Krita 5.2 | Hacker News Reader

Krita 5.2

krita.org

249 pointsbitigchi60 comments

> For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.

I didn't realize these features were exposed at all, I thought it would only be engine support. Even if it is through the code editor that makes this release a bit more exciting for text manipulation.

Also in theory I guess opens the door for plugins if 5.3 takes a while to come out? I really need to deal with my aversion to Python and just learn Krita's extension API.

Edit: also just because it's good practice to remind whenever a program like Krita does a release, https://fund.krita.org/. Krita is already a great painting app, and it's headed in an incredibly promising direction, so it's a good candidate if you're looking for projects to fund that could have a really useful impact on the industry.

The release notes for 5.2 are probably a better place to get a sense of what the release includes: https://krita.org/en/krita-5-2-release-notes/

I prefer to do digital sketching/painting on an iPad these days, but on desktop I’m using increasingly more FOSS-based software. Adobe products are sometimes absolutely essential but between Krita, Inkscape and Blender I feel pretty confident for most digital image manipulation. It’s actually kind of a golden age of usable free software these days for artists!

I wish Inkscape were a little slicker, because vector-art software is basically moribund at this point.

Illustrator (aside from being part of Adobe's software-rental scam), has been abandoned for years. Affinity Designer is also basically static, as simple-but-important feature requests or bug reports go ignored year after year. I mean... there's no way to set a layer as non-printing, despite continual requests for it. If that's difficult to implement, then the software is hopeless anyway. You also can't enter exact sizes for multiple objects at once. Affinity seems to do the most obscure and dumb thing possible when you try to accomplish simple tasks that are well-understood in every other similar app.

Applications are simply not important to any for-profit company anymore, so we're stuck with the current state of the art, or worse, hideous regressions like those that plague Microsoft Office. Ugh, Word is a depressing shitshow now.

Inkscape is a little buggy and unintuitive at times, but once you get used to its idiosyncrasies it's fine. For example, if you want to select a layer and move it with the keyboard, you can switch to another tool (like the node tool) and then back to the select tool and the arrow keys will work.

I just launched Inkscape (a recent version) for the first time in quite a while.

Not bad! And I enjoy that its default selection mode is the one I find most important in vector-art applications: select only things that are totally enclosed by the selection marquee.

Illustrator isn't even capable of selecting this way as an option, which makes it a monumentally tedious, deal-breaking PITA to use. And, of course, people have been complaining about this for decades now. Ignored by Adobe. So much for their "subscription model will allow us to do more timely bug fixes and enhancements" lie.

If you're feeling a bit masochistic, I think you can get Inkscape to behave like that too.

I can self-punish adequately with various other applications, thanks!

Will have to check it out to see if it has my most-longed-for feature. The ability to nudge the selection by a single pixel with the arrow keys.

I'm not familiar with the project but this sounds like a good first contribution, if you want to get involved as a developer :)

Make sure to hit up their IRC first, the friendly folks there will put you into the right path. Krita will always be special for me because I’ve put in a feature that I use all the time. So it will become special for you as well.

I'm not familiar with the project either, but ensure it is a feature they intend to accept into their project before you commit the energy into developing it. I have had a weekend that was devoted to naught because it wasn't aligned with the vision or roadmap.

I found it difficult to get started with Krita because it doesn't automatically pan when you try to draw beyond the edge of the current view when using a drawing tablet. I wrote about it on https://krita-artists.org/t/how-can-you-have-automatic-panni... a couple of months ago and now filed an issue at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475481 after observing the same behavior in 5.2

Any chance of seeing this feature request in future releases?

For everyone who has a hard time with the keyboard shortcuts I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiP7pXnwu6g which covers basic navigation in 1 minute.

Any time that I have used automatic panning, it's always felt like a bad solution to the problem of the trade-off between view size and detail. It's clunky and unintuitive with how it essentially forces the mouse to move (relative to the screen), just because the mouse is in a specific area. Not to mention many times you go too far or its too slow, and because its purely based off of the mouse location, it can be hard to control.

I'm not exactly sure in what case you would want automatic panning for a standard brush, but even for the straight line tool, I feel it would just be better to allow a user to select the two points individually, without the need for dragging the mouse between the locations without letting it drop.

