get dumped.

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