8 ms·

25 Years of Krita

224 points by TangerineDream 2y ago

Teslazar 2y ago
Every time I try Krita I bounce off of it because the controls are too different from Photoshop. For my relatively simple use cases, Krita could be a replacement for Photoshop, which I've been using on and off for roughly 30 years. The muscle memory runs deep. Just something simple like holding alt to toggle the magnifying glass between zoom-in/zoom-out doesn't work in Krita and the configuration doesn't allow for this.
cranberryturkey 2y ago
Krita is a great replacement for photoshop.
- hennell 2y ago
  If you're creating digital art / painting. It's a good program, but it doesn't do everything Photoshop can (nor does it try to).
- Gualdrapo 2y ago
  Call me paranoid, but I think it's harmful for Krita when someone frames it as a Photoshop alternative - because it really isn't. It is a program targeted specifically at digital painting. Yes, it can do some "basic" image manipulation like Photoshop does, and even you can do some animation stuff too - but it doesn't intend to target everything image manipulation wise as Photoshop does. I for one as a graphic designer use more tools alongside it, as GraphicsMagick or Digikam's Showfoto, because there's some stuff that it's easier to do with them, or they can do some stuff Krita can't. People hears that Krita is "a photoshop alternative" in countless comments, blog posts and etcetera and can get frustrated when they find something is lacking. And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
  - hallarempt 2y ago
    Well, as Halla, the Krita maintainer, I kind agree. Image manipulation is not a goal. But for animation, we have a very specific goal. What we want to see is someone doing a looney Tunes like hand-drawn animation in Krita. And I've seen some, so mission accomplished!
  - RobotToaster 2y ago
    > And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software. I doubt they will bitch less if people recommend GIMP.
  - shortformblog 2y ago
    I’ve used Photoshop for 25 years, a decade of that as a professional designer. I disagree. Krita is a worthy Photoshop alternative. It has things in areas software explicitly marketed as a Photoshop alternative does not have. Plus it feels intuitive, like Photoshop. I sort of feel like this shield is unnecessary and in some ways harms Krita, a great tool.
- chongli 2y ago
  Maybe if you use Photoshop for painting or art. If you're a photographer who mainly uses Photoshop to do RAW conversion and global adjustments to exposure/colour/saturation/sharpness with a bit of local dodging/burning/healing then Krita doesn't seem to be set up for that sort of workflow.
- virtualritz 2y ago
  > Krita is a great replacement for photoshop. No it is not. Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1]. And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more. I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life. Krita is a great paint app. It's not a Photoshop alternative. Photoshop is a great image manipulation app. It's not a Krita alternative. Krita absolutely is a Painter alternative. Painter is no longer a Krita alternative, if you need certain features (that's a topic for an entire blog post). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter
  - GeneralMaximus 2y ago
    Would it be accurate to say that Krita is a Procreate alternative?
    - virtualritz 2y ago
      I don't know Procreate well enough to answer this conclusively. But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper. Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq). I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative. But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience. That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps. But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes). As is the case with Procreate.
    - random42_ 2y ago
      Conceptually yes (and Krita might be more feature rich than Procreate), but Procreate is an iPad only app and Krita is not available on that platform, unfortunately.
Rinzler89 2y ago
Wow, is it just me or does that screenshot of 2005 Krita 1.4 UI[1] look absolutely amazing? All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect. Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example). [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1.4.2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....
- scrlk 2y ago
  Agreed. I suspect the shift in design occurred when the base assumption moved from "most users have never used a computer before" to "most users are familiar with computers". IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
  - hallarempt 2y ago
    To be honest, I still reference my paper copy of the Windows 1995 Interface Guidelines from time to time, when people propose new features for Krita. They are not always useful, but at least they don't change all the time.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    And since the new generation of users is growing up with mobile touch devices, we're coming back full circle to "most users never used a computer before".
- vvillena 2y ago
  The different icon colors and shapes help a lot. It doesn't look uniform, and this is actually a big plus, as there's less thinking required to identify the target. The new interface looks nicer, but interfaces should focus on being usable, not just look good. Sometimes this means getting out of the way and being unobtrusive. Other times, it means standing out more. The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.
sebstefan 2y ago
Wow. I could've sworn Krita was only around 6 years old. I've only very recently started hearing about it.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  There seems to be a phenomena I observe in the FOSS community where we reflexively respond to suggestions despite them being far beneath their FOSS alternatives. Only after digging or running into issues, do you find the good stuff. Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.
  - vachina 2y ago
    You have converted me.
  - acomjean 2y ago
    There is a lot of overlap, but I’d hardly call GIMP low quality. I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use. Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      Compared to Krita's interface, abstractions, and capability, GIMP feels pretty archaic. It's a vaguely capable photo editor but it's awful for digital painting.
      - sham1 2y ago
        Well that might be because, well, GIMP is made for photo editing, not for digital painting. Of course, GIMP does have some drawing tools in it, but that's clearly not the task it was designed for.
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influx 2y ago
Sounds like developing in QT is awful. They have had to do so much work porting it to new versions of QT.
- hanikesn 2y ago
  Imagine porting a web app to new frameworks over 25 years or keeping up with Macs ui Framework over that time frame ...
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  GUI development is awful in general tbh, outside of basic stuff anyway.
- tux3 2y ago
