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‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8

524 points by buovjaga 12y ago

frankzander 12y ago
Krita is not an Photoshop surrogat ... it's not even a surrogat for Gimp.
- buovjaga 12y ago
  It is for this specific group of people (The Art and Technology of Image department at University Paris 8).
- leinir 12y ago
  This is a very apt statement. It is not a surrogate for anything. Krita is its own thing. A tool designed very specifically for digital painting, and not trying to clone or replace anything. That it /can/ replace some things is a lucky coincidence.
- yoha 12y ago
  s/surrogat/surrogate → https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surrogate https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surrogate
zirkonit 12y ago
Whoa, today is the first time I've heard about Krita. Visually, seems very powerful, original, and a much more interesting PS replacement than Gimp is. Gotta download and try it out!
- shmerl 12y ago
  It's pretty well known to KDE users ;)
alphadevx 12y ago
Never used it before, on first glance it reminds me of Manga Studio (which I love). Anyone ever use both and can offer a comparison?
awjr 12y ago
The Krita website is running a tad slow https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/ https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/ however download is possible if you are patient. Looks like a very interesting tool for creating art/comics.
- GordonS 12y ago
  I suspect the current performance of the website might have something to do with Hacker News :)
  - raghukamath 12y ago
    the website is up again!! :)
- buovjaga 12y ago
  I went to #krita on IRC to alert about this and bcooksley just fixed the website performance problem!
ehurrell 12y ago
While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment "you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to double-check the results.
- carlob 12y ago
  That's what people said about Quark XPress, but failing to have a smooth transition to MacOSX doomed them. It didn't even have to be a very smooth one, since Adobe took forever to ship the ancestor of creative suite.
  - ehurrell 12y ago
    I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.
    - Doctor_Fegg 12y ago
      Adobe have done something - Creative Cloud and subscription-based purchasing - and it's given the indie Mac app market (Pixelmator etc.) a huge boost. More, I suspect there's a delayed effect where people are still holding on to their non-subscription copies of CS. I'm a heavy Illustrator user; I'm still on CS 5.5, but when the time comes to upgrade it won't be to Illustrator CC.
      - ehurrell 12y ago
        I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me some artist friends really like it.
        12y ago
aidos 12y ago
It looks nice, never seen it before but I'll try to find the time to have a play with it. Photoshop, like other well established tools, is nearly impossible to replace. There are whole industries born with it in their hands, and you'd have to pry it from their cold dead bodies. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with PS. It does so much more than I could ever imagine, with features I will never know about. For web development it's a bit suboptimal, but it's still the standard. It's not streamlined - we have pages with standard headers etc, I know there's some support for embedding PS files in other PS files but it's not the promoted way of working. It allows people create graphics that are unsuitable for the web / hard to unpick into layers that you can use (better css support has made things better but I spent over a decade trying to get suitable flat images out of PS files). These days, no longer working with designers in an agency, I just do everything straight to html/css so that it works without jumping through any hoops.
stefanix 12y ago
Discovered Krita a while a ago. The brush parameter system is excellent. You can really go nuts with all the settings. Defaults are good too.
DigitalSea 12y ago
Krita actually resembles Photoshop quite a lot, and while the feature list is impressive, I don't think it replaces Photoshop 1:1 or is even meant too for that matter. Krita is more aimed at digital painting, Photoshop isn't a digital painting application, if anything, that's what Illustrator is for. For a free application you have to give props to Krita, it looks fantastic and plenty of digital artists and illustrators have been raving on about how great it is since it came out. It definitely appeals to me more than Gimp, but I would still probably use Gimp over Krita for general photo touching and editing though. Even the about page on the Krita site itself speaks of illustrators and more drawing purposes. I mean if it works as a Photoshop replacement for some, then that's great. Undoubtedly a cool application.
- montag 12y ago
  Illustrator is not for digital painting. Did you mean Corel Painter?
- ehurrell 12y ago
  Photoshop definitely wasn't intended for the wide variety of use-cases it now supports, but it is definitely the front-runner for digital painting, 95% of concept artists/comic colourists or similar artists I know or have seen use Photoshop. Krita looks fantastic, really capable, but I haven't had a chance to try it, mainly because all of my brushes and settings are in Photoshop.
  - muyuu 12y ago
    Most designers I know will draw on illustrator and maybe finish up in Photoshop. Since Photoshop is a sort of common baseline in the industry it's used as a general tool to aid in the finishing of artwork even when said artwork is not really in its domain.
    - ehurrell 12y ago
      Illustrator seems widely used in brand and web design alright, but for example concept artists and comic artists I know never leave Photoshop, start to finish.
onion2k 12y ago
Krita's site is under a lot of pressure right now. If you've never heard of it, learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita It's a Photoshop alternative in the same way Word is an alternative to vim. You can use them both to make a text file, but they have very different specialisms. Krita is a very capable drawing package while Photoshop is a print finishing app that got really bloated.