Yeah I can't imagine automatic panning being usable for a continuous stroke. I could see it if you're doing splines or something, and just need to get to an area of the canvas to click on.

I wonder if auto-zoom-out would be better than auto-pan. As you approach the edge, zoom out to give you more room. Then you're not just dragging blindly against a wall and ending up who knows where.

I try Krita every now and then (probably will again with this release) but I always find myself going back to Clip Studio Paint at some point. The out of the box experience is just better somehow.

Krita shortcuts were not chosen by someone who draw.

Why do you need 2 hands to rotate the view, one of my hand have the pen in it ?!?

Huh? 4 and 6 rotate left/right, and 5 rotates to the central position. If you have a keypad it's even more accessible.

I press Ctrl-Shift (or was it Ctrl-Alt?) with the left hand and rotate with the pen. Sorry muscle memory only.

I think it's just Shift.

Shift is the tip size adjustment

From the release notes:

- Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme

Wait, is that only now? I'm kind of confused, maybe I've been on a beta branch or something, I could of sworn that was part of 5.1?

You're right, I'm looking at the release notes now. But it's a very weird deja vu moment. There are a couple of features listed here that I really thought were already released. I need to check what my upstream is...

"Could of?"

Should of, would of, could of.

I sure hope you're mocking those.

Might of, may of, will of, can't of, must of, ought to of... There's no end to the horror.

You're not wrong.

Oh wait... I mean YOUR not wrong.

As tempting as it would admittedly be to get into an extended argument with someone online over prescriptivism and descriptivism in English grammar, it has nothing to do with Krita, so it's imo better not to engage with these kinds of really off-topic comments. Not that I'm always good at resisting the urge myself ;)

Or maybe it's good to inform people that they're not using legitimate English, so they can learn.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know if it helps your issue, but this latest update does include a set of Clip Studio Paint compatible key bindings.

It's tough to judge because I'm not familiar with the shortcuts anymore but around the time that CSP swapped to the subscription model (or however it works) Krita devs started implementing a CSP mode that changes the default shortcuts to try and match.

I don't know how close it actually is though.

Ah, I tried it a years or two ago.

It's limited vector painting tools are what keep me in Clip Studio. It's the first thing I look for with each Krita release.

I suspect it's probably going to be a while unfortunately. I'm all-in on Open Source, there's no way I'm moving back to CSP, but the lack of vector drawing in Krita has driven me to learn more about Blender grease pencil. It's got both some really amazing features and some frustrating limitations as well.

Truthfully, CSP is also not quite everything I would want out of vector tools, it's just closer. What I've been interested in for a while and haven't been able to replicate is drawing in multiple passes: draw a stroke's position, then its thickness, then its strength, then its velocity, all as separate steps.

CSP sort of has this; you can redraw vector strokes (or at least could last time I used it), and it was great. But I feel like it could be taken further and I feel like it's an area where there could be a lot of innovation beyond what CSP even allows. But I don't think there's consensus yet from the Krita team about what direction they would want to go, and to be fair, I'm not sure I would be able to answer that question either. I'm not sure just copying CSP would be the right move, I do want to see more actual experimentation in that space beyond just vector layers -- like ideally I'd like to be able to do multiple-pass strokes in paint layers too?

But it is a really big weakness of the app right now, I agree.

For vector art have you looked at Inkscape?

I have, I couldn't get into it. Might have been a learning curve issue; Grease pencil also had a giant learning curve and I've only recently started to feel more comfortable with it.

But I just found Inkscape really awkward and clunky to use for any kind of illustration or free-drawing. I think Blender in some ways might have an advantage there because there are enough obvious cool features with Grease pencil (3D integration, rendering pipelines) that it provides more motivation to get past the "how the heck am I supposed to draw comfortably in this" hurdle. And it needs those motivators, Grease pencil is not comfortable to draw in without changing some settings and learning more about the general Blender interface; it's got a huge barrier to entry.

It's possible I could get Inkscape configured and comfortable to use, but I just didn't have enough reason to get over the hurdle. Or maybe it is actually too clunky to use more like a painting app; but I want to give it the benefit of the doubt since I'm less familiar with it.

Inkscape is good for many things, but not for painting.