  That's just any big framework. Porting a large codebase between major releases of GTK (or Javascript frameworks) isn't much better.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    Depends on the framework. Qt5 was released in 2012. All of my LCL/Lazarus projects from that time open in modern straight-out-of-git Lazarus just fine. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of my LCL/Lazarus projects from 2005 (when Qt4 was released) also work out of the box, with the exception of those that tried to use strings as byte buffers (fixing this is a quick search and replace) since the datatype changed (this was a compiler/language change though, not a framework one). Retaining backwards compatibility is very important for LCL/Lazarus. That said Qt has been better than other frameworks when it comes to backwards compatibility, after all you can use the Qt5 docs for Qt6 code and vice versa and things work 95% of the time. Actually i was working on some Krita plugin recently and i only had the Qt6 docs around but i never encountered any issue with what i was using. AFAICT Krita's issue is mainly on the lower end of things and how they integrate with their custom OpenGL code.
    - hallarempt 2y ago
      Yeah. We need to do lots of low-level stuff, and things related to GPU have changed a lot from Qt to Qt.
shortformblog 2y ago
I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I've found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does. I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.
- anonymousab 2y ago
  Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could. It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF. Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.
  - shortformblog 2y ago
    More recent versions of Photoshop have a frame-based editing setup that can be modified by hand, allowing use of filters and similar tools. This feature has essentially been ignored by every commercial alternative to Photoshop (Affinty, Pixelmator, etc.), which is why I don’t use them. I edit a lot of GIFs. Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  I bet the UI is nicer for Krita gif editing than the GIMP animation plugin. Time to spend time learning it for a few GIFs I’d like to make.
  - shortformblog 2y ago
    My recommended strategy is to create a document to your preferred size and then go to File -> Import Animation Frames. You can import video or existing GIFs from there. The animation workspace is good for this, of course.
juliangmp 2y ago
I never knew that the project has been around for so long, let alone that its older than myself. But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...
- jpetso 2y ago
  Qt hasn't been terrible in terms of upgradeability between major versions for many use cases, but Krita got the short end of the stick. Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs. As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
  - yosefk 2y ago
    By going full Vulkan, you mean do nothing at all in Qt, or do you mean a particular way to use Qt but not some parts of it?
j_san 2y ago
The text in the "Choose your membership" column at https://fund.krita.org/ https://fund.krita.org/ is broken for me, it's not visible.
binkHN 2y ago
I'm impressed by the quality of programs that are coming out of the KDE ecosystem. While KDE is known for its desktop environment, many of the applications that come out of this organization are simply awesome.
- silisili 2y ago
  This has always been the case to be honest, and I say this as a gnome fan and user. Kate better than Gedit. Konqueror better than Epiphany. Dolphin better than Nautilus. Amarok better than Rhythmbox, and so on. I wish I liked KDE proper better, because their apps are too notch.
- zeroc8 2y ago
  In my opinion, that is due to Qt being such a complete and well documented framework.
jmix 2y ago
What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.
- hallarempt 2y ago
  Oh, noes... A post that has this in the second paragraph: "I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show." ended up in something "jmix" thought was "self-indulgent".
- ranger207 2y ago
  > constantly changing the name of the project Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?
  - ttepasse 2y ago
    KImageShop → Krayon → Krita, according to this article from 2009: https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-krayon-krita/ https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr... I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
- asddubs 2y ago
  it's an anniversary celebration post, not a "what is krita" post. It's meant for people already following the project. Krita is an application primarily aimed at digital artwork rather than editing images. So a strong emphasis on drawing and related tasks. For this, it is much easier to use than gimp. I won't necessarily say it's better, but every time I tried using gimp I gave up and I actually stuck with krita.
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jmclnx 2y ago
I am glad the KDE/QT applications are being developed. gimp is good, but my concern is the still rumored move/merge of the gtk into gnome lib. When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well. I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)
badsectoracula 2y ago
I was (and sometimes still am) using Paint Shop Pro 7 even on Linux (via Wine) until recently, but at some point i wanted to do some texture painting and found the whole process of "paint stuff, export to PNG, switch to Blender, reload texture, go back, etc" to be a bit of a PITA. I looked into making a plugin for PSP7 to show the image on a 3D model in a window but PSP7 only supported Photoshop plugins and making Photoshop plugins (for the circa 2000 version of Photoshop) seemed very convoluted as it was a quickly hacked together port of the process used on pre-MacOSX Macintosh. So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita's UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP's UI better but PSP7's the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i'm not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it. I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i'd like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials). I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like "paste into selection" to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7's UX much better overall. From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to "monitor" an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i've seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of "the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2" event would really speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document. I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i'd probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i'll probably try again though. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/ [1] https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw [4] https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png
pwitvoet 2y ago
One thing I particularly like about Krita is its wrap around mode. Very useful when making seamless textures! Another thing is that its file format contains a merged image, which can easily be extracted (.kra and .ora files are zip archives). I've used that to add native .kra/.ora support to a game texture conversion tool. .psd support took a lot more work in comparison.
haunter 2y ago
Started using Krita heavily since the local generative AI plugin is available (3rd party not official). Awesome and works perfectly.

