6 ms·

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 c

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.

antoineMoPa 9y ago
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.
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  I use "pinta" on Linux when I need an equivalent to MS paint.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    Both Pinta and Krita had really weird interactions with my touch screen the last time I tried. GIMP was the only one who worked correctly - I presume because it just treated it as a mouse (it may well be that my Linux configuration is to blame, not Pinta and Krita) Perhaps things work better now.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Paint.net is pretty notable too. Windows only, but free, and halfway between paint and what Adobe offers. There are many plugins that either meet or exceed what you can find for Photoshop.
  - sus_007 9y ago
    Yeah, I think Pinta could be considered as MS Paint++ for Linux.
  - dizzystar 9y ago
    I use kolour paint. Don't really do much outside of resizing and cropping though.
    - amyjess 9y ago
      Seconding. I'm pretty happy with KolourPaint, but all I use it for is resizing, cropping, and blocking out people's names and pictures in social media screenshots.
- lmm 9y ago
  That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Krita is fine for the "crop images, make memes, etc" use case and for most artist-like things, but I found Gimp had slightly better tablet support (at least on Windows).
  - Doxin 9y ago
    Krita has much better default pressure curves though. The default settings on the gimp are basically unusable with how nonlinear they are.
    - prokoudine 9y ago
      Yeah, this is something we've been looking into for a while. See e.g. https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn and around.
- prokoudine 9y ago
  > Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids Oh yeah, if steroids bring layers, masks, paths, a shitload of selection, transformation, and cropping tools, a whole lot of filters and loaders for all sorts of image file formats, complete color management support, 32-bit per channel processing and suchlike, then you might be correct :)
  - Unai 9y ago
    >complete color management support GIMP still only half-supports CMYK in 2018, though. But as someone who uses it professionally, I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint. I'm guessing that the user you replied to has only used it as such and hasn't dive into all the tools and features it offers. With all the bugs and half-broken tools it has, I still think it is a great piece of software, and my life would be much harder without it.
    - prokoudine 9y ago
      Half-broken tools? I know there are good reasons to dislike Cage Transform, but what other tools are half-broken?
    - T-N-T 9y ago
      > I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing. Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering. As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release. I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.
JoeDaDude 9y ago
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: https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/ https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/
- mattigames 9y ago
  That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made their lives more difficult by purpose.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    I think you fail to appreciate that learning a new skill requires some kind of connection to an already learned skill, and that this connection becomes harder to establish at old age. The old lady's choice may have made perfect sense from her point of view.
    - mattigames 9y ago
      Pretty sure whatever she knew already (e.g. oil painting) at least had anti-aliasing; what I mean is that there are tools that are even simpler than MS-paint but produce better results ("better" as in art more likely to be liked by more people)
  - Xyzodiac 9y ago
    Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself
    - mattigames 9y ago
      Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time. And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.
m-p-3 9y ago
The UI is much more intuitive to me than the one in GIMP, but it's probably a lack of experience with it from my part.
- opencl 9y ago
  I've used GIMP for ~10 years and the UI still confuses me.

antoineMoPa 9y ago

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.

dorfsmay 9y ago
I use "pinta" on Linux when I need an equivalent to MS paint.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Both Pinta and Krita had really weird interactions with my touch screen the last time I tried. GIMP was the only one who worked correctly - I presume because it just treated it as a mouse (it may well be that my Linux configuration is to blame, not Pinta and Krita) Perhaps things work better now.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Paint.net is pretty notable too. Windows only, but free, and halfway between paint and what Adobe offers. There are many plugins that either meet or exceed what you can find for Photoshop.
- sus_007 9y ago
  Yeah, I think Pinta could be considered as MS Paint++ for Linux.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  I use kolour paint. Don't really do much outside of resizing and cropping though.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Seconding. I'm pretty happy with KolourPaint, but all I use it for is resizing, cropping, and blocking out people's names and pictures in social media screenshots.
lmm 9y ago
That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Krita is fine for the "crop images, make memes, etc" use case and for most artist-like things, but I found Gimp had slightly better tablet support (at least on Windows).
- Doxin 9y ago
  Krita has much better default pressure curves though. The default settings on the gimp are basically unusable with how nonlinear they are.
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    Yeah, this is something we've been looking into for a while. See e.g. https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn and around.
prokoudine 9y ago
> Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids Oh yeah, if steroids bring layers, masks, paths, a shitload of selection, transformation, and cropping tools, a whole lot of filters and loaders for all sorts of image file formats, complete color management support, 32-bit per channel processing and suchlike, then you might be correct :)
- Unai 9y ago
  >complete color management support GIMP still only half-supports CMYK in 2018, though. But as someone who uses it professionally, I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint. I'm guessing that the user you replied to has only used it as such and hasn't dive into all the tools and features it offers. With all the bugs and half-broken tools it has, I still think it is a great piece of software, and my life would be much harder without it.
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    Half-broken tools? I know there are good reasons to dislike Cage Transform, but what other tools are half-broken?
  - T-N-T 9y ago
    > I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing. Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering. As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release. I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.

JoeDaDude 9y ago

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: https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/ https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/

mattigames 9y ago
That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made their lives more difficult by purpose.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  I think you fail to appreciate that learning a new skill requires some kind of connection to an already learned skill, and that this connection becomes harder to establish at old age. The old lady's choice may have made perfect sense from her point of view.
  - mattigames 9y ago
    Pretty sure whatever she knew already (e.g. oil painting) at least had anti-aliasing; what I mean is that there are tools that are even simpler than MS-paint but produce better results ("better" as in art more likely to be liked by more people)
- Xyzodiac 9y ago
  Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself
  - mattigames 9y ago
    Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time. And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.

m-p-3 9y ago

The UI is much more intuitive to me than the one in GIMP, but it's probably a lack of experience with it from my part.

opencl 9y ago
I've used GIMP for ~10 years and the UI still confuses me.