- eru 12y ago
  What do you mean by pressure?
  - onion2k 12y ago
    A lot of people are trying to look at it just to find out what Krita is, which is putting a high additional load on their server. Hence the link to Wikipedia instead. (Maybe it's because I'm English, but I really thought 'pressure' would be quite obvious in this context.)
    - eru 12y ago
      Oh, I thought of some kind of social pressure.
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      "The Krita Web site is seeing very high traffic at the moment" might be better for a multi-lingual audience. Glad to see free/open source software getting some exposure. My College makes GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LibreOffice available on its Windows desktops alongside commercial alternatives. Students get used to both.
raverbashing 12y ago
"but because of inadequate support from the company the department decided to replace that." I read that as "Adobe got greedy" Well, good for Krita. Part of PS/AI success is that students use it at Uni (and later on at work, and most of the workflow, even going to printing uses it)
- ygra 12y ago
  Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice, but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another colour space and colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible, too. Except for Illustrator.¹ The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free (both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™. TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas. _____ ¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.
  - patrickg 12y ago
    Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk + spotcolors etc. (https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html)
    - 12y ago
huuu 12y ago
If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can understand the switch. But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. I think that's because a lot of developers think Photoshop is layers and blend modes. But imho the real strength of Photoshop is the interface. Not only the GUI but also the interaction design. I can do with Gimp what I can do with Photoshop but it will take a lot more time. In-place text editing, attaching effects to layers (drop shadows), non destructive editing, it's all missing from most Photoshop alternatives. Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): https://natron.inria.fr/ https://natron.inria.fr/ I never heard of it but it's looking great!
- antome 12y ago
  If you count inkscape as a "photoshop replacement", it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does, as well as more, and better. Kinda wish someone just merged the concepts of Paint.NET and Inkscape.
  - roel_v 12y ago
    Do you understand the differences between 'raster' and 'vector' images?
    - girvo 12y ago
      Photoshop and Fireworks didn't. That was their strength. By that I mean they handled both, reasonably well.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      Do you know Inkscape? Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools, you can do masking and such. The GP mentions "in-place text editing" for which PS presumably uses vector methods. I use Inkscape pre- and/or post- GIMP for things like text layers. I've long thought that a great graphics package could be achieved if Inkscape and The GIMP (or other primarily raster programmes) could draw to [different layers of] the same canvas. Inkscape lets you link in images which is a small step towards this.
lxc 12y ago
Aye.. It's down :(
Morgawr 12y ago
If you are interested about Krita, may I also recommend checking out MyPaint? The two programs are similar but very different also, I routinely use them both. What I like about Krita is that it's very powerful, its interface has a lot of stuff going on (not a bad thing, it's very easy to understand and use) and it's definitely the better digital painting application out of the two. What I think works better in MyPaint is sketching and quick notes/drawing. It has the concept of infinite canvas where you can keep drawing and drawing and drawing. I also prefer its preset brushes over Krita's, but that's just personal preference. My normal workflow is, if I want to draw some painting with definite proportions and size and everything, I use Krita. If I just want to sketch something or jot down some notes, I use MyPaint. My last infinite canvas with MyPaint ended up being over 200MB of png with a very ridiculous resolution because I kept writing and writing and zooming and zooming all my notes and I didn't notice how big it actually became (I use it as a big whiteboard for sketching my projects).
- davidgerard 12y ago
  +1 - the loved one does a lot of digital painting and generally uses MyPaint. Though Krita is pretty good too, and has specialised from being KDE's "me too!" for GIMP to being specifically tweaked for artists.
- bufordsharkley 12y ago
  I never used Krita before today-- trying it out, it made me realize how much I love MyPaint. (NOTE: I'm mostly a pen-and-ink illustrator who's very much a novice in the digital realm) MyPaint, though, makes it really easy to toy around with one hand on the keyboard with nice one-stroke shortcuts. I'm totally able to make a drawing with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the tablet. The minimalist interface for MyPaint is really terrific. I can't recommend it enough...
bsaul 12y ago
Offtopic : I recently visited paris 8 university, and eventhough i'm used to the insanely sad state of french universities, this one won by a large margin. This university is the closest thing you can imagine from a war zone leftover. I was attending a presentation of an intern, and i had to ask people if the building i was in really was still in use... You probably have to read "inadequate support by adobe" as " we didn't have the money for the licence anymore, and adobe didn't want to give the software for free".
- oblio 12y ago