Every time I try Krita I bounce off of it because the controls are too different from Photoshop. For my relatively simple use cases, Krita could be a replacement for Photoshop, which I've been using on and off for roughly 30 years. The muscle memory runs deep. Just something simple like holding alt to toggle the magnifying glass between zoom-in/zoom-out doesn't work in Krita and the configuration doesn't allow for this.

cranberryturkey 2y ago

Krita is a great replacement for photoshop.

hennell 2y ago
If you're creating digital art / painting. It's a good program, but it doesn't do everything Photoshop can (nor does it try to).
Gualdrapo 2y ago
Call me paranoid, but I think it's harmful for Krita when someone frames it as a Photoshop alternative - because it really isn't. It is a program targeted specifically at digital painting. Yes, it can do some "basic" image manipulation like Photoshop does, and even you can do some animation stuff too - but it doesn't intend to target everything image manipulation wise as Photoshop does. I for one as a graphic designer use more tools alongside it, as GraphicsMagick or Digikam's Showfoto, because there's some stuff that it's easier to do with them, or they can do some stuff Krita can't. People hears that Krita is "a photoshop alternative" in countless comments, blog posts and etcetera and can get frustrated when they find something is lacking. And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software.
- hallarempt 2y ago
  Well, as Halla, the Krita maintainer, I kind agree. Image manipulation is not a goal. But for animation, we have a very specific goal. What we want to see is someone doing a looney Tunes like hand-drawn animation in Krita. And I've seen some, so mission accomplished!
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  > And they can be one of those people that bitch about FOSS because they couldn't manage to do that specific task they can with propietary software. I doubt they will bitch less if people recommend GIMP.
- shortformblog 2y ago
  I’ve used Photoshop for 25 years, a decade of that as a professional designer. I disagree. Krita is a worthy Photoshop alternative. It has things in areas software explicitly marketed as a Photoshop alternative does not have. Plus it feels intuitive, like Photoshop. I sort of feel like this shield is unnecessary and in some ways harms Krita, a great tool.
chongli 2y ago
Maybe if you use Photoshop for painting or art. If you're a photographer who mainly uses Photoshop to do RAW conversion and global adjustments to exposure/colour/saturation/sharpness with a bit of local dodging/burning/healing then Krita doesn't seem to be set up for that sort of workflow.
virtualritz 2y ago
> Krita is a great replacement for photoshop. No it is not. Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1]. And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more. I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life. Krita is a great paint app. It's not a Photoshop alternative. Photoshop is a great image manipulation app. It's not a Krita alternative. Krita absolutely is a Painter alternative. Painter is no longer a Krita alternative, if you need certain features (that's a topic for an entire blog post). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter
- GeneralMaximus 2y ago
  Would it be accurate to say that Krita is a Procreate alternative?
  - virtualritz 2y ago
    I don't know Procreate well enough to answer this conclusively. But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper. Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq). I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative. But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience. That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps. But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes). As is the case with Procreate.
  - random42_ 2y ago
    Conceptually yes (and Krita might be more feature rich than Procreate), but Procreate is an iPad only app and Krita is not available on that platform, unfortunately.

