25 Years of Krita
krita.org
krita.org
I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.
It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF.
Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.
Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.
Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned
Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita
Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora
I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.
I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use.
Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.
NO! STOP!
Seriously, don't spread rumors. Debian "Stable" has bugs and issues that up-to-date distros have solved.
The word "Stable" has 0 correlation with bug-free. It is entirely meaning "outdated/old" and used for bug consistency, not OS stability.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows.
Most people havent been using linux for decades, and Fedora takes care of things you 'deal with'.
> The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date,
Sorry dude, this is just wrong. You literally could not run Nvidia GPUs on Debian last year due to Kernel 5. Your ignorance doesnt make this problem go away. Any new laptop + debian is a disaster.
"Don't use Nvidia, don't use laptops, learn the terminal, its not that hard to upgrade X, its not that hard to install Y, its not that hard to change Z setting"- Debianer
I mostly use it for development - backends and data/spark mostly, nothing lower level. What does fedora do better? Is it something that was introduced in later releases?
Fedora will usually push major Linux changes before other distros; systemd, wayland, cgroupsv2, btrfs, etc.
[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-...
I haven't heard that story before. Got any references?
What's difficult about Ctrl-Shift-A? If it's a problem for you, it's easy to change the keyboard shortcut. You can also just click away. GIMP certainly makes some things unexpectedly challenging, but that seems like a strange example to pick.
"Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work.
Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things.
I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows."
OpenSUSE >>> Fedora >>>> Debian Family
It exists !
This is the problem, people are recommending Debian-family for desktop.
I don't think people are really talking about server linux, that is almost a solved problem.
I think Debian sid is underappreciated as a decent rolling release distro. I get that Debian doesn't advertise it that way, but it virtually never breaks for me.
A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.
They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.
It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.
The problem is that Krita/GIMP have many features that very few people use. Like you have digital artists who don't need CMYK, but the entire application needs to support it. Or you have people who want to write text on images. Or people that want to do photo manipulation. Or people who need to make assets for games. Or even doing something weird like saving a PNG without pre-multiplied alpha.
So whenever you compare it with something else, you're able to point out to all these features they accumulated through the years.
But if you started making an app today for a specific use case, in 1 month you would be able to add features that these applications have lacked for decades, and these will be just the first features you'll be able to think of.
So it's always this strange feeling where an application clearly has had a lot of work put into it and yet seems to lack something extremely basic you would expect to find in an application that has had a lot of work put into it.
I wish I liked KDE proper better, because their apps are too notch.
All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect.
Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....
IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vchat.PNG
What a shame to lose useful illustrations of software history.
I use a theme called "CDE-esque" that adds little bevels where appropriate. It isn't really CDE/Motif, if anything it is closer to Plastique (which i think is the theme in your linked shot) but it isn't overly flat either.
The icons are still monochrome but they look distinct enough for me to not bother me (and i tend to use the shortcut keys for most things anyway).
But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...
Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.
As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
Qt5 was released in 2012. All of my LCL/Lazarus projects from that time open in modern straight-out-of-git Lazarus just fine. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of my LCL/Lazarus projects from 2005 (when Qt4 was released) also work out of the box, with the exception of those that tried to use strings as byte buffers (fixing this is a quick search and replace) since the datatype changed (this was a compiler/language change though, not a framework one). Retaining backwards compatibility is very important for LCL/Lazarus.
That said Qt has been better than other frameworks when it comes to backwards compatibility, after all you can use the Qt5 docs for Qt6 code and vice versa and things work 95% of the time. Actually i was working on some Krita plugin recently and i only had the Qt6 docs around but i never encountered any issue with what i was using.
AFAICT Krita's issue is mainly on the lower end of things and how they integrate with their custom OpenGL code.
MFC is slightly better, and MFC sucks (at least on MSVC 6.0 era)
WxWidgets was one of the best/easiest OSS ones.
The best library hands down was the one used by Borland C++ Builder (Windows only), VCL.
QT felt like going around in circles and a bit like those "useless superpower" charts, GTK like nobody had invented C++ yet.
You can't drag and drop widgets in the hierarchy view, which sucks when a container has a width/height of zero because it has no widgets inside of them yet.
It's not terrible, but it could be better.
I can't be the only one feels this is weird, right? Like, you have a team who can create an entire IDE, even rendering widgets and dragging them around, but somehow things like organizing a context menu in submenus and making the designer intuitive is too hard. And this is a consistent theme in every one of these apps. The things that should be the hardest to program are programmed, the easiest to implement quality-of-life improvements are lacking. GPU-accelerated video transitions in a timeline based video editor? Easy peasy. A status bar that actually displays statuses? Absolutely impossible to implement.
When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well.
I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)
It is a program targeted specifically at digital painting. Yes, it can do some "basic" image manipulation like Photoshop does, and even you can do some animation stuff too - but it doesn't intend to target everything image manipulation wise as Photoshop does. I for one as a graphic designer use more tools alongside it, as GraphicsMagick or Digikam's Showfoto, because there's some stuff that it's easier to do with them, or they can do some stuff Krita can't.
People hears that Krita is "a photoshop alternative" in countless comments, blog posts and etcetera and can get frustrated when they find something is lacking. And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
I doubt they will bitch less if people recommend GIMP.
I disagree. Krita is a worthy Photoshop alternative. It has things in areas software explicitly marketed as a Photoshop alternative does not have. Plus it feels intuitive, like Photoshop.
I sort of feel like this shield is unnecessary and in some ways harms Krita, a great tool.
No it is not.
Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1].
And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more.
I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life.
Krita is a great paint app. It's not a Photoshop alternative.
Photoshop is a great image manipulation app. It's not a Krita alternative.
Krita absolutely is a Painter alternative.
Painter is no longer a Krita alternative, if you need certain features (that's a topic for an entire blog post).
But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper.
Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq).
I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative.
But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience.
That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps.
But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes).
As is the case with Procreate.
So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita's UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP's UI better but PSP7's the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i'm not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it.
I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i'd like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials).
I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like "paste into selection" to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7's UX much better overall.
From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to "monitor" an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i've seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of "the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2" event would really speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document.
I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i'd probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i'll probably try again though.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/
[1] https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao
Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?
https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr...
I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
Krita is an application primarily aimed at digital artwork rather than editing images. So a strong emphasis on drawing and related tasks. For this, it is much easier to use than gimp. I won't necessarily say it's better, but every time I tried using gimp I gave up and I actually stuck with krita.
"I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show."
ended up in something "jmix" thought was "self-indulgent".