5 ms·

I'm migrating from Krita to Photoshop lately. Don't get me wrong, I love Krita. I used it for years and I wrote ~30+ bug reports. It's a positive thing -- I wo

I'm migrating from Krita to Photoshop lately. Don't get me wrong, I love Krita. I used it for years and I wrote ~30+ bug reports. It's a positive thing -- I won't bother reporting bugs to Adobe cause I know they don't care, unlike Krita devs. However every time I need to collaborate with someone else, they use Photoshop. They use .psd like it's an interchangeable format[1]. Out of 10+ artists I've only seen one who doesn't use PS, and it's not Krita. [1]: I know Krita can read and write .psd.

moelf 3y ago
is there an interchangeable format for this? .tiff? .ora?
- raincole 3y ago
  If interchangeable format means non-proprietary then Krita's .kra is one. If it means a format designed to be used as interchangeable format then .ora. If it means one that everyone uses then none.
  - alexvitkov 3y ago
    There is one that everyone uses, unfortunately.
sweatypalmer 3y ago
Maybe a stupid question, but if Krita can read/write .psd then why does this matter?
- raincole 3y ago
  Because just like the most "open source app reading/writing proprietary format" scenarios, it doesn't do it perfectly. Even if you simply import a .psd and re-export it again as-is, it will still break things like smart objects and layer blending options. It's not Krita's fault: .psd is not an interchangeable format. Implementing .psd support perfectly is basically implementing the whole PS itself. It's all the artists' "fault". But it doesn't change the fact that using Krita makes my days difficult.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    And I believe .psd is still the only "raw" common format for artistic drawing, right? I've once seen a .psd that won't display correctly in neither Ps or CSP, supposedly because it was exported from something else. That didn't seem like a fun situation.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    And PSD is notoriously complicated. I remember reading some rant by an open source developer and there were things along the lines of different endianness in the same file. It’s a 30+ year old format that went to multiple transitions. I don’t envy the poor soul that has to reverse engineer it.
    - lloeki 3y ago
      > I remember reading some rant by an open source developer This one? https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f316f7a02903276/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108-L136 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
      - alexvitkov 3y ago
        Fantastic read, thanks.
      - tambourine_man 3y ago
        That’s the one yes, thanks.
      - funnyflywheel 3y ago
        I took a look at the git blame, and the commit title is perfect. https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b302996bcc338b1f6c80 https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b30299...
      - seanthemon 3y ago
        My favorite part is the immediately followed //sanity check, too apt.
Kelteseth 3y ago
Why not Affinity Designer/Photo?
- raincole 3y ago
  Perhaps it's a just me, but I've never met someone who uses Affinity Photo as their main digital painting app. The one artist who doesn't use PS actually uses Clip Studio Paint. I'm not saying it's not a great app (I'm not familiar with it enough to judge it). But if I'm not using an open source one, I'd use the industry standard one.
  - hoistbypetard 3y ago
    I'm not a real artist. I do programmer art for game jams, MVPs, UI mockups, etc. I always liked Affinity Designer on iPad for that. It's got nice Apple Pencil support, it was inexpensive, and it works with other file formats pretty well. Last time they had a sale on their "Universal" bundle, which got you Mac, Windows and iPad licenses for all their products for $100, I had just received some illustrator files that I wanted to work with on my desktop and decided to go ahead and pick that up. I now find myself using Photo and Designer instead of Krita/Gimp and Inkscape, because I'm more efficient with it as a non-expert user and because the .psd and .ai interop is better. I need to deal with one of those two file types approximately 0.75 times a month, so the industry standard one feels eye-wateringly expensive. But a one-time $100 fee for a less frustrating experience than the open source ones offered felt worthwhile to me. And they've grown on me to the point that I pick them up when I need to make something for a game jam, not just when I need the interop.
    - 7moritz7 3y ago
      The Affinity Suite has substantially better UIs than the Adobe pendants. It just works immidiately without tutorials, and it works really well
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    I am a pro artist. Most of my artist friends who don't use Photoshop either use Clip Studio or Procreate. In general the Clip/Procreate split corresponds strongly to whether or not they do a lot of comics. There's a handful of other programs that one or two of my friends use but absolutely zero of my friends have talked about using Affinity Photo.
catapart 3y ago
I feel this pain. Photoshop is such a massive beast and really doesn't do anything for me that other programs don't. It's just too ubiquitous to work around without literally budgeting in your hours for having to work around it. -_-
hospitalJail 3y ago
Hate defacto standards behind corporations. M$ Windows, Photoshop, each company gets locked into their own CAD nightmare. On the flip slide, we have Blender, Linux Server, (enough)SQL, Git, Stable Diffusion, and maybe python/python libraries if that counts.