Rinzler89 2y ago

Wow, is it just me or does that screenshot of 2005 Krita 1.4 UI[1] look absolutely amazing? All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect. Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example). [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1.4.2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....

scrlk 2y ago
Agreed. I suspect the shift in design occurred when the base assumption moved from "most users have never used a computer before" to "most users are familiar with computers". IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
- hallarempt 2y ago
  To be honest, I still reference my paper copy of the Windows 1995 Interface Guidelines from time to time, when people propose new features for Krita. They are not always useful, but at least they don't change all the time.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  And since the new generation of users is growing up with mobile touch devices, we're coming back full circle to "most users never used a computer before".
vvillena 2y ago
The different icon colors and shapes help a lot. It doesn't look uniform, and this is actually a big plus, as there's less thinking required to identify the target. The new interface looks nicer, but interfaces should focus on being usable, not just look good. Sometimes this means getting out of the way and being unobtrusive. Other times, it means standing out more. The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.

sebstefan 2y ago

Wow. I could've sworn Krita was only around 6 years old. I've only very recently started hearing about it.

resource_waste 2y ago
There seems to be a phenomena I observe in the FOSS community where we reflexively respond to suggestions despite them being far beneath their FOSS alternatives. Only after digging or running into issues, do you find the good stuff. Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora I almost feel like a religious Zealot when I teach people that Krita>>>GIMP, Fedora>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Debian-family. Its unpaid work, its moral work. People shouldn't have to suffer with low quality products because something was popular a few years ago.
- vachina 2y ago
  You have converted me.
- acomjean 2y ago
  There is a lot of overlap, but I’d hardly call GIMP low quality. I use Gimp for photos (layers and such) . It wasn’t intuitive but I know how to use it now: I have Krita on an android tablet with a stylus for painting (it’s brushes are amazing) and frankly it’s pretty fun to use. Using open source can be “free” but if you use something a lot they alway need donations.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    Compared to Krita's interface, abstractions, and capability, GIMP feels pretty archaic. It's a vaguely capable photo editor but it's awful for digital painting.
    - sham1 2y ago
      Well that might be because, well, GIMP is made for photo editing, not for digital painting. Of course, GIMP does have some drawing tools in it, but that's clearly not the task it was designed for.

deleted 2y ago

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influx 2y ago

Sounds like developing in QT is awful. They have had to do so much work porting it to new versions of QT.

hanikesn 2y ago
Imagine porting a web app to new frameworks over 25 years or keeping up with Macs ui Framework over that time frame ...
RobotToaster 2y ago
GUI development is awful in general tbh, outside of basic stuff anyway.
tux3 2y ago
That's just any big framework. Porting a large codebase between major releases of GTK (or Javascript frameworks) isn't much better.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  Depends on the framework. Qt5 was released in 2012. All of my LCL/Lazarus projects from that time open in modern straight-out-of-git Lazarus just fine. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of my LCL/Lazarus projects from 2005 (when Qt4 was released) also work out of the box, with the exception of those that tried to use strings as byte buffers (fixing this is a quick search and replace) since the datatype changed (this was a compiler/language change though, not a framework one). Retaining backwards compatibility is very important for LCL/Lazarus. That said Qt has been better than other frameworks when it comes to backwards compatibility, after all you can use the Qt5 docs for Qt6 code and vice versa and things work 95% of the time. Actually i was working on some Krita plugin recently and i only had the Qt6 docs around but i never encountered any issue with what i was using. AFAICT Krita's issue is mainly on the lower end of things and how they integrate with their custom OpenGL code.
  - hallarempt 2y ago
    Yeah. We need to do lots of low-level stuff, and things related to GPU have changed a lot from Qt to Qt.

