Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita [LWN.net]

On his blog, Boudewijn Rempt has an interesting walk down memory lane about the history of the Krita digital painting program. It started its life in 1998 as a Qt wrapper around GIMP, called "kimp", though the first real Krita code came from a KOffice application called KImage, which changed to KImageShop, Krayon, and, finally, in 2002, Krita (Swedish for crayon). His account has controversies, flame wars, development setbacks, and more, resulting in the high-quality application that we have today. "I didn't know C++ back then, but neither was I a novice programmer. I'd been earning the daily bread for me and my family for about ten years, first as an Oracle PL/SQL developer, then Visual Basic, then Java. I had written and gotten published a book on Python and Qt, so I knew Qt as well. I had no experience with graphics, though... In October 2003 it was not possible to paint with Krita: all tools except for the layer move tool had been disabled. The paint tool was the first thing I worked on, and I was very proud when I had a tool that could place squares on the canvas -- and the size of the squares was sensitive to the tablet pressure!"

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Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 2, 2013 5:12 UTC (Wed) by mrdocs (guest, #21409) [Link]

Having been through the same kind of experience with Scribus, I can only tip my hat to Boudwijn. If you are lucky enough to meet him in person, you will be impressed with his character and sense of humor. A real gentleman and good luck in the next ten years.

<shameless plug>
LGM http://libregraphicsmeeting.org is an awesome meet. Next year in Leipzig.
</plug>

Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 2, 2013 6:26 UTC (Wed) by magfr (guest, #16052) [Link]

Krita is an even better pun in Swedish since K-rita means K-draw.

Replacing GIMP

Posted Oct 2, 2013 12:51 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

When I first heard of Krita, I hoped it would replace Gimp as the free graphic editor of choice. Gimp development has been slow and frustrating. There is still no 16-bit channel depth support in any version of Gimp, stable or unstable. The single window interface was added after a long struggle, but it's so inconvenient that it only there to speak on behalf of Gimp developers - "you don't want it, I told you so".

Is Krita getting close to being a Gimp replacement for casual users? How about professionals?

Replacing GIMP

Posted Oct 2, 2013 13:00 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Though there is overlap, for sure, Krita has a different focus from GIMP, so it'll never be a drop-in replacement. Krita is a painting application, GIMP an image manipulation application. Krita's brushes are better, GIMP has more filters and better selection tools :-)

And these days, Krita is pretty suitable for professional use, it is actually used by professional illustrators, texture painters, game graphics designers, vfx studios and matte painters every day. Check the brochure I made for the 2.6 release: http://krita.org/aboutkrita26.pdf.

And I fully intend to go further down this route, which is why we've got the Krita Foundation, which sponsors development, and my company, KO GmbH, which provides professional Krita support for VFX studios.

Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 2, 2013 15:37 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

My blog went down... For some reason I got tens of thousands of hits per hour, and the blog software is also ten years old. Plus, it runs on a Lenovo Ideapad I got for free at a Meego conference. The static page is available at http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/kde/krita_10_year... -

Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 3, 2013 15:55 UTC (Thu) by flok (subscriber, #17768) [Link]

Something I dearly miss, is a drawing program trivial as "paint" under microsoft oses.
There are things for linux which do so, but they're always incomplete. Not all shapes, limitted colors, only a small canvas, no undo, no text.
I would prefer not to have to invest tons of time in learning a drawing tool for a quick sketch.
It would be great if someone stepped-in to that void!

Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 3, 2013 16:05 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Have you tried mtpaint?

Rempt: Ten years of working on Krita

Posted Oct 3, 2013 18:27 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Or kolourpaint... Though Win 8's paint app has gotten quite sophisticated, more than the kolourpaint, gpaint, mtpaint or pinta. In any case, that's not the kind of application I needed ten years ago, nor the kind of application that excites me or my users today :-)