Krita release notes are superb studies in how to create software product pages: lots of context, plenty of examples, clear explanations, both features and benefits, thanks and credits, and call outs to real world users.
They were written by pretty much one person, who also fixes bugs, maintains the manual and help out the maintainer -- me -- with any tasks needed. We usually start the release notes for the next major version right after we released a major version, and try to keep up with what happens.
Upcoming Krita 5.1, that what's currently in the master branch on invent.kde.org, already has a bunch of new stuff...
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"We usually start the release notes for the next major version right after we released a major version, and try to keep up with what happens" That is a best practice right there, and I've long been an advocate of 'continuous documentation' because it's actually less work per unit of quality over time.
I love Krita it is a great free open source photoshop replacement and does photo editing better than Gimp. People will say Krita is a digital painting program but it still goes photo editing in a much less frustrating way than gimp.
I agree it's less frustrating than Gimp, but as someone who did a lot of photoediting in the latter, Krita's abilities do not really compare with Gimp's. Last time I checked (admittedly years ago), there was no equivalent of Liquid Rescale in Krita. Nor was there smart object removal capability. I think the options for dealing with noise were quite limited, as well.
Krita with a Wacom tablet on Linux is more plug-n-play than any other setup I've seen. I never had to "learn Krita," just the occasional Google to get me back on track. Thank you to everyone who makes these projects happen!
I love that, if you are on Windows, there are official paid versions that help support the development of the app. IIRC, it’s on the Microsoft and Steam stores.
Lots to be excited about in this release, particularly with animation.
I've been using Krita as a daily driver for a while. It's been slowly working through its list of features that are "technically there" but that are either very narrow or just kind of cumbersome to use, and broadening them out and making them more competitive. That effort really shows. So in this release the animation tools go from being mostly suited for basic frame-by-frame animation to now having storyboards, and being able to do tweening, cloned frames, and having a bit nicer UX; it's a big jump forward.
I say this whenever Krita comes up on HN, but I see a huge amount of potential in this project because of how its development team approaches development; they pay a lot of attention to the artist community and they're not just developing features in isolation, it feels like they have a sense of direction about the project, they put a ton of effort into UX. Krita has gone from technically sort-of usable as a daily driver, to basically good enough to be a daily driver, to actually just feeling quite nice to paint in where you'd probably have it installed on the side even if you were already accustomed to other programs and even if you didn't care about the OS aspect at all.
The closest comparison-project I can think of is Blender, and I mean that as a high complement. If you're coming out of the Clip Studio world, it's worth taking a look at. There are some features I miss, particularly around the vector tools and being able to redraw line widths, but there's also some stuff that Krita just does better now: I think it has a much cleaner interface than Clip Studio and is just overall more pleasant to use with touchscreen devices.
It's linked in the release notes, but dropping a second link to their funding page (https://fund.krita.org/). If you want to have a competitive Open Source drawing/painting tool on Linux that can rival some of the more traditional painting tools in the same vein as projects like Blender, then I think Krita is pretty much the singular best project to back/fund. It's already good enough to use as a serious tool, and more than that I just feel very optimistic about their entire development process and trajectory. This is a good project for the OS community to just throw resources/money at.
> With in-stack transform, the blending modes and overlapping layers are composited on top of the transform preview. This was a feature funded by the Blender Institute.
Great improvement, and it’s wonderful to see support from another open source project.
Even though I don't have much use for it now that I'm out of school, Krita and the Calligra Office suite make up one of the reasons I've been a KDE user forever. The most prominent KDE apps have long done an amazing job, imo, of making tons of functionality accessible in a way that feels orderly and approachable rather than chaotic and cluttered.
Amarok was this way, which made it just incredible when the most common way to listen to music was local collections.
When Dolphin came out, it seemed like a harmonization of Konqueror's massive featureset along the same lines.
Some apps are a little bit messier (Kate, Konsole) but are still way more orderly and easy to explore than popular alternatives on Windows despite matching or beating them on features.
