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Comment by Diti | Hacker News Reader

I’d say the winner in this category is Krita.

I don't know if this is an artifact of what I grew up on (paint shop pro), but personally I found Krita vastly more intuitive than GIMP, to the extent that I no longer use GIMP, and instead use Krita even for tasks that are objectively more appropriate for GIMP.

Krita and GIMP are not in the same category.

One is for digital painting and the other is, as it name says, an image manipulation program.

That might be the tagline but I've always found Krita better for doing both things.

> Krita and GIMP are not in the same category.

True. Usability, accessibility, and basic UI quality are all important focuses for the Krita devs.

Krita covers all image manipulation needs I have, so I thankfully don't have to suffer through GIMP anymore.

Again with the competitions, haha. But I mean, yeah - in a scenario where you only have one shot to recommend a piece of free software to someone, and are trying to avoid their startled retreat back into the walled garden, I'd also give 'em Krita.

Nevertheless, both are wonderful pieces of software! I'm not a graphics pro but do find myself editing images quite regularly, and I usually reach for GIMP as it's more familiar to me. Krita on the other hand has a great brush engine, so if I feel like drawing something, I go for that.

Also, of course, whichever one has GMIC on that particular day! Some of the stuff in that plugin is absolutely wild. Usually that means Krita again, though iirc at some point it was broken there for some time, but I found it for GIMP...

Btw, anyone know if there's a Rebelle Mixbox-style color mixing feature for either of the two?

I tried Krita, but as difficult to use as Gimp can be, Gimp is still easier to use for me and has all the image tools I need.

For photo editing Gimp is way ahead. It also has a lot more plugins. Krita is superior when it comes to drawing or painting.

Genuinely curious - in which specific ways is GIMP better than Krita at photo editing?

Krita is vastly better if you come to it from photoshop.

I doubt there is anything that couldn't be done in either and it is simply a matter of time spent in the UI and personal preference.

A lot more design oriented people are familiar with Photoshop or Photoshop inspired software so not optimizing for that is ignoring the vast majority of the expected target audience. And I doubt Gimp has the usability studies to prove their workflows are superior.

Does it have the same freature set as gimp? Genuine question because I have heard people saying Krita err much more to artistic creation side than photo editing capabilities that gimp does.

No, you can't print in Krita. Also, GIMP's transform tools are more powerful.

Krita still doesn't have a usable text tool or a way to change an image's color space.

If you're working with text in an image, you'll have a vastly better experience using Inkscape.

What? Krita had proper color space handling and conversions for many years, probably a decade now.

GIMP is the one that's still missing proper colorspace handling, especially regarding CMYK.

And Krita has had vector layers with text support for quite a while as well.

I thought CMYK was part of the 3.0 release?

Partial CMYK support, yes. Comparable to e.g. Inkscape. That means it's actually doing RGB under the hood and converting to/from CMYK on the fly as needed.

But not proper native support for CMYK and spot colors as you might know from Adobe or Krita, where everything internally tracks CMYK data throughout.

For many things Inkscape is better even though it is a vector drawing program, like making photo collages, and clipping photos against frame designs, etc.

It is much easier to make a photo collage in Inkscape than Gimp.

I use both and I think they both have areas where they are better than the other

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