  It doesn't look so sad to me: http://www.univ-paris8.fr/en/?The-University http://www.univ-paris8.fr/en/?The-University
  - bsaul 12y ago
    It's france. We invented perfume :) Just like third world countries always keep one or two monuments extra clean and luxurious as a flagship, all universities have one or two brand new building, hosting very few students, to keep a good image. If you want real world images, have a look at this blog ( which shows all universities, but you can find some of paris 8 among them) : http://universiteenruines.tumblr.com/ http://universiteenruines.tumblr.com/ And those pictures really don't show the worst things i've seen.
    - novalis78 12y ago
      Looks like German universities I have seen. Of course that short article had to contain at least one sentence bad mouthing private institutions :-)
      - bsaul 12y ago
        Did you have a look at the older posts ? I found some really bad ones of paris 8, which doesn?t surprise me. I would be shocked to hear that germans accept this level of dirt.
Coding_Cat 12y ago
I absolutely adore Krita, it really is one of my favourite programs. It's very intuitive in its controls and very good at "getting out of the way" when you're painting. For example, it has a quick-selection wheel that pops up when you press right mouse button. It's a radial design with the outer layer being your favourite brushes, then your last used colours and in the middle it has a colour-selection triangle. This means that if you're drawing in full-screen mode (hiding all the controls) you hardly ever have to switch back to the menus to tweak stuff (changing brush size is also done by holding shift and dragging), only to switch layers really. (that is my work-flow at least) And, if anyone is looking for an OSS project to contribute too: Development is very active and open, it's written in C++ Qt/KDE. :)
otikik 12y ago
Just to let you know, I confirm that Krita is very unstable in a Mac. The "fatal failure and you lost everything you did" kind of unstable. So far I can not recommend Krita+Mac for anything other than tinkering around.
- boudewijnrempt 12y ago
  Definitely! Don't use Krita on OSX for real work. It's labeled as _experimental_ for a reason! And that's the guy who did the port talking. Also, there are lots of features missing still. It's there to show that it can be done, but the Mac port of Krita needs funding -- about 30k euros, at least, to make it work well.
unhammer 12y ago
Getting a presentation from http://davidrevoy.com/ http://davidrevoy.com/ sounds like a motivating way to start using the program :-)
- boudewijnrempt 12y ago
  There's a really nice video course for Krita: https://krita.org/item/muses/ https://krita.org/item/muses/
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
I suspect the cost had more to do with the switch than the product itself but it's a bit mystifying to me while a school focused on art and image editing wouldn't teach Photoshop to their students since there's a 100% chance they will have to work with it on their job.
muraiki 12y ago
I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise of being able to offer updates more often, along with providing some small features like storage of files in their cloud. Basically, they wanted to charge yearly since users would generally skip a version or two before seeing enough of a motivating feature improvement. (Prior to this Adobe tried x.5 upgrades) The cost of licenses varies depending upon an institution's bargaining ability. For the "benefit" of getting SaaS we could either pay an extraordinary amount over our previous license in order to get the same number of licenses, or we could get a site license for only a fairly large amount more than our previous license. Mind you that we had little warning about this change, and academic budgets tend not to follow the typical business cycle. Now the benefit of the site license is that all your users can become dependent upon Adobe, so when they raise the cost in the future you'll be more than obligated to agree. Upon hearing about this changes, which brought _no real benefit to users_, one local school actually had Adobe's salesperson ejected from campus. :) In terms of support, CC had a special enterprise edition with its own installer that generated CC packages for deployment. It was not the smoothest deployment for many institutions, it was difficult to maintain, and when I ran into a problem with licensing it took running into a higher level Adobe rep at a conference before I could make progress (our own rep eventually stopped helping). Also, there was some software included in Enterprise CC -- software that could actually benefit from "the cloud" in creating websites -- that would not work out in a mult-user environment unless you wanted your users to erase each other's Adobe cloud hosted websites. Yes, this behavior was documented, but being that it was one of the few useful "cloud" features CC offered, it was pretty disappointing for it to be unusable with our site license. Entrepreneurs, listen. I know education is a tough nut to crack. But I'm sure it's not just education that is fed up with Adobe. Remember that Quark was once one of the big guys, but their licensing and support was so bad that InDesign took over. Yes, I had teachers complaining about Quark's licensing -- not the cost, but the horrible, broken license server. These kinds of things can destroy your business. PS: You would not believe how many users ask for Adobe Acrobat just to save Word files as PDFs. Office has (or at least had) a built-in plugin to do this, and OS X supports exporting to PDFs natively via print.
ThinkBeat 12y ago
Krita doesnt have proper support or Macs yet.
evo_9 12y ago
Obligatory Pixelmater mention.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
What a load of bullshit. Photoshop for students is $10 a month. That's $120 a year. Most students at most schools are throwing away probably $1000/year on textbooks (in the US). Krita doesn't even work on OS X for crying out loud. This is not good for the students. Not good at all.
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