I feel like this aspect of KDE apps is often undersold. Outside of KDE, I hardly ever find anything as powerful as a mature KDE app whose UI isn't just an overwhelming hodgepodge of menus. Krita seems like a leader when it comes to this approach to adding features but in a thoughtful way.
To me, the thing that brings me back to Krita over and over is that fact that it's intuitive to use. I've been trying to use GIMP for the past 10 years and still have no idea how to resize an image/canvas or where the heck the crop tool is. In Krita those things are exactly where I end up looking for them.
Wife still uses Photoshop CS 2 on Windows, and I've basically told her that when her computer dies, she's getting Linux and open source software, or she's gonna have to figure out Windows 11 by herself and pay the subscription for Adobe. "Fine with Linux" she says, since it's installed on other computers in the house, "... but what can I use instead of Photoshop?". "Use Gimp, of course!" I say, and install it on her computer. Then I watch her get increasingly frustrated for an hour before rage quitting. It's not lack of features, it's UI, UX, workflow.
There are a lot of paths that are unique to each of them. I bet the reverse (from Gimp to PS) feels the same. My wife asked to make a logo and a leaflet, and I never offered other thing than Inkscape. She ended up using it for almost anything. After a couple of years I bet that she will find Illustrator frustrating.
The difference is that after a week of serious Photoshop training you will have at your fingertips a world class, incredibly powerful piece of software with modern ML tools for smart image manipulation, collaborative tools and cloud infrastructure for syncing documents, plus a massive ecosystem of plugins and assets available to purchase.
I say this as someone who strongly dislikes Photoshop. I wish I had a viable alternative.
You'd better test if her Photoshop works fine with Wine. If it does, nobody get frustrated, there is no need for her to relearn everything from scratch if she is satisfied with that tool and her workflow established over more than 10 years, and you don't have to pay for a new tool.
It does! Some very minor UI issues but very usable. Actually, I've got an old trial version of Photoshop CS6 (I think? Whichever was the last version they released as locally installable) and it also seems to work on Wine. But you can't buy that any more :(
You can run older versions of Photoshop (CS2 is almost certainly old enough) surprisingly well in wine. If she doesn’t like something like Krita, I’d try installing the exact version of photoshop she’s used to under wine.
Seriously? I can understand people having trouble adapting to a different layering model, but cropping? If over 10 years you haven't been able to figure out
Image -> Crop to selection
then either it's a real accomplishment they you can cloth yourself in the morning, or this is just willful ignorance.
Maybe Gimp has one of the worst UI/UX ever made? I still stand by my theory that gimp was made as a troll program to see how far people will defend opensource no matter how objectively bad it is to use.
As somebody who uses Photoshop for a living, I prefer the GIMP. The GIMP falls down on a few major features, not on usability. I can also see how Photoshop as the standard has broken people's brains so much that the concept of "intuitive" becomes entirely lost. It's not as bad as Illustrator, but features are just randomly thrown everywhere; the only reason I'm fast at it is from hard-won experience.
It's impossible to paint "Image -> Crop to Selection" as hard to find. The menu is at the same place it is in almost every other program one uses, at the top of the window.
I've never used Photoshop and gimp confuses the hell out of me. I installed krita a year ago for my simple editing tasks and never once had to search online for 'how do I....'
I've used all three, and the amount of searching from least to most goes Krita -> PS -> GIMP for me.
PS was the first I used, but I still had to search things for the entire time I used it. GIMP I just start by looking up how to do something, and Krita I just do it.
As someone who never used Photoshop before I find Gimp's UI functional and nothing worth complaining about. Especially I like the MDI interface with each widget being a seperate window.
It's been a long time, but when I was in high school I chose to use the GIMP rather than Photoshop for my photo class, which was the first time I used any photo editing software. I found it to be more or less fine.
There's exactly one thing I still prefer to do in Gimp - splitting a single image into multiple images, one per RGBA/HSL channel. There's also some image formats that Gimp supports that Krita does not. But that's it. There's nothing else I miss, and Krita is just incredibly far ahead on usability.
They fixed a font size bug that made it inconsistent between computers, but did they change the user interface for font styling? It's the second that makes it annoying - I never got far enough to notice the bug.