- raincole 3y ago
  When I moved from web dev to game dev, the second most surprising thing I found is how much this industry depends on proprietary solutions compared to web dev. The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    > The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev. They pay less because they can - there are many more highly motivated people who dream of making video games than there are open spots. People are less highly motivated who dream about making Another Corporate CRUD App 2.0 (this time with Firefox support), and there are a lot more job openings.
    - raincole 3y ago
      Yes, I understand that. It's just like filmmaking industry but not that bad. If I had had the same level of understanding of economics as I do now, I probably would have stayed in web backend development.
      - pxc 3y ago
        From an engineering perspective, are there any things you prefer, or are at least glad to have learned from, in game dev?
  - nunodonato 3y ago
    that's why I switched from gamedev to webdev :D
borbtactics 3y ago
Same here. I want a Photoshop alternative that has built-in tate-chu-yoko but I've never seen one
- catapart 3y ago
  Perfect example of something that most people will think of as "not necessary", but a whole industry will understand as close to, if not outright, a deal-breaker! It would be really cool to have some kind of open source community that developed these kinds of "usage specific" plugins across multiple open-source projects, to kind of patch in that functionality where it's missing. Some people to work on ever-evolving interfaces for the supported applications, and then some other people to write plugins that provided these features, progressively enhanced, based on those interfaces. It would be a gargantuan effort, though, and you would just end up with a plugin soup without careful moderation (even more effort; and easy to go awry!) so c'est la vie!
danjc 3y ago
Seems that a near-perfect psd import/export would be the killer feature that enables it to compete with Photoshop. That would be huge.
- raincole 3y ago
  I highly doubt if Krita has the man power to do this. They've been developing a new text system for more than one year. The new text system isn't designed to be compatible with Photoshop. And even if it is, rendering text just like Photoshop is just a tiny step towards rendering everything like Photoshop.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Relevant: "PSD is not my favorite format" (2009) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
Does that one (1) non-Photoshop artist prefer .xcf?
- raincole 3y ago
  Clip Studio Paint. I highly doubt any of them even knows .xcf (I didn't ask tho).
danShumway 3y ago
Not to detract from raincole's point, and this is not relevant at all to their problem, but just a general reminder that in many ways Krita is not a direct competitor to Photoshop unless you're using Photoshop as a digital painting tool -- and if you are, I would argue that Krita is arguably a better product in multiple ways. I think that Photoshop is an image manipulator first and foremost, and Krita is a tool for drawing/painting and maybe doing some light traditional animation (although even that is not its primary focus). I think that CSP, Procreate, etc... are more direct competitors to Krita. Photoshop is a competitor to Gimp. Again, does not change anything about raincole's comment, and I don't think that raincole was suggesting that they were direct competitors. It's just that whenever Photosohp and Krita get mentioned in the same sentence I feel like the assumption from many readers is that they're trying to do the same things, and I would personally say that I think they're separate categories of software. There are things that Photosohp does that Krita doesn't want to do and will probably never support, because it's a painting app, not an image manipulation app.
- raincole 3y ago
  I agree. Off the top of my head, the most important new features they introduced in recent years were: Krita: A new brush engine. A new file format for brushes. Some animation features that I don't use. New text system. PS: AI-based object selection. AI-based neural filter. AI-based generative fill. New Javascript API for plugins. It's quite clear that Adobe doesn't see PS as a digital painting app, but an (AI-assisted) image manipulation app.
yuukisenshi 3y ago
What industry? I am involved in the game and illustration industry, and work with mostly eastern studios. I have seen a 90% CSP usage rate, with the last 10% mostly being procreate users. Photoshop is in usage to the same degree as Paint Tool Sai and I have never seen a Krita user.
orbital-decay 3y ago
What kind of work do you do? The primary use case for Krita is digital painting, where a lot of artists use CSP/Procreate and typical pipelines allow certain freedom of choice. I used to work with 2D artists, and perfect PS compatibility was a deal breaker everywhere except for digital painting.
libraryatnight 3y ago
I don't ever really collaborate, so I had come to comment that I recently switched to Krita and have really been enjoying it. Between Krita, Gimp, and Blender once I swap some fonts in places I can drop my Adobe sub which has at least been dropped to the minimum package. I switched because it seems like it's important to use and support open source tools wherever possible, proprietary software is feeling more and more hostile to the user. I'm redirecting the money I was spending on Adobe products to open source donations.

