Krita has come a long way since I last looked at it. I had no idea it was still so actively developed. Super cool. I don't do a lot of visual stuff, and I've always reached for Gimp or Inkscape when I need to...but, seeing some of the stuff Krita can do makes me wanna give it a try next time I need art.
I was one of the few that really was disappointed in the change of Krita from a better Gimp (In my opinion) to a Painting Program. I still funded the project and just trusted the vision of the team. They really have hit a home run and they are a shinning example of what Open Source can do.
Now here is hoping Gimp can learn and blow away the competition in raster image processing.
Krita is my absolute favorite tool when I'm drawing with a Wacom. It gets out of the way and let you get in "the zone" and has many powerful features. It's just fantastic.
Love Krita. This upgrade to QT5 will provide an important base for future development. The brisk pace of development is encouraging.
Although I still find myself using GIMP and Inkscape for usability reasons. But, given that they are being developed at a snail's pace, I tend to think I will be increasingly using Krita.
I think they complement each other. Gimp is probably powerful, but I by the time I figure out how to do something, I forget what I was trying to do in the first place. Krita is easy to use, but can't do SVG. And Inkscape is still the best for SVG.
The overlap between GIMP and Krita is quite large. In general, at this point Krita is mostly a superset of the GIMP - though I still use GIMP a lot due to familiarity. Also, Krita is a must for >8bit images at the moment.
Neither of which I would use for palette based pixel pushing. For that I use something like Promotion or Aseprite. I tried to pixel with Gimp and found it frustrating.
I use Krita for painting and sketch work (animation now) with my Wacom or Surface Pro, I use Gimp or FireAlpaca (new on the scene) for manipulation and finally Promotion or Aseprite for pixel work. There is really no killer drawing application that does it all. Which is probably a good thing.
They're both general-purpose image editors, no? No doubt each has things it does that the other doesn't, but I would expect each to aim to subsume all the other's features.
Krita is more really an artistic tool, and less of a general image editor such as Gimp. Or as Wikipedia puts it, "Krita is designed to be a digital painting application."
Well, we broke the tablet gui we had when we ported to Qt5. It's going to take some time to restore in a sensible way. I do want Krita on my Android Hybrid Cintiq Companion, but I worry that that tablet is not powerful enough...
The name KImageShop fell foul of trademark law in Germany, and KImageShop was renamed to Krayon, which also appeared to infringe on an existing trademark, so Krayon was finally renamed to Krita in 2002.
Of course, "Krita" can also be read as K-rita, where "rita" means "draw" in Swedish (but not in German) and the K is the usual Qt/KDE prefix.
However, here[0] is a mailing list message from 2002 that answers:
MyPaint still exists and its 1.2 release is a very nice program. It's more focused and has less features than Krita, but it's also very ergonomic to work with. Does anyone know if MyPaint is likely to stick around, when Krita is developing so much?
Artists who use Linux always seemed like a crazy bunch.
Btw, if anyone needs a simple image editor for Linux, I can't recommend Pinta enough. It's basically Paint.NET. Gimp didn't have the one feature I need - drawing lines, squares, circles, etc. and Kolourpaint doesn't have layers.
Seems really buggy on OSX (just drew two rectangles and filled them with colors - some parts of the rectangle don't appear until you zoom in and then back out 2x).
Paint for Windows still seems like the single best drawing program for simple things.
>Krita is for art, not for simple things - comparing it with paint is kind of disrespectful even if meant as a joke.
That doesn't even make sense.
First of all, it's not "for art" as some abstract ideal, it's for drawing and graphic design. Which includes "simple things" like drawing perfect circles and triangles in the day-to-day requirements.
Second, nothing about "art" (even high art) precludes it being good at the things the parent mentions. If anything, they should be a prerequisite. Artists have used rulers and compasses in real life since forever.
Painter Artist and yes the program is geared more towards being an art tool.
I have used Krita for years. Krita was a better Gimp and then they drastically turned it into a painting program. I would not use Krita for most things Gimp they are two different tool kits.
>Artists have used rulers and compasses in real life since forever. //
Perhaps you could highlight some well known artists using a geometric drawing style to prove your point? My first thought would be Mondrian but I'd go with an app targeting vector graphics to get that effect.
That's really where a lot of these suites come into their own. There's a myriad of applications that can paint and draw. Really, I don't see any need for anything other than Photoshop in my normal day-to-day workflow.
But if you're wanting to freehand something with a tablet, for instance, having some specialised brushes and features that are fine-tuned by artists for artists can quite often make it a much 'nicer' experience.
I feel all the examples on this site could have been achieved in any other capable suite. However whether or not the artist enjoyed creating them is where the point of difference lies.
Well, as we noted in the release notes: Krita on OSX still has problems with rendering the image because we're depending on OpenGL and Apple's OpenGL drivers are missing stuff. You can disable OpenGL for now; we want to fully support OSX in the 3.1 release, which should be out in September.
I read on the website that one of the future project goals is to improve stability on OSX. Reading the artist interviews it sounds like it performs very well in Linux.
There is also a blog post [1] describing how Krita is funded and as you can see, the Kickstarter campaign plays a huge role in its development.
So if you are a Krita user, consider funding the campaign.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-m...
[1] https://krita.org/item/funding-kritas-development/
Edit: The campaign has already reached its goal, but there are stretch goals to achieve.