It depends gimp have more photo editing features but is a mess, and krita is more of painting app who have features of photo editing( more than not professionals tends to need)
I think the only real advantage of GIMP at this point is its age and stability. Gimp was around 20 years ago and it is more likely to be there 20 years from now than Krita. EDIT: my error - Krita is much older than I thought.
Moreover stability is important if you access it programmatically.
And yes, even that is not guaranteed by any means. It's just the area where Krita does not beat Gimp totally.
Krita was started in the previous millenium, too. I've been Krita's maintainer since 2004... If I have to think about what I did with my life, https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/ comes to mind :-)
Just read this guy's vita. An entire long life of profit-oriented road rage, always using the law and presumably his connections to go after like everyone else for minor copyright and similar offenses, striving to make this planet a more miserable place for everyone else while raking in for himself. At almost 90 yo he finally got convicted for fraud and rather killed himself instead of going to jail. Not even his high-falutin name is all that real. At some point he tried to get courts deny people the right to even mention the fact that he was not born as a Von And Zu. Christ what an asshole.
I've never been able to do anything meaningful in GIMP, but Krita is relatively nice to use. It's much more intuitive than GIMP, and even things you have to look up and learn are easier to get used to and remember, because the UI actually makes sense.
It is suitable for both applications, painting and photo editing.
I have used it strictly for photo editing professionally and privately and it works flawlessly. Highly recommended.
I use the knowledge I have from my Photoshop days and apply them in Krita, no issues there. For me it is a Photoshop drop-in replacement.
Before Krita was 'marketed' as a digital painting app, it was described and used as an alternative to GIMP and Photoshop.
At some point (in the 2010s?) there was a decision to refocus on digital painting, I think maybe because of the difficulty of keeping up with the expansive featureset of something like Photoshop or GIMP (and maybe the additional difficulty of still keeping a focused, pleasant UI).
But it's not like the developers removed a bunch of functionality. It's cool to hear that Krita remains capable of handling some heavy duty photo editing use cases.
This is really good to know. Years back they decided on making the program a painting app first and foremost so, not being an artist, I didn't really follow its progress. Knowing now that it does a solid job at photo editing tells me it is time to give it a second look.
Photopea is a perfect replacement for Photoshop, it's a shame you can't just buy it, he started a subscription model too. I don't want to pay a sub and I don't want ads.
Krita is one of those tools I've followed for ages, use sparingly, but should use more, as it continues to be one of the best tools for its class (let alone the fact its FOSS)
When I tried Krita a few years ago I couldn't imagine using it over things like Clipstudio yet.
I am really rooting for Krita though, so Ill probably give it another shot soon.
Clip Studio still has a number of features we don't have yet, but we're regarding it as our main competitor. Now 5.0 is out, we will start looking at fun features again, and we've already made a little list of things CSP has that we want for Krita, too...
Krita has vector layers, but it's not the absolute focus: the purpose of vector layers is adding frames for comic books, text, speech bubbles and the occasional other bit of clipart.
I feel like a number of basic pieces are in place for Krita to be really good for this, but it's not quite all put together and hasn't been expanded out into a really usable form yet.
I think they did a bunch of overhauls a while back (through a Kickstarter) where they specifically rebuilt and beefed up the core vector engine, but if I remember correctly other features ended up getting more votes during the campaign than some of the followup user-facing vector tools/systems they were thinking about, and they ended up prioritizing the other stuff that got more votes.
It's completely unrelated? SeExpr is a language for generating pixels in interesting ways, originating with Disney. Generic scripting is provided through Python, but SeExpr is fun for fill/generator layers.
SeExpr is great and used a lot in animation / shader development in things like Renderman from Pixar, it was great to see it in Krita https://wdas.github.io/SeExpr/
For reference, SeExpr is only used for a certain amount of scripting (usually around pattern generations etc). It's an industry standard in visual effects and animation workflows and was created by Disney;
http://wdas.github.io/SeExpr/
It is not used for general purpose scripting, for which Krita allows you to write Python scripts instead.
https://krita.org/en/krita-5-0-release-notes/
Kudos to the Krita team for the great upgrade.