moelf 3y ago

is there an interchangeable format for this? .tiff? .ora?

raincole 3y ago
If interchangeable format means non-proprietary then Krita's .kra is one. If it means a format designed to be used as interchangeable format then .ora. If it means one that everyone uses then none.
- alexvitkov 3y ago
  There is one that everyone uses, unfortunately.

sweatypalmer 3y ago

Maybe a stupid question, but if Krita can read/write .psd then why does this matter?

raincole 3y ago
Because just like the most "open source app reading/writing proprietary format" scenarios, it doesn't do it perfectly. Even if you simply import a .psd and re-export it again as-is, it will still break things like smart objects and layer blending options. It's not Krita's fault: .psd is not an interchangeable format. Implementing .psd support perfectly is basically implementing the whole PS itself. It's all the artists' "fault". But it doesn't change the fact that using Krita makes my days difficult.
- numpad0 3y ago
  And I believe .psd is still the only "raw" common format for artistic drawing, right? I've once seen a .psd that won't display correctly in neither Ps or CSP, supposedly because it was exported from something else. That didn't seem like a fun situation.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  And PSD is notoriously complicated. I remember reading some rant by an open source developer and there were things along the lines of different endianness in the same file. It’s a 30+ year old format that went to multiple transitions. I don’t envy the poor soul that has to reverse engineer it.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    > I remember reading some rant by an open source developer This one? https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f316f7a02903276/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108-L136 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
    - alexvitkov 3y ago
      Fantastic read, thanks.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      That’s the one yes, thanks.
    - funnyflywheel 3y ago
      I took a look at the git blame, and the commit title is perfect. https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b302996bcc338b1f6c80 https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b30299...
    - seanthemon 3y ago
      My favorite part is the immediately followed //sanity check, too apt.

Kelteseth 3y ago

Why not Affinity Designer/Photo?

raincole 3y ago
Perhaps it's a just me, but I've never met someone who uses Affinity Photo as their main digital painting app. The one artist who doesn't use PS actually uses Clip Studio Paint. I'm not saying it's not a great app (I'm not familiar with it enough to judge it). But if I'm not using an open source one, I'd use the industry standard one.
- hoistbypetard 3y ago
  I'm not a real artist. I do programmer art for game jams, MVPs, UI mockups, etc. I always liked Affinity Designer on iPad for that. It's got nice Apple Pencil support, it was inexpensive, and it works with other file formats pretty well. Last time they had a sale on their "Universal" bundle, which got you Mac, Windows and iPad licenses for all their products for $100, I had just received some illustrator files that I wanted to work with on my desktop and decided to go ahead and pick that up. I now find myself using Photo and Designer instead of Krita/Gimp and Inkscape, because I'm more efficient with it as a non-expert user and because the .psd and .ai interop is better. I need to deal with one of those two file types approximately 0.75 times a month, so the industry standard one feels eye-wateringly expensive. But a one-time $100 fee for a less frustrating experience than the open source ones offered felt worthwhile to me. And they've grown on me to the point that I pick them up when I need to make something for a game jam, not just when I need the interop.
  - 7moritz7 3y ago
    The Affinity Suite has substantially better UIs than the Adobe pendants. It just works immidiately without tutorials, and it works really well
- egypturnash 3y ago
  I am a pro artist. Most of my artist friends who don't use Photoshop either use Clip Studio or Procreate. In general the Clip/Procreate split corresponds strongly to whether or not they do a lot of comics. There's a handful of other programs that one or two of my friends use but absolutely zero of my friends have talked about using Affinity Photo.

catapart 3y ago

I feel this pain. Photoshop is such a massive beast and really doesn't do anything for me that other programs don't. It's just too ubiquitous to work around without literally budgeting in your hours for having to work around it. -_-

hospitalJail 3y ago

Hate defacto standards behind corporations. M$ Windows, Photoshop, each company gets locked into their own CAD nightmare. On the flip slide, we have Blender, Linux Server, (enough)SQL, Git, Stable Diffusion, and maybe python/python libraries if that counts.