I've been really surprised recently by Paint.Net. It actually does a lot of the "basic" photoshop stuff really well. It may be difficult to create graphical masterpiece type stuff but for the basics it's great. Would be nice to see something like that cross platform with a decent UI. Gimp is cool and I've spent countless hours with it but the interface is simply clunky. Will definitely check this out.
jjcm 12y ago
Krita is great for what it is, but saying 'Goodbye Photoshop, hello Krita' is akin to saying 'Goodbye tractor, hello vespa'. If all you're doing is trying to get from A to B, a vespa certainly may be a better option, but don't think that a vespa can do what a tractor can do. Even GIMP is far behind what Photoshop can provide. Want a really good look at what the differences are between the two? Look at GIMP's development roadmap: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap It's usually a pretty quick view of the delta between the two programs. Krita is missing most if not all of these too. Some of the big features Krita and Gimp are missing: 1.) Non-destructive editing capabilities. Krita and GIMP have masks, which is a start, but neither support smart objects (dynamically sized/edited objects that don't destroy/replace pixel data on resize) or adjustment layers. This is huge. Unless you're a painter, no one in the industry uses destructive editing techniques. 2.) High bit depth. This is another big one. Since most of the crowd on HN are more familiar with code than design, I'll put it in code terms: pretend that you had to do precision work, but a Math.floor() function was called every time you did any arithmetic. When you're doing light adjustments/corrections, blending, color correction, and such, the work can introduce heavy banding when you're working in 8bits per channel. By switching to 16bits per channel you provide way more fidelity on the individual pixel level, eliminating a lot of banding in your final product. Even if you have a monitor that can only display 8bit color, working in 16 can change your end result drastically. There are some minor features too that bug me. The inability to add a mask to layer groups is a big one for me. Layer effects (while often overused and gaudy) can be really helpful for design work - need to change the color of an icon that's raster art? Just drop a color overlay on it. If you have style swatches, it can be really easy to do fast mockups using this. This in conjunction with Layer Comps (also something missing in Gimp right now) can really help in switching between two or more alts. These programs are a long way off from being Photoshop. Whenever I see a story like this where Photoshop is replaced by GIMP/Krita, what I see isn't that these things have the capability to replace Photoshop, but rather that the people who replaced it were only using a tiny subset of Photoshop's capabilities, and found something more suited to their usecase.
- boudewijnrempt 12y ago
  Well, I guess you haven't checked out Krita since 2003. Krita got adjustment layers (which are basically masks with a filter that applies right there in the layer stack) in 2004 (2005, it's a long time, and I can't be arsed to check on the exact date). 16 bit integer, 16 bit float and 32 bit float followed in the same year. OpenEXR has been supported for about a decade. OpenColorIO was added two years ago, so there's the LUT functionality needed for movie and vfx people. And have you actually tried Krita? I mean, group layers were a 2004 or 2005 addition as well, and you can add transparency masks, local selection masks, filter masks or transformation masks to groups just like you can add them to vector, pixel, clone, filter, fill (color, pattern, other generators) or file (external file added in your layer stack) layers. Smart objects? There are vector layers, where you can add any svg image or editable vector object. Layer effects? Well, that's something we're working on. It isn't too difficult, but a lot of work just typing in all that code. Previously, we assumed that people could make do with filter masks and layers, but well, this is one thing where we'll do a clone job, I guess. Color overlays? Gosh, take a fill layer with a color and the right blending mode. Or do something else -- a HSV colorize filter mask, for instance.
iamcreasy 12y ago
Anyone knows if we can access the 4 hour long David Revoy presentation? It would have been awesome!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
amelius 12y ago
I'm looking for a system that can do calligraphic pens along paths. (I use this for cartoons). I know Adobe Illustrator can do this. But Inkscape can't. (Yes, it has a calligraphic pen, but it is too direct, i.e., it doesn't allow the paths to be changed using the anchorpoints; it also doesn't allow the calligraphic strokes to be converted to paths).
michaelbuddy 12y ago
Krita has a few unique features. I love the tiling mode to help you draw seamless textures. I love all the brushes out of the box. I do not love the performance on Windows. Maybe Linux is better but both 2.8 and the new beta if you start drawing with big brushes on a big canvas, even with a late model computer setup, it bogs really bad. Now you could argue that a 4K image is gonna take performance. BUT it's the first preset document with like 3-4 brushstrokes and it's starting to lag bad. I would consider my experience with the windows version Alpha at best due to performance issues. If you like graphics and want to do something to save money on a lot of licenses - look at replacing illustrator with Xara on Windows or Affinity Designer on Mac. Or try to roll back to an earlier Photoshop like CS2. I really really want to love Krita and I'll give it a shot on Linux when I get the chance but sheesh, any classroom wanting to adopt it en masse is definitely trading one evil for another. I have no desire to buy photoshop cc at this moment in time, I like to purchase licenses. I'll stick with CS6 as absolutely long as possible. But educational pricing on Adobe software has always been pretty good. Time spent in school is impermanent so it fits pretty well with the CC model.