I recently started doing more vector work as preliminary layouts/color flatting for digital painting in other apps and Inkscape has come a long way.

The energy you can muster to go back and learn more Blender will pay off in the long term imo.

Blender is like the Swiss Army knife program of my dreams.

Not an artist, but what's limiting about the vector painting? Is it something that could be fixed by a plug-in?

In my experience, unlike an SVG path that has a single line thickness and opacity value, a vector stroke in Clip Studio Paint has thickness and opacity data per point. In addition, these points can have image textures, just like the raster brushes. These features make the vector path better depict a hand-drawn stroke. A Clip Studio user can easily switch between vector and raster mode with the same brush, but Krita cannot achieve this.

The Blender Grease Pencil also represents vector data in this way (per-point attributes). I find it promising and try to develop add-ons for it. But I am not familiar with Krita plug-in development and do not know how much its vector painting can be improved.

Android Tablet with Krita is the goat...I have an S9 which comes with a pen...

Have you used an iPad for drawing before? I'm curious how they compare. I looked at Android options way back when, but it wasn't particularly developed around that time.

I think the project would do better with a different mascot. Krita is good software, but that mascot just sends the wrong vibes.

I think this is said in every Krita submission here, but Krita's largest type of audience is cartoon-y fantasy artists. It makes sense for their demographic.

> I think this is said in every Krita submission

So maybe they should take it seriously.

> but Krita's largest type of audience is cartoon-y fantasy artists. It makes sense for their demographic.

Yeah, that seems like survivor bias: the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic. I mean, that is fine if they want to keep it that way.

I am a happy user of Krita myself. I think it is a marvellous tool. However, I am not using it at work precisely because of the mascot and splash screen.

I feel Krita could be used my so many more people if they had a more neutral mascot.

>maybe they should take it seriously.

Yes, an artist community take bikeshedding advice from a community with a skew from the tech industry. That always ends well.

>the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic.

Sounds like a chicken and egg situation.

Regardless, it's a classic business question. When you become an established piece of software due to community efforts, do you try to become more mainstream at the cost of metaphorically betraying the very community that got you such visibility? History says thst it is the most profitable venture but a surefire way to become the very thing these open source initiatives strove to oppose. So it's not exactly a road I will personally champion (nor oppose per se. In some ways the founders do deserve such riches. And I'd probably take them myself on their shoes).

The only benefit here is that such a change has a chance to fork the project if there are enough unsatisfied customers. But forking can still get messy.

Can you elaborate ? Wrong vibes, how so ?

Westernized anime/"weeb" vibes, or "cute cartoon" vibes. People can like that stuff if they so desire, but it's a poor choice to brand your arguably in all other respects great software by something that niche.

Imagine working in a professional setting, and your boss asks you to see your most recent sketch on a design. You open your .kra file and that mascot pops up. Your boss sees the splash screen and asks himself "who have I just hired?".

I know the splash screen can be disabled (but only via a flag on the executable), defaults still matter. If the mascot was purely used on the website or announcements/blog posts, it really would be a different deal. Now it's packaged in such a way that it distracts from other workflow and gets in your face. Setting a flag on the executable is also finicky way of handling this preference, and it's prone to breaking after updates.

Speaking of branding and icons, the krita icon itself [1] is actually quite nice, and in my opinion seems to send the same vibes of cutesy anime much more vaguely by their choice of mostly using pink/pastel colors, but still doesn't make a statement in the same blunt way the mascot does. They could use their icon as branding on the splash screen and I would be very satisfied.

1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Calligra...

Westernized? The creator of the mascot and the artist of the splash screens is actually Chinese...

Good luck with that. People here have trouble understanding why Gimp isn't the best of names.

If you don't want to see it you can use --no-splash (or something like that).

fill to boundary color looks pretty sweet

Any good reasons why they don't put it on get up to get many more contributions?

Another UGLY color selector pallet. Just give me a normal HSL slider ffs

there is a slider color selector though? Caveat that it's an HSV slider rather than an HSL one.

https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/dockers/specific_...

what? is this free?

Open source drawing program. Not too shabby, but clearly some people here have opinions about it.

Yes

Yep, GPLv3, it is indeed Free.

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