Krita Receives Epic MegaGrant

[danShumway]

Nice! Krita is one of the Open Source art tools that I'm really bullish on right now.

I don't think it's at the same level of quality as its commercial competition yet, but it's not so bad, and it's getting progressively better, and it has a really nice community, and it's being pushed forward by actual artists.

Absent the way its growing, I might not be so bullish, but I feel pretty optimistic about Krita's future -- enough that I'm betting on it internally for games and art projects that I make, spending time to make sure I really understand its interface, donating money, thinking about ways to integrate it into other workflows -- much more than I'm betting on tools like MyPaint. Optimistic enough that I'm willing to make a full switch over to it instead of hopping into Windows or wrestling with Wine to get Clip Studio working.

Grants like this are great news, both because the influx of money is important, and because increased industry focus is good for pushing projects like this in the direction of being the kind of stable software that you can rely on industrially. The thing to be really optimistic about with Krita is that the right categories of people are betting on it and supporting it.

Krita is usable right now for what I need, some annoyances aside, and I think it's very possible that it could end up being just flat out better than its competition in the future. If any Open Source project is set up to follow Blender in the art world, it's Krita.

[jchw]

Krita is fantastic. There's a lot of open source painting and imaging software out there, but Krita really stands out with a cool brush engine, good performance, and a feature set very useful for digital art. I only hope Krita can receive more substantial funding in the future.

Krita definitely helped me leave some closed source apps that I used to use for hobby, without feeling like I was making a compromise (quite the opposite really.)

Of course, it's not really equivalent to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint, for example, but I think it's competitive in some areas already.

[q_andrew]

Between this and Epic's massive grant towards Blender, they are really doing their part to enrich an already blossoming open source artist community. It used to be that all of these tools were locked behind years of education and a staggering software subscription. Hopefully they continue backing these grants as the Epic Games store matures.

[narrator]

I think Blender and Krita are going to do to Adobe what Adobe did to QuarkXpress.

[thrower123]

Good for them, I'm sure it's a nice shot in the arm. But jesus, it's not much, really. You certainly don't do open source to get rich.

25k is about 18 minutes of Fortnite revenue, if I've done the math right.

[ronilan]

I once had an independent project that was both awesome and positioned extremely well for the needs of big co.

But, life, it needed support.

So, big co sent someone with a fat salary and stock options to take care of things. He mailed to “brainstorm” what can be done so that “folks like yourself could successfully build” stuff that benefits them and how to make it “worth a developer’s while”.

So yah.

That was bullshit and the way Open Source is funded is (also, among other such piles) bullshit

[preommr]

It's pretty insane.

Tech in general has so much money that is more or less 'wasted'. Just people throwing billions at useless startups in the hope that it grows big. I know wework wasn't a tech company, but it got invested in like it was one. If even a trickle of that money had gone into projects like blender or krita, it would make such big difference.

It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but it's still a thought that pops into my head from time to time.

[webboynews]

Going by their donation this month, this is roughly equiv to 12 months'

[kresten]

OS X really needs a “good enough” paint app, like Windows has paint.net

Preview is ok for various editing tasks but nowhere near as good as paint.net

[newscracker]

...and preferably something that works well with a keyboard. I use Paint.Net many a times with the arrow keys (and the mouse button pressed) to be more precise and also go in specific directions to paint or brush over things.

[jacknews]

Congratulations, krita is excellent.

Let's hope other content purveyors are also moved to support the free software which they directly or indirectly profit from.

And if krita could just add 'tweening' to the animation tools, my kids would be even happier and I'd certainly be adding a donation :)

[bfrog]

The Krita team is patient, thoughtful, and welcoming. Its a fantastic artistic tool by being created by artists.

Congrats!

[_bxg1]

I'm not familiar with Krita. How does it compare with/relate to GIMP?

[BeetleB]

Krita is primarily a painting tool. GIMP is primarily an image manipulation tool. Both do the "other", but poorly. In that sense, they probably shouldn't be compared.

[bmer]

Following on the above question, how does it compare with Inkscape?