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> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functional

> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.

lukan 3y ago
"Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking" What is missing, compared to gimp?
- kuschku 3y ago
  Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general. And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes. It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
  - Blackthorn 3y ago
    Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad kernel.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP. Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
    - kuschku 3y ago
      That actually mirrors my experience perfectly. But nonetheless, the selection and move UI/UX for moving pixel grids and the tooling for manipulating pixels individually is the only feature that forces me to leave Krita and start GIMP every once in a while. I've moved the entire rest of my workflow to Krita many years ago.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Some things off the top of my head... I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense). GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues). GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them. And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita. There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    > GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues). Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.html https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht... There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      > Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, Yes it does, but it does not have all the tools that Gimp provides. > and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default I need to "destructively" modify images more often than non-destructively. > There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels. You can most likely get some similar result if you play around with the curves but it is certainly not as simple or easy as having a dedicated brightness/contrast filter like you can find in other image editing applications. Having that specialization might feel unnecessary for developers who are used to trying to make things more generic, but from a UX perspective it can be very preferable (if your goal is to make an image editing application - from the perspective of a 2D digital painting application, this sort of specialization may indeed feel like UI bloat). As i mentioned in my original message it isn't so much that you can't do things in Krita, it is more that the stuff that exist are often clunkier and the more you need outside "2D digital painting", the more limitations and clunkiness you face.
int_19h 3y ago
It started during GNOME 2. Remember the whole "spatial Nautilus" debacle? But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.
dheera 3y ago
Never heard of Krita, just downloaded it. It starts up way slower than Gimp and the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system. Bleh. It's probably busy spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops, and other bloat. Qt/KDE ecosystem apps are slow and memory-hogging compared to their GTK counterparts. Oh well, back to GIMP.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > It starts up way slower than Gimp On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second. > the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms). > spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    With a reasonable amount of effort you can get Qt apps to look good on GNOME. The same often can't be said about GNOME apps on KDE due to recent pushes of libadwaita, among other things, which greatly hinder the ability for a user to apply system themes.
  - eviks 3y ago
    You can't learn things like that if you have a budget of one minute to test an app before removing it

lukan 3y ago

"Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking" What is missing, compared to gimp?

kuschku 3y ago
Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general. And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes. It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
- Blackthorn 3y ago
  Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad kernel.
- Intralexical 3y ago
  IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP. Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
  - kuschku 3y ago
    That actually mirrors my experience perfectly. But nonetheless, the selection and move UI/UX for moving pixel grids and the tooling for manipulating pixels individually is the only feature that forces me to leave Krita and start GIMP every once in a while. I've moved the entire rest of my workflow to Krita many years ago.
badsectoracula 3y ago
Some things off the top of my head... I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense). GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues). GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them. And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita. There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
- Intralexical 3y ago
  > GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues). Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.html https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht... There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, Yes it does, but it does not have all the tools that Gimp provides. > and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default I need to "destructively" modify images more often than non-destructively. > There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels. You can most likely get some similar result if you play around with the curves but it is certainly not as simple or easy as having a dedicated brightness/contrast filter like you can find in other image editing applications. Having that specialization might feel unnecessary for developers who are used to trying to make things more generic, but from a UX perspective it can be very preferable (if your goal is to make an image editing application - from the perspective of a 2D digital painting application, this sort of specialization may indeed feel like UI bloat). As i mentioned in my original message it isn't so much that you can't do things in Krita, it is more that the stuff that exist are often clunkier and the more you need outside "2D digital painting", the more limitations and clunkiness you face.

int_19h 3y ago

It started during GNOME 2. Remember the whole "spatial Nautilus" debacle? But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.

dheera 3y ago

Never heard of Krita, just downloaded it. It starts up way slower than Gimp and the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system. Bleh. It's probably busy spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops, and other bloat. Qt/KDE ecosystem apps are slow and memory-hogging compared to their GTK counterparts. Oh well, back to GIMP.

badsectoracula 3y ago
> It starts up way slower than Gimp On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second. > the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms). > spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  With a reasonable amount of effort you can get Qt apps to look good on GNOME. The same often can't be said about GNOME apps on KDE due to recent pushes of libadwaita, among other things, which greatly hinder the ability for a user to apply system themes.
- eviks 3y ago
  You can't learn things like that if you have a budget of one minute to test an app before removing it