I'm very much an amateur but Krita is a great piece of software for me and does everything I need so far, for free. Much easier to use than GIMP, seems quite comparable to Photoshop and the development is going strong.
It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.
I like good tools as much as anybody, but I am always impressed with what a little talent and practice can do with existing tools. This story was in the news lately, about a woman that uses nothing but MS Paint:
I'd say krita and gimp fill different needs. Krita is for artists and Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids. I frequently use Gimp to crop images, make memes, etc. When I used to draw with my wacom tablet, krita was the tool of choice.
Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally.
Linux desktop desperately needs:
1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities
2. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to)
If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something intuitive and stable! Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers... few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...
My impression is that the American software community sometimes doesn't pay much attention to what's coming out of Europe. Have a look at other KDE-based programs if you haven't already - IME KVirc, Kile, KTorrent, and indeed Konqueror and KMail are best-in-class.
"There are over 1000 bugs and 350 wishes reported against Krita per year, and that number is rising. The Krita developers cannot handle that stream on their own! Please consider helping out by triaging bugs. This document gives some simple guidelines to get started, and some common cases that can often be answered with a standard text."
She's more important than she seems - branding is everything, and Krita has one of the best mascots in FOSS, a field in which aesthetics has traditionally not been a priority.
How better to spread a program for artists than with a mascot that begs to be drawn?
Actually, for a digital painting program, I would expect it to be the case!
Usually, in my experience, the mascots of FOSS software were quite criticized as having too many features to draw, etc... Not easily recognizable as logos.
I have no idea whether this is valid criticism or not. But when you ask me about Krita, I think about Kiki. I can't tell what the icon looks like on the top of my head.
On the plus side, some say that we are much better mentally equipped to recognize faces than abstract figures. So, maybe this was just something not fashionable in the past few years in the flat corporate/branding/design world?
Holy cow, I had no idea... she's great! That's some Miku-level stuff there (Checks Wikipedia) ahhh, it's from the same guy that did Freedom Planet, I totally see the influence.
Maybe it's time to commission him for some other mascots for other projects that are sorely lacking. Inkscape, for example.
While it looks very powerful, does anyone know if the miserable light gray on medium gray UI can be changed? I despise this modern trend (Pixelmator drives me nuts too) as I have difficulty reading text with such low contrast. This is terribly unfriendly to people with vision difficulties.
As a first comment on full version bump of a truly astounding application with a clear and accessible Themes in its top-level menu, this is perhaps a tad lacking in positivity.
People compare Krita to Photoshop, and that's fine. There's another space where it shines and people might not know about that. It's animation. Friend and I have been working on a hand-drawn short animation (~10 minutes) for a few years now and it's just about done (final stages of sound editing). We started out in Harmony, but we were extremely disappointed with it. We tossed around the idea to switch over to TV Paint (raster based), but I thought that maybe there's an OSS something for it? Being an OSS fan and advocate, after all. If Toonz were released earlier, we might've tried that (not really, considering years of experience with it). We even considered Photoshop - it now has a nice animation workflow built-in, but I didn't want to go away from OSS until I explored all the options. So, there was Krita. Let me tell you, not only is it great, it easily cut down our animation time by a large percentage over if we were using Harmony. It's awesome tool for 2d hand-drawn animation with still A LOT of room to grow, workflow-wise.
tl;dr; If you want to animate by hand, give Krita a chance. It's better than Harmony and Toonz (again, for hand-drawn animation).
Based on the app description and homepage I always thought Krita can't replace Photoshop for the few things I need to do for basic webdesign stuff. But reading the comments here made me reconsider. Has anyone used Krita for web stuff (icons, headers, banners, editing screenshots, etc?
Since the developers are reading this thread: I saw that you have a simple press page [0], if you want something more detailed, I can hook you up with a free PressKitHero[1] account.
Krita is not targeted as a photoshop replacement. It was at one time, but 15+ years ago they realized that many people are willing to pay for photoshop and thus Adobe has a large amount of money to throw at developers (at least some of them good) and so they are unlikely to catch up. They then shifted focus to be the best programing for drawing instead, a niche that Photoshop can cover but it isn't what their customers want and so it isn't well served. Photoshop is mostly used by photographers who need to touch up a photo, this is art but a very different style of art from someone who starts with a blank page and draws a picture.
As an intermediate-to-advanced PS user, I found that it didn't fill the void too (but this was more than a year ago). It seems more geared toward traditional media emulation.
If you're looking for something designed to work like and solve the same problems as PS and Illustrator, Affinity Photo and Design by Serif are probably what you're looking for. They are around $50 each.
I have no idea about presskithero... But we can't just use a closed platform for our stuff. As for the first question: we, obviously, use Krita for icons, headers, banners and screenshots, but that's just because we're making Krita. It's not what Krita is made for :-)
And don't even think of trying to make mockups for whole websites in Krita!
I'm still a bit sad they decided to de-emphasize the photo-editing-targeted features - it was (and still is) miles ahead of GIMP in terms of deep color support.