shortformblog 2y ago

I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I've found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does. I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.

anonymousab 2y ago
Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could. It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF. Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.
- shortformblog 2y ago
  More recent versions of Photoshop have a frame-based editing setup that can be modified by hand, allowing use of filters and similar tools. This feature has essentially been ignored by every commercial alternative to Photoshop (Affinty, Pixelmator, etc.), which is why I don’t use them. I edit a lot of GIFs. Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
I bet the UI is nicer for Krita gif editing than the GIMP animation plugin. Time to spend time learning it for a few GIFs I’d like to make.
- shortformblog 2y ago
  My recommended strategy is to create a document to your preferred size and then go to File -> Import Animation Frames. You can import video or existing GIFs from there. The animation workspace is good for this, of course.

juliangmp 2y ago

I never knew that the project has been around for so long, let alone that its older than myself. But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...

jpetso 2y ago
Qt hasn't been terrible in terms of upgradeability between major versions for many use cases, but Krita got the short end of the stick. Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs. As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
- yosefk 2y ago
  By going full Vulkan, you mean do nothing at all in Qt, or do you mean a particular way to use Qt but not some parts of it?

j_san 2y ago

The text in the "Choose your membership" column at https://fund.krita.org/ https://fund.krita.org/ is broken for me, it's not visible.

binkHN 2y ago

I'm impressed by the quality of programs that are coming out of the KDE ecosystem. While KDE is known for its desktop environment, many of the applications that come out of this organization are simply awesome.

silisili 2y ago
This has always been the case to be honest, and I say this as a gnome fan and user. Kate better than Gedit. Konqueror better than Epiphany. Dolphin better than Nautilus. Amarok better than Rhythmbox, and so on. I wish I liked KDE proper better, because their apps are too notch.
zeroc8 2y ago
In my opinion, that is due to Qt being such a complete and well documented framework.

jmix 2y ago

What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.

hallarempt 2y ago
Oh, noes... A post that has this in the second paragraph: "I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show." ended up in something "jmix" thought was "self-indulgent".
ranger207 2y ago
> constantly changing the name of the project Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?
- ttepasse 2y ago
  KImageShop → Krayon → Krita, according to this article from 2009: https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-krayon-krita/ https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr... I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
asddubs 2y ago
it's an anniversary celebration post, not a "what is krita" post. It's meant for people already following the project. Krita is an application primarily aimed at digital artwork rather than editing images. So a strong emphasis on drawing and related tasks. For this, it is much easier to use than gimp. I won't necessarily say it's better, but every time I tried using gimp I gave up and I actually stuck with krita.

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jmclnx 2y ago

I am glad the KDE/QT applications are being developed. gimp is good, but my concern is the still rumored move/merge of the gtk into gnome lib. When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well. I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)

badsectoracula 2y ago

I was (and sometimes still am) using Paint Shop Pro 7 even on Linux (via Wine) until recently, but at some point i wanted to do some texture painting and found the whole process of "paint stuff, export to PNG, switch to Blender, reload texture, go back, etc" to be a bit of a PITA. I looked into making a plugin for PSP7 to show the image on a 3D model in a window but PSP7 only supported Photoshop plugins and making Photoshop plugins (for the circa 2000 version of Photoshop) seemed very convoluted as it was a quickly hacked together port of the process used on pre-MacOSX Macintosh. So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita's UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP's UI better but PSP7's the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i'm not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it. I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i'd like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials). I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like "paste into selection" to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7's UX much better overall. From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to "monitor" an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i've seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of "the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2" event would really speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document. I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i'd probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i'll probably try again though. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/kritaview3d/ [1] https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png https://i.imgur.com/X4k0qeU.png [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw [4] https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png https://i.imgur.com/I5RXHqy.png

pwitvoet 2y ago

One thing I particularly like about Krita is its wrap around mode. Very useful when making seamless textures! Another thing is that its file format contains a merged image, which can easily be extracted (.kra and .ora files are zip archives). I've used that to add native .kra/.ora support to a game texture conversion tool. .psd support took a lot more work in comparison.

haunter 2y ago

Started using Krita heavily since the local generative AI plugin is available (3rd party not official). Awesome and works perfectly.