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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

For me the absolute killer feature for Gimp or Krita would be a way to save the editing history, which is currently lost with all the levels of 'undo' when you save in native format.

Versioning for image editing; I don't know how it would be done but by Jove it would be a time-saver.

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I am the main developer of a new painting application called Leonardo ( http://www.getleonardo.com ) which include this feature for our native .LEO file format.

Leonardo is currently in early beta.

I gave the beta a try and it seems pretty nifty! Great job!

Since I'm an programmer who's an aspiring artist, I have a few questions:

1. Is there a way to turn off additive brush-layering (ie the opacity does not change when you stroke over the same place)[1]? I am used to Krita and Photoshop having an option to toggle this. The only way when the opacity increases is when the pressure increases.

2. Is there a way to create custom brushes? I'd love to be able to create my own. Also, Krita has some nice ways of "scripting" brushes which was nifty. The current ones are more than fine, but I usually make certain "helper" brushes to speed things up a little.

3. Do you plan to open-source certain parts of Leonardo? It'd be great if you open-sourced the specification for .leo and, the brush format, so it's easier to create conversion tools. I'm not a marketing expert, but I imagine having the ability to import brushes from Photoshop would be a huge benefit.

4. Do you intend to support plugins?

--- [1]: http://i.imgur.com/lqa6E9r.gif

P.S: Sorry for dumping ideas like this.

1. Yes, we have one parameter we call "flow" that does what your GIF shows. We also have a parameter called "opacity" that does what you want to do. To create a brush that behaves the way you want do the following: open brush settings panel (located on the upper right of the screen), go to the "flow" tab, change "flow pressure" to 100%, go to the opacity tab and change "opacity pressure" to 0%.

(we need to improve the brush settings)

2. Yes, use the same brush settings as described above. You can click on "tip" (round circle for standard brush) to change brush tip.

3. We might open source the brush format in the future.

4. Maybe in a distant future. The problem with plugins is that you have one more API to keep backward compatible.

Thanks for testing Leonardo! Please feel free to email me if you have any more questions or feedback: henning.tegen 'at' getleonardo.com

Nice. I'm wondering, does "zero lag" mean that the painting is handled in a background thread, while keeping the UI responsive.

Or does it mean something else?

Yes and progressively updating the resolution.

The "Ghost Point" and "Isometric" strokes look very useful. While with practice I think I'll develop a steady hand with my Wacom, those features look really helpful when precision is needed.

FYI, you can also add those features (lazy mouse, curved lines, isometric and perspective constraints) to any art app (including Photoshop) with the Lazy Nezumi Pro app. http://lazynezumi.com

I was pretty impressed with the demo. Great work.

Thanks

Cool. Did you implement the versioning yourself or do you use git or something like that underneath?

We implemented it our self. We tried a bunch of existing solutions like SQLite but they were all too slow handling large amount of pixels.

That, in a nutshell, is one of Photoshop's great strengths. It's not that you can save undo data, but that most things don't need to be undone if you take advantage of smart objects (decomposable composites, more or less) and adjustment layers. Even deformation meshes (warps, liquify, etc.) can be stored, changed and re-applied (to multiple things, including masks). I'm not really committed to anything in Ps until I export, and then the PSD is still there if the client wants a change. I know that colour management and bit depth have been at the top of a lot of lists (and rightly so), but if anyone wants to step up and challenge Ps as the professional tool, then non-destructive editing is not optional.

Krita has had filter layers (non-destructive, mask + filter layers right inside the layer stack) since _2005_. Krita has had color management, with icc profiles and cmyk, rgb, lab and xyz since 2005. OpenColorIO based color management since 2012. Krita 2.9 has non-destructive transform masks -- and 2.9 is in beta right now. You can have selections masks local to a layer. There have been group layers for a decade.

So, yeah, non-destructive editing is not optional. It's been around for about ten years, in Krita.

So, only a little behind. I'm not knocking Krita, nor am I saying that Ps is beyond reach and will forever be the standard. I welcome real competition, because frankly there hasn't been anything close enough in far too long. And much of what has gotten pretty close has thrown the third-party ecosystem overboard without replacement -- which may in some cases be necessary, but when you tell people that their "one hour's work in a click" time-savers are going away, they're not going to be impressed with what you've done to their workflow and profitability.

Not really versioning, but Ormr [1] is built around completely non-destructive editing with history baked into each project. Still in beta but worth a look.

[1] https://www.getormr.com/

I bought affinity designer for Mac, it's a vector software but it has a history slider, I don't think it saves with the file format but it's an amazing take on history display. One 3D program I saw did save the history with it, but I can't recall the name.

I use git for that, works great.

And even easier (though more expensive and less versatile) - Dropbox or Time Machine.

With Gimp? Explain.

Git handles binaries perfectly fine. Your repo is gonna get big fast, and it isn't going to handle merges, but if you just want a linear version history and are used to git, you might as well use it.

He probably means to add the project file to the versioning system and commit regularly so that you can rollback to a previous version. It's way less flexible than Undo though.

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