524 points by buovjaga 12y ago

frankzander 12y ago

Krita is not an Photoshop surrogat ... it's not even a surrogat for Gimp.

buovjaga 12y ago
It is for this specific group of people (The Art and Technology of Image department at University Paris 8).
leinir 12y ago
This is a very apt statement. It is not a surrogate for anything. Krita is its own thing. A tool designed very specifically for digital painting, and not trying to clone or replace anything. That it /can/ replace some things is a lucky coincidence.
yoha 12y ago
s/surrogat/surrogate → https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surrogate https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surrogate

zirkonit 12y ago

Whoa, today is the first time I've heard about Krita. Visually, seems very powerful, original, and a much more interesting PS replacement than Gimp is. Gotta download and try it out!

shmerl 12y ago
It's pretty well known to KDE users ;)

alphadevx 12y ago

Never used it before, on first glance it reminds me of Manga Studio (which I love). Anyone ever use both and can offer a comparison?

awjr 12y ago

The Krita website is running a tad slow https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/ https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/ however download is possible if you are patient. Looks like a very interesting tool for creating art/comics.

GordonS 12y ago
I suspect the current performance of the website might have something to do with Hacker News :)
- raghukamath 12y ago
  the website is up again!! :)
buovjaga 12y ago
I went to #krita on IRC to alert about this and bcooksley just fixed the website performance problem!

ehurrell 12y ago

While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment "you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to double-check the results.

carlob 12y ago
That's what people said about Quark XPress, but failing to have a smooth transition to MacOSX doomed them. It didn't even have to be a very smooth one, since Adobe took forever to ship the ancestor of creative suite.
- ehurrell 12y ago
  I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.
  - Doctor_Fegg 12y ago
    Adobe have done something - Creative Cloud and subscription-based purchasing - and it's given the indie Mac app market (Pixelmator etc.) a huge boost. More, I suspect there's a delayed effect where people are still holding on to their non-subscription copies of CS. I'm a heavy Illustrator user; I'm still on CS 5.5, but when the time comes to upgrade it won't be to Illustrator CC.
    - ehurrell 12y ago
      I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me some artist friends really like it.
      - 12y ago

aidos 12y ago

It looks nice, never seen it before but I'll try to find the time to have a play with it. Photoshop, like other well established tools, is nearly impossible to replace. There are whole industries born with it in their hands, and you'd have to pry it from their cold dead bodies. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with PS. It does so much more than I could ever imagine, with features I will never know about. For web development it's a bit suboptimal, but it's still the standard. It's not streamlined - we have pages with standard headers etc, I know there's some support for embedding PS files in other PS files but it's not the promoted way of working. It allows people create graphics that are unsuitable for the web / hard to unpick into layers that you can use (better css support has made things better but I spent over a decade trying to get suitable flat images out of PS files). These days, no longer working with designers in an agency, I just do everything straight to html/css so that it works without jumping through any hoops.

stefanix 12y ago

Discovered Krita a while a ago. The brush parameter system is excellent. You can really go nuts with all the settings. Defaults are good too.

DigitalSea 12y ago

Krita actually resembles Photoshop quite a lot, and while the feature list is impressive, I don't think it replaces Photoshop 1:1 or is even meant too for that matter. Krita is more aimed at digital painting, Photoshop isn't a digital painting application, if anything, that's what Illustrator is for. For a free application you have to give props to Krita, it looks fantastic and plenty of digital artists and illustrators have been raving on about how great it is since it came out. It definitely appeals to me more than Gimp, but I would still probably use Gimp over Krita for general photo touching and editing though. Even the about page on the Krita site itself speaks of illustrators and more drawing purposes. I mean if it works as a Photoshop replacement for some, then that's great. Undoubtedly a cool application.

montag 12y ago
Illustrator is not for digital painting. Did you mean Corel Painter?
ehurrell 12y ago
Photoshop definitely wasn't intended for the wide variety of use-cases it now supports, but it is definitely the front-runner for digital painting, 95% of concept artists/comic colourists or similar artists I know or have seen use Photoshop. Krita looks fantastic, really capable, but I haven't had a chance to try it, mainly because all of my brushes and settings are in Photoshop.
- muyuu 12y ago
  Most designers I know will draw on illustrator and maybe finish up in Photoshop. Since Photoshop is a sort of common baseline in the industry it's used as a general tool to aid in the finishing of artwork even when said artwork is not really in its domain.
  - ehurrell 12y ago
    Illustrator seems widely used in brand and web design alright, but for example concept artists and comic artists I know never leave Photoshop, start to finish.

onion2k 12y ago

Krita's site is under a lot of pressure right now. If you've never heard of it, learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita It's a Photoshop alternative in the same way Word is an alternative to vim. You can use them both to make a text file, but they have very different specialisms. Krita is a very capable drawing package while Photoshop is a print finishing app that got really bloated.