raincole 3y ago
When I moved from web dev to game dev, the second most surprising thing I found is how much this industry depends on proprietary solutions compared to web dev. The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  > The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev. They pay less because they can - there are many more highly motivated people who dream of making video games than there are open spots. People are less highly motivated who dream about making Another Corporate CRUD App 2.0 (this time with Firefox support), and there are a lot more job openings.
  - raincole 3y ago
    Yes, I understand that. It's just like filmmaking industry but not that bad. If I had had the same level of understanding of economics as I do now, I probably would have stayed in web backend development.
    - pxc 3y ago
      From an engineering perspective, are there any things you prefer, or are at least glad to have learned from, in game dev?
- nunodonato 3y ago
  that's why I switched from gamedev to webdev :D

borbtactics 3y ago

Same here. I want a Photoshop alternative that has built-in tate-chu-yoko but I've never seen one

catapart 3y ago
Perfect example of something that most people will think of as "not necessary", but a whole industry will understand as close to, if not outright, a deal-breaker! It would be really cool to have some kind of open source community that developed these kinds of "usage specific" plugins across multiple open-source projects, to kind of patch in that functionality where it's missing. Some people to work on ever-evolving interfaces for the supported applications, and then some other people to write plugins that provided these features, progressively enhanced, based on those interfaces. It would be a gargantuan effort, though, and you would just end up with a plugin soup without careful moderation (even more effort; and easy to go awry!) so c'est la vie!

danjc 3y ago

Seems that a near-perfect psd import/export would be the killer feature that enables it to compete with Photoshop. That would be huge.

raincole 3y ago
I highly doubt if Krita has the man power to do this. They've been developing a new text system for more than one year. The new text system isn't designed to be compatible with Photoshop. And even if it is, rendering text just like Photoshop is just a tiny step towards rendering everything like Photoshop.
bonzini 3y ago
Relevant: "PSD is not my favorite format" (2009) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

Does that one (1) non-Photoshop artist prefer .xcf?

raincole 3y ago
Clip Studio Paint. I highly doubt any of them even knows .xcf (I didn't ask tho).

danShumway 3y ago

Not to detract from raincole's point, and this is not relevant at all to their problem, but just a general reminder that in many ways Krita is not a direct competitor to Photoshop unless you're using Photoshop as a digital painting tool -- and if you are, I would argue that Krita is arguably a better product in multiple ways. I think that Photoshop is an image manipulator first and foremost, and Krita is a tool for drawing/painting and maybe doing some light traditional animation (although even that is not its primary focus). I think that CSP, Procreate, etc... are more direct competitors to Krita. Photoshop is a competitor to Gimp. Again, does not change anything about raincole's comment, and I don't think that raincole was suggesting that they were direct competitors. It's just that whenever Photosohp and Krita get mentioned in the same sentence I feel like the assumption from many readers is that they're trying to do the same things, and I would personally say that I think they're separate categories of software. There are things that Photosohp does that Krita doesn't want to do and will probably never support, because it's a painting app, not an image manipulation app.

raincole 3y ago
I agree. Off the top of my head, the most important new features they introduced in recent years were: Krita: A new brush engine. A new file format for brushes. Some animation features that I don't use. New text system. PS: AI-based object selection. AI-based neural filter. AI-based generative fill. New Javascript API for plugins. It's quite clear that Adobe doesn't see PS as a digital painting app, but an (AI-assisted) image manipulation app.

yuukisenshi 3y ago

What industry? I am involved in the game and illustration industry, and work with mostly eastern studios. I have seen a 90% CSP usage rate, with the last 10% mostly being procreate users. Photoshop is in usage to the same degree as Paint Tool Sai and I have never seen a Krita user.

orbital-decay 3y ago

What kind of work do you do? The primary use case for Krita is digital painting, where a lot of artists use CSP/Procreate and typical pipelines allow certain freedom of choice. I used to work with 2D artists, and perfect PS compatibility was a deal breaker everywhere except for digital painting.

libraryatnight 3y ago

I don't ever really collaborate, so I had come to comment that I recently switched to Krita and have really been enjoying it. Between Krita, Gimp, and Blender once I swap some fonts in places I can drop my Adobe sub which has at least been dropped to the minimum package. I switched because it seems like it's important to use and support open source tools wherever possible, proprietary software is feeling more and more hostile to the user. I'm redirecting the money I was spending on Adobe products to open source donations.