Krita 1.6: State of the art (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Krita 1.6: State of the art (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 31, 2006 23:17 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Krita has a ways to go still. That's not to say that it's not nice. It's very nice.

But I've played around with 1.5 krita and it's slow and tablet support is still behind what I can get for Gimp. It doesn't have the same amount of features and etc etc.

Realise, of course, that it's not designed to do what people use Gimp and Photoshop for. It's a painting program, not a image editing program.

The difference is that it's for image creation.. and I REALY REALY REALY REALY hope that they concentrate on being a painting program rather then trying to compete with Photoshop. It would be a huge mistake, IMO.

I remember back in the day when I took classes for this I used two programs most of the time.. Fractal Painter and Photoshop for dealing with raster images. Both had their uses.. I would never dream of using Photoshop for image creation, it just sucked for painting and doing stuff that I wanted to do. Painter was king.

And visa versa. I'd never ever want to edit a image with Painter. It would of been a mess, except for specific cases were I needed to recreate portions of images then it's pretty cool.

Now Painter is gone.. been eaten by a couple other bigger companies and have been killed off. With photoshop nowadays they've added more painter features, but it's still not anywere nice to use.

It's just like that bug report in Gimp. 'difficult to draw a circle'.

Well in Krita it should be EASY to draw a circle. That's what it's made for.. It's great for that! And it should be. They have brush strokes, water effects. You should be able to affect the 'wetness' of a pigment and mix colors on the canvas just like a real paint brush.

For that I want a _paint_ program. Not photoshop. Not gimp. I hope that Krita avoids the temptation to try to 'be the gimp that everybody wanted gimp to be unless they were gimp users already'

As for next generation graphics you want to look at this:
http://pippin.gimp.org/gegl/
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gegl/

After several years of stagnation it's on fire now.

If you want to get into the next generation of programmable graphic editing and manipulation for Linux this is were it's at. It'll integrate into the Gimp replacing it's current core.. but there is no reason it can't be used for a dozen other types of programs.

Very very very cool stuff. It's now to the point were they are starting to release demo programs using it.

If this works out it will literally blow the limitations on the current Gimp system. Want 16bit per channel.. screw that I'll give you 32bit per channel if you realy want to flaunt those filters. Hell maybe even floating point percision for virtually lossless image editing.

Non-destructive editing. CYMK support up the wazzo. Chains of undos and be able to undo steps with out having to go back and redo everything else. Just remove the 'link' Transformation layers.

Also sorts of crazy stuff. Everything that Photoshop can do and more.

Krita 1.6: State of the art (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 1, 2006 7:13 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I think the improvements in tablet handling in 1.6 will please you :-).
And there are improvements in speed, too, though not enough. And we'll
never take away the ellipse tool, I promise.

What makes gegl interesting (to us, too, we regularly discuss design
things with Oyvind Kolas) is the way a gegl based application allows
non-destructive image editing, not the colorspaces and channel depths,
floating point channels and so on because, well, we've got that already
in Krita.

By the way, Fractal Painter lives on as Corel Painter (in the sense that
it seems to be the same code base), and we do look at its features from
time to time. But for real painterly work, you should look at Bill
Baxter's thesis. (http://www.billbaxter.com) It's a real pity his work
isn't open source, but his dissertation is very readable.