eru 12y ago
What do you mean by pressure?
- onion2k 12y ago
  A lot of people are trying to look at it just to find out what Krita is, which is putting a high additional load on their server. Hence the link to Wikipedia instead. (Maybe it's because I'm English, but I really thought 'pressure' would be quite obvious in this context.)
  - eru 12y ago
    Oh, I thought of some kind of social pressure.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    "The Krita Web site is seeing very high traffic at the moment" might be better for a multi-lingual audience. Glad to see free/open source software getting some exposure. My College makes GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LibreOffice available on its Windows desktops alongside commercial alternatives. Students get used to both.

raverbashing 12y ago

"but because of inadequate support from the company the department decided to replace that." I read that as "Adobe got greedy" Well, good for Krita. Part of PS/AI success is that students use it at Uni (and later on at work, and most of the workflow, even going to printing uses it)

ygra 12y ago
Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice, but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another colour space and colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible, too. Except for Illustrator.¹ The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free (both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™. TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas. _____ ¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.
- patrickg 12y ago
  Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk + spotcolors etc. (https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html)
  - 12y ago

huuu 12y ago

If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can understand the switch. But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. I think that's because a lot of developers think Photoshop is layers and blend modes. But imho the real strength of Photoshop is the interface. Not only the GUI but also the interaction design. I can do with Gimp what I can do with Photoshop but it will take a lot more time. In-place text editing, attaching effects to layers (drop shadows), non destructive editing, it's all missing from most Photoshop alternatives. Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): https://natron.inria.fr/ https://natron.inria.fr/ I never heard of it but it's looking great!

antome 12y ago
If you count inkscape as a "photoshop replacement", it does many of the things photoshop/illustrator does, as well as more, and better. Kinda wish someone just merged the concepts of Paint.NET and Inkscape.
- roel_v 12y ago
  Do you understand the differences between 'raster' and 'vector' images?
  - girvo 12y ago
    Photoshop and Fireworks didn't. That was their strength. By that I mean they handled both, reasonably well.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Do you know Inkscape? Inkscape has free-hand and raster tools, you can do masking and such. The GP mentions "in-place text editing" for which PS presumably uses vector methods. I use Inkscape pre- and/or post- GIMP for things like text layers. I've long thought that a great graphics package could be achieved if Inkscape and The GIMP (or other primarily raster programmes) could draw to [different layers of] the same canvas. Inkscape lets you link in images which is a small step towards this.

lxc 12y ago

Aye.. It's down :(

Morgawr 12y ago

If you are interested about Krita, may I also recommend checking out MyPaint? The two programs are similar but very different also, I routinely use them both. What I like about Krita is that it's very powerful, its interface has a lot of stuff going on (not a bad thing, it's very easy to understand and use) and it's definitely the better digital painting application out of the two. What I think works better in MyPaint is sketching and quick notes/drawing. It has the concept of infinite canvas where you can keep drawing and drawing and drawing. I also prefer its preset brushes over Krita's, but that's just personal preference. My normal workflow is, if I want to draw some painting with definite proportions and size and everything, I use Krita. If I just want to sketch something or jot down some notes, I use MyPaint. My last infinite canvas with MyPaint ended up being over 200MB of png with a very ridiculous resolution because I kept writing and writing and zooming and zooming all my notes and I didn't notice how big it actually became (I use it as a big whiteboard for sketching my projects).

davidgerard 12y ago
+1 - the loved one does a lot of digital painting and generally uses MyPaint. Though Krita is pretty good too, and has specialised from being KDE's "me too!" for GIMP to being specifically tweaked for artists.
bufordsharkley 12y ago
I never used Krita before today-- trying it out, it made me realize how much I love MyPaint. (NOTE: I'm mostly a pen-and-ink illustrator who's very much a novice in the digital realm) MyPaint, though, makes it really easy to toy around with one hand on the keyboard with nice one-stroke shortcuts. I'm totally able to make a drawing with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the tablet. The minimalist interface for MyPaint is really terrific. I can't recommend it enough...

bsaul 12y ago

Offtopic : I recently visited paris 8 university, and eventhough i'm used to the insanely sad state of french universities, this one won by a large margin. This university is the closest thing you can imagine from a war zone leftover. I was attending a presentation of an intern, and i had to ask people if the building i was in really was still in use... You probably have to read "inadequate support by adobe" as " we didn't have the money for the licence anymore, and adobe didn't want to give the software for free".

oblio 12y ago
It doesn't look so sad to me: http://www.univ-paris8.fr/en/?The-University http://www.univ-paris8.fr/en/?The-University
- bsaul 12y ago
  It's france. We invented perfume :) Just like third world countries always keep one or two monuments extra clean and luxurious as a flagship, all universities have one or two brand new building, hosting very few students, to keep a good image. If you want real world images, have a look at this blog ( which shows all universities, but you can find some of paris 8 among them) : http://universiteenruines.tumblr.com/ http://universiteenruines.tumblr.com/ And those pictures really don't show the worst things i've seen.
  - novalis78 12y ago
    Looks like German universities I have seen. Of course that short article had to contain at least one sentence bad mouthing private institutions :-)
    - bsaul 12y ago
      Did you have a look at the older posts ? I found some really bad ones of paris 8, which doesn?t surprise me. I would be shocked to hear that germans accept this level of dirt.