A majority of the advances in Krita come from the crowdfunding campaigns, and those are centered around the painting part. I'm sure if there were a senior dev in the project who had the desire to improve the photo editing parts the foundation would let them crowdfund that independently of the drawing work.
I wonder why my Krita in Windows (3.0 - 3.4, also 4.0) has some lag (around 100ms or so) when switching presets. During that, I can't even move the cursor, which is quite annoying since I use switch presets shortcut very often.
I've got no problem whatsoever on Ubuntu though, aside from some random crashes when doing free transform.
That being said, Krita is still my main tool for painting/drawing and some picture editing. The interface is IMHO very intuitive (or maybe just more Photoshop-like) which is nice
Just installed Krita 4.0 on my Surface 4 Pro. Like many other software ported to Windows, it can't handle hidpi screens well, all the UI becomes so tiny that the program is not really useful.
Anyone has tips for running Krita on hidpi screens on Windows?
Changing the program compatibility setting 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour' may help with this (I haven't tried with Krita yet, but I had a similar problem with Matlab & Simulink which was fixed by this)
I really want to love Krita, and I sort of do. The only thing preventing me from doing so is the absurd amount of crashes on my macOS machine. Is this just a Mac problem? Has this been addressed in this update? Am I doing something wrong?
Krita + Gimp is a great combo - I'm extremely happy both exist in the OSS world! Hoping to use Krita more as I start getting into texturing models - it's been great so far for basic images though.
[+] [-] headsoup|8 years ago|reply
It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.
[+] [-] JoeDaDude|8 years ago|reply
https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/
[+] [-] antoineMoPa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m-p-3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Findus23|8 years ago|reply
https://www.peppercarrot.com/
[+] [-] cheunste|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matado|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kriro|8 years ago|reply
Congrats on 4.0. Great work.
[+] [-] nnq|8 years ago|reply
Linux desktop desperately needs:
1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities
2. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to)
If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something intuitive and stable! Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers... few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...
[+] [-] bringtheaction|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RazrFalcon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hoasi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boudewijnrempt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|8 years ago|reply
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=krita&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
Is there a way to get weekly summary of HN for the top stories? There are probably lots of stories I miss.
[+] [-] buovjaga|8 years ago|reply
"There are over 1000 bugs and 350 wishes reported against Krita per year, and that number is rising. The Krita developers cannot handle that stream on their own! Please consider helping out by triaging bugs. This document gives some simple guidelines to get started, and some common cases that can often be answered with a standard text."
[+] [-] Fej|8 years ago|reply
She's more important than she seems - branding is everything, and Krita has one of the best mascots in FOSS, a field in which aesthetics has traditionally not been a priority.
How better to spread a program for artists than with a mascot that begs to be drawn?
[+] [-] MayeulC|8 years ago|reply
Usually, in my experience, the mascots of FOSS software were quite criticized as having too many features to draw, etc... Not easily recognizable as logos.
I have no idea whether this is valid criticism or not. But when you ask me about Krita, I think about Kiki. I can't tell what the icon looks like on the top of my head.
On the plus side, some say that we are much better mentally equipped to recognize faces than abstract figures. So, maybe this was just something not fashionable in the past few years in the flat corporate/branding/design world?
[+] [-] fl0wenol|8 years ago|reply
Maybe it's time to commission him for some other mascots for other projects that are sorely lacking. Inkscape, for example.
[+] [-] coldcode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diggan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boudewijnrempt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lodyb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guiltia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interfixus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|8 years ago|reply
tl;dr; If you want to animate by hand, give Krita a chance. It's better than Harmony and Toonz (again, for hand-drawn animation).
[+] [-] mephitix|8 years ago|reply
Among many other features it has onion skinning, play controls per layer, and looping over custom-labeled set of frames.
I used it for my first game last year and it made everything so much more fun :)
[+] [-] boudewijnrempt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnm|8 years ago|reply
Since the developers are reading this thread: I saw that you have a simple press page [0], if you want something more detailed, I can hook you up with a free PressKitHero[1] account.
[0] https://krita.org/en/about/press/ [1] https://presskithero.com
[+] [-] bluGill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|8 years ago|reply
If you're looking for something designed to work like and solve the same problems as PS and Illustrator, Affinity Photo and Design by Serif are probably what you're looking for. They are around $50 each.
[+] [-] boudewijnrempt|8 years ago|reply
And don't even think of trying to make mockups for whole websites in Krita!
[+] [-] ris|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guiltia|8 years ago|reply
I've got no problem whatsoever on Ubuntu though, aside from some random crashes when doing free transform.
That being said, Krita is still my main tool for painting/drawing and some picture editing. The interface is IMHO very intuitive (or maybe just more Photoshop-like) which is nice
[+] [-] soapdog|8 years ago|reply
Anyone has tips for running Krita on hidpi screens on Windows?
[+] [-] edh649|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microtheo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sevrene|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methodin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|8 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if it works well with the new svg vector layers in this release?
[+] [-] noobermin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khanan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j1elo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valeg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xroy|8 years ago|reply