The Krita team is seeking sponsorship to allow one of the core team members to work on Krita full-time, focusing on performance and usability, with a goal of releasing the results in Krita 2.2 and 2.3, in 2010. See kde.dot.org for an interview, or the Krita site for more information about this effort.
unlike gimp, krita’s engine support more colour spaces (and more advanced colour mixing), 16-bit and wider colour, and even floating point pixels.
GEGL for gimp never really took off, filmgimp/cinepaint found a niche.
What rock have you been living under? GEGL is pretty much done. (There is still development going on, but the design is pretty much nailed down)
It’s taking several development cycles to port everything in GIMP over, but to say GEGL never took off is dead wrong.
GEGL for GIMP is great, and so is the new user interface for GIMP promised for version 2.8. The only problems really are these: (1) why did it take so long? (2) why was there such strong opposition from GIMP developers to doing this for such a long time? and (3) now that it has taken this long, has GIMP missed the boat?
1 & 2 : limited development resources.
3 : If GEGL works out as planned, not likely.
CinePaint is pretty much treading water, if not drowning. Sure it was used for menial tasks in several blockbusters four years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been used recently. If it has been used, it hasn’t been mentioned on its website, or anywhere else.
Its interface currently retains the look, feel, and usability of the gimp’s 1.x days.
The new rewrite( glascow) using fltk as a toolkit had one really buggy, unstable early alpha release, and hasn’t been updated since.
One of the advantages of Krita over Gimp was it’s simpler and nicer UI. But I’ve been using Krita 2.1, and man, it is horrible!
– selecting region is buggy as hell (you can’t select pixels that are on the edges of the canvas) and the selection looks very strange
– inserting text is ilogic, why there is not a button in the tools for text?
– I can’t figure out how to configure the eraser to clear just ONE pixel at time, and I want it erased 100%, not being more clear/translucit and having to click button 5 times to fully clear it. (if possible, the configure tool UI is a mess, because I could not find it after a lot of tries)
– why showing a export dialog every single time I save a png? Once for session is good enought.
That said, I hope Krita have a plan to address those issues, if true, then I’m willing to donate. But today, I don’t see a plan to fix it’s UI.
Er, did you just copy and paste this from the dot? Or vice-versa. In any case, here’s my answer to these points from the dot:
Yes, we have a plan. A fairly detailed one even. Lukas’ action plan is here: http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Krita/ActionPlan. It has two phases: performance work and usability work. We’ve already received enough donations to start doing the performance work starting in January (Lukas first needs to finish his exams), and we are starting to get there for the usability work.
The general plan for 2.2 is at http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Krita/Roadmap22.
However, this doesn’t answer most of the points you make above. Some I agree upon, some I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on.
* selections: Sven Langkamp is working on this, so that should indeed be improved.
* location of the text tool/shape. This is the result of a long discussion in KOffice as a whole. We don’t have one text tool as such: we have text shapes that can be manipulation with a number of tools. For instance, the standard text shape has an editing tool and a paragraph settings tool. Then there is the artistic text tool that enables you to set type on a path. We chose to make all shapes available through a shape selector instead of putting them all as creation tools in the toolbox, because the toolbox quickly became very crowded. I’m afraid that this is settled for now, pending some future KOffice-wide usability and interaction review.
* pixel eraser. It’s a general issue with painting tools in Krita that they are meant for painting, not for changing the value of single pixels. There is a bug for the pencil brush engine to make neat, precise, aliased lines. Together with the “erase” blending mode, this should do what you want, when it is fixed. See bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148207.
* showing the export dialog. Well, in general, the work flow we aim at is for someone working on a single image for a longer period of time, saving it as .kra often, and only in the end exporting it. Krita isn’t a photo manager like Digikam. Still, it’s a valid point — so we’ll have to think about it.
* tool configurations not being saved. That’s actually my fault. Back in 2003, Krita had some rudimentary code to save tool configurations to the settings file, but that didn’t work, and I kept getting confused by gimp remembering my settings when I started it again, so I concluded it was a bad idea and removed the non-working code. There is a bright side here, though, because we’re working on making it easy to save and restore brush settings, which would certainly meet the requirements you state above: you will be able to define a one-pixel hard eraser “preset”, save it and retrieve it from a combobox. It will work a bit like Corel Painter’s brush selection works now.
If you intend to paste these issues in more places, could you tell me? Then I can paste my answers there as well 😛
Half your points were, “we don’t care if you found it annoying or confusing because you’re not using the software the way we want you to.”
That’s NOT usability design. That’s laziness and cockiness. Either you care about making the software as easy to use and figure out as possible (e.g., even if text can be done in a very powerful way, 90% of the time a person just wants to slap a simple horizontal line of text on an image, and making an easy-access tool for that very common case just makes sense) or you don’t care, and there’s no reason someone should throw money at people who don’t actually care about the quality of the software.
If your answers had been, “we know but just haven’t had a chance to fix it yet,” or even, “you make a valid point and we’ll investigate ways to make it easier,” that’d be one thing. “It’s hard to use by design because that’s more consistent with other KOffice components that aren’t Krita and hence have no reason to have influence on Krita’s domain-specific UI” is just silly.
Iuri made five points. You claim I arrogantly dismissed half of them. That is either two or three. In fact, if you read what I wrote, I didn’t dismiss any. Of the one point you rant about, the position of the text shape, I said it is fixed for now, pending some future KOffice usability and interaction review. That means that we are aware of interaction issues, and that we want those reviewed.
We are not so arrogant that we think we should do that on our own, we need real expertise for that, nor are we so dumb that we think that a good gui will follow from just doing whatever anyone on any webforum asks for.
All the other points he made I answered with, and I’ll quote the essential bits for you: “should indeed be improved”, “. See bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148207.”, “Still, it’s a valid point — so we’ll have to think about it”, “we’re working on making it easy to save and restore brush settings”.
That means I acknowledge work needs to be done to meet his requirements. Will the result be exactly what he envisioned? Probably not. Fortunately, we are blessed with three excellent users on #krita who test whatever we do and give us lots of useful feedback and help us create an interaction that fits with the features Krita provides.
Krita will never be a complete Photoshop work-alike., and we don’t hide that. It will look more like Corel Painter in some respects. Corel Painter users are used to having one freehand tool and lots of brushes, instead of lots of different freehand tools, for example. It avoids the horrible Photoshop toolbox with toolbars expanding from buttons.
So, yes, users will have to get used to Krita working in a different way from the applications they might be used to in places, and if you conclude that our way is worse, well, that’s your opinion, but until you join the team and do some thorough interaction design for us, I’m bound to feel that it’s not me who is lazy.
more than half way already.
this could be the replacement for all the failed bounties. instead of $50 for some specific task, raise $3k and pay someone for a couple of months.
a good competitor to GIMP can only be good. friendly rivalry can help them both
Edited 2009-12-03 12:11 UTC