Coding_Cat 12y ago

I absolutely adore Krita, it really is one of my favourite programs. It's very intuitive in its controls and very good at "getting out of the way" when you're painting. For example, it has a quick-selection wheel that pops up when you press right mouse button. It's a radial design with the outer layer being your favourite brushes, then your last used colours and in the middle it has a colour-selection triangle. This means that if you're drawing in full-screen mode (hiding all the controls) you hardly ever have to switch back to the menus to tweak stuff (changing brush size is also done by holding shift and dragging), only to switch layers really. (that is my work-flow at least) And, if anyone is looking for an OSS project to contribute too: Development is very active and open, it's written in C++ Qt/KDE. :)

otikik 12y ago

Just to let you know, I confirm that Krita is very unstable in a Mac. The "fatal failure and you lost everything you did" kind of unstable. So far I can not recommend Krita+Mac for anything other than tinkering around.

boudewijnrempt 12y ago
Definitely! Don't use Krita on OSX for real work. It's labeled as _experimental_ for a reason! And that's the guy who did the port talking. Also, there are lots of features missing still. It's there to show that it can be done, but the Mac port of Krita needs funding -- about 30k euros, at least, to make it work well.

unhammer 12y ago

Getting a presentation from http://davidrevoy.com/ http://davidrevoy.com/ sounds like a motivating way to start using the program :-)

boudewijnrempt 12y ago
There's a really nice video course for Krita: https://krita.org/item/muses/ https://krita.org/item/muses/

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

I suspect the cost had more to do with the switch than the product itself but it's a bit mystifying to me while a school focused on art and image editing wouldn't teach Photoshop to their students since there's a 100% chance they will have to work with it on their job.

muraiki 12y ago

I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise of being able to offer updates more often, along with providing some small features like storage of files in their cloud. Basically, they wanted to charge yearly since users would generally skip a version or two before seeing enough of a motivating feature improvement. (Prior to this Adobe tried x.5 upgrades) The cost of licenses varies depending upon an institution's bargaining ability. For the "benefit" of getting SaaS we could either pay an extraordinary amount over our previous license in order to get the same number of licenses, or we could get a site license for only a fairly large amount more than our previous license. Mind you that we had little warning about this change, and academic budgets tend not to follow the typical business cycle. Now the benefit of the site license is that all your users can become dependent upon Adobe, so when they raise the cost in the future you'll be more than obligated to agree. Upon hearing about this changes, which brought _no real benefit to users_, one local school actually had Adobe's salesperson ejected from campus. :) In terms of support, CC had a special enterprise edition with its own installer that generated CC packages for deployment. It was not the smoothest deployment for many institutions, it was difficult to maintain, and when I ran into a problem with licensing it took running into a higher level Adobe rep at a conference before I could make progress (our own rep eventually stopped helping). Also, there was some software included in Enterprise CC -- software that could actually benefit from "the cloud" in creating websites -- that would not work out in a mult-user environment unless you wanted your users to erase each other's Adobe cloud hosted websites. Yes, this behavior was documented, but being that it was one of the few useful "cloud" features CC offered, it was pretty disappointing for it to be unusable with our site license. Entrepreneurs, listen. I know education is a tough nut to crack. But I'm sure it's not just education that is fed up with Adobe. Remember that Quark was once one of the big guys, but their licensing and support was so bad that InDesign took over. Yes, I had teachers complaining about Quark's licensing -- not the cost, but the horrible, broken license server. These kinds of things can destroy your business. PS: You would not believe how many users ask for Adobe Acrobat just to save Word files as PDFs. Office has (or at least had) a built-in plugin to do this, and OS X supports exporting to PDFs natively via print.

ThinkBeat 12y ago

Krita doesnt have proper support or Macs yet.

evo_9 12y ago

Obligatory Pixelmater mention.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

What a load of bullshit. Photoshop for students is $10 a month. That's $120 a year. Most students at most schools are throwing away probably $1000/year on textbooks (in the US). Krita doesn't even work on OS X for crying out loud. This is not good for the students. Not good at all.

JeremyMorgan 12y ago

I've been really surprised recently by Paint.Net. It actually does a lot of the "basic" photoshop stuff really well. It may be difficult to create graphical masterpiece type stuff but for the basics it's great. Would be nice to see something like that cross platform with a decent UI. Gimp is cool and I've spent countless hours with it but the interface is simply clunky. Will definitely check this out.

jjcm 12y ago

Krita is great for what it is, but saying 'Goodbye Photoshop, hello Krita' is akin to saying 'Goodbye tractor, hello vespa'. If all you're doing is trying to get from A to B, a vespa certainly may be a better option, but don't think that a vespa can do what a tractor can do. Even GIMP is far behind what Photoshop can provide. Want a really good look at what the differences are between the two? Look at GIMP's development roadmap: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap It's usually a pretty quick view of the delta between the two programs. Krita is missing most if not all of these too. Some of the big features Krita and Gimp are missing: 1.) Non-destructive editing capabilities. Krita and GIMP have masks, which is a start, but neither support smart objects (dynamically sized/edited objects that don't destroy/replace pixel data on resize) or adjustment layers. This is huge. Unless you're a painter, no one in the industry uses destructive editing techniques. 2.) High bit depth. This is another big one. Since most of the crowd on HN are more familiar with code than design, I'll put it in code terms: pretend that you had to do precision work, but a Math.floor() function was called every time you did any arithmetic. When you're doing light adjustments/corrections, blending, color correction, and such, the work can introduce heavy banding when you're working in 8bits per channel. By switching to 16bits per channel you provide way more fidelity on the individual pixel level, eliminating a lot of banding in your final product. Even if you have a monitor that can only display 8bit color, working in 16 can change your end result drastically. There are some minor features too that bug me. The inability to add a mask to layer groups is a big one for me. Layer effects (while often overused and gaudy) can be really helpful for design work - need to change the color of an icon that's raster art? Just drop a color overlay on it. If you have style swatches, it can be really easy to do fast mockups using this. This in conjunction with Layer Comps (also something missing in Gimp right now) can really help in switching between two or more alts. These programs are a long way off from being Photoshop. Whenever I see a story like this where Photoshop is replaced by GIMP/Krita, what I see isn't that these things have the capability to replace Photoshop, but rather that the people who replaced it were only using a tiny subset of Photoshop's capabilities, and found something more suited to their usecase.

boudewijnrempt 12y ago
Well, I guess you haven't checked out Krita since 2003. Krita got adjustment layers (which are basically masks with a filter that applies right there in the layer stack) in 2004 (2005, it's a long time, and I can't be arsed to check on the exact date). 16 bit integer, 16 bit float and 32 bit float followed in the same year. OpenEXR has been supported for about a decade. OpenColorIO was added two years ago, so there's the LUT functionality needed for movie and vfx people. And have you actually tried Krita? I mean, group layers were a 2004 or 2005 addition as well, and you can add transparency masks, local selection masks, filter masks or transformation masks to groups just like you can add them to vector, pixel, clone, filter, fill (color, pattern, other generators) or file (external file added in your layer stack) layers. Smart objects? There are vector layers, where you can add any svg image or editable vector object. Layer effects? Well, that's something we're working on. It isn't too difficult, but a lot of work just typing in all that code. Previously, we assumed that people could make do with filter masks and layers, but well, this is one thing where we'll do a clone job, I guess. Color overlays? Gosh, take a fill layer with a color and the right blending mode. Or do something else -- a HSV colorize filter mask, for instance.

iamcreasy 12y ago

Anyone knows if we can access the 4 hour long David Revoy presentation? It would have been awesome!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

amelius 12y ago

I'm looking for a system that can do calligraphic pens along paths. (I use this for cartoons). I know Adobe Illustrator can do this. But Inkscape can't. (Yes, it has a calligraphic pen, but it is too direct, i.e., it doesn't allow the paths to be changed using the anchorpoints; it also doesn't allow the calligraphic strokes to be converted to paths).

michaelbuddy 12y ago

Krita has a few unique features. I love the tiling mode to help you draw seamless textures. I love all the brushes out of the box. I do not love the performance on Windows. Maybe Linux is better but both 2.8 and the new beta if you start drawing with big brushes on a big canvas, even with a late model computer setup, it bogs really bad. Now you could argue that a 4K image is gonna take performance. BUT it's the first preset document with like 3-4 brushstrokes and it's starting to lag bad. I would consider my experience with the windows version Alpha at best due to performance issues. If you like graphics and want to do something to save money on a lot of licenses - look at replacing illustrator with Xara on Windows or Affinity Designer on Mac. Or try to roll back to an earlier Photoshop like CS2. I really really want to love Krita and I'll give it a shot on Linux when I get the chance but sheesh, any classroom wanting to adopt it en masse is definitely trading one evil for another. I have no desire to buy photoshop cc at this moment in time, I like to purchase licenses. I'll stick with CS6 as absolutely long as possible. But educational pricing on Adobe software has always been pretty good. Time spent in school is impermanent so it fits pretty well with the CC model.