25 Years of Krita

I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I&#x27;ve found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does.<p>I know they have a different focus these days, but it&#x27;d be nice if they promoted this.

Wow. I could&#x27;ve sworn Krita was only around 6 years old. I&#x27;ve only very recently started hearing about it.

I&#x27;m impressed by the quality of programs that are coming out of the KDE ecosystem. While KDE is known for its desktop environment, many of the applications that come out of this organization are simply awesome.

One thing I particularly like about Krita is its wrap around mode. Very useful when making seamless textures! Another thing is that its file format contains a merged image, which can easily be extracted (.kra and .ora files are zip archives). I&#x27;ve used that to add native .kra&#x2F;.ora support to a game texture conversion tool. .psd support took a lot more work in comparison.

Wow, is it just me or does that screenshot of 2005 Krita 1.4 UI[1] look absolutely amazing?<p>All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect.<p>Feels like the mid-2000&#x27;s was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser&#x27;s toolbar for example).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;6&#x2F;69&#x2F;Krita_1.4.2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;6&#x2F;69&#x2F;Krita_1....</a>

I never knew that the project has been around for so long, let alone that its older than myself.<p>But what I can clearly read from the blog post: Qt likes to break compatibility a lot between their major releases...

Sounds like developing in QT is awful. They have had to do so much work porting it to new versions of QT.

Every time I try Krita I bounce off of it because the controls are too different from Photoshop. For my relatively simple use cases, Krita could be a replacement for Photoshop, which I&#x27;ve been using on and off for roughly 30 years. The muscle memory runs deep. Just something simple like holding alt to toggle the magnifying glass between zoom-in&#x2F;zoom-out doesn&#x27;t work in Krita and the configuration doesn&#x27;t allow for this.

I am glad the KDE&#x2F;QT applications are being developed. gimp is good, but my concern is the still rumored move&#x2F;merge of the gtk into gnome lib.<p>When I need a spreadsheet or WP application, I use calligra as opposed to libraoffice. It comes with my distro and I find these work just as well.<p>I still use gimp only because I forget krita exists, will need to remember that and use it more often :)

Started using Krita heavily since the local generative AI plugin is available (3rd party not official). Awesome and works perfectly.

The text in the &quot;Choose your membership&quot; column at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fund.krita.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fund.krita.org&#x2F;</a> is broken for me, it&#x27;s not visible.

Krita is a great replacement for photoshop.

I was (and sometimes still am) using Paint Shop Pro 7 even on Linux (via Wine) until recently, but at some point i wanted to do some texture painting and found the whole process of &quot;paint stuff, export to PNG, switch to Blender, reload texture, go back, etc&quot; to be a bit of a PITA. I looked into making a plugin for PSP7 to show the image on a 3D model in a window but PSP7 only supported Photoshop plugins and making Photoshop plugins (for the circa 2000 version of Photoshop) seemed very convoluted as it was a quickly hacked together port of the process used on pre-MacOSX Macintosh.<p>So i thought i might try Krita instead. TBH i was never a fan of Krita&#x27;s UI, it was too Photoshop-y for me (which i disliked, i found GIMP&#x27;s UI better but PSP7&#x27;s the best) but since it does have some digital painting focus and i prefer Qt apps to Gtk apps these days (GIMP is still on Gtk2 which i find perfectly fine, but very soon the Gtk3 version will replace it and i&#x27;m not a fan of Gtk3), i decided to check if i can make what i had in mind and if so stick with it.<p>I managed to hack together a plugin[0][1][2] for Krita to display a 3D model with the current image as a texture, initially using pure Python but later changed to a combination of Python and C (to do some more complex processing, like a feature in the latest version to force a predefined 8bit palette[3] to a texture). I also have some WIP shader support[4], though it is currently very experimental (as they increase the complexity a ton, but i&#x27;d like to be able to do use Krita for making simple materials).<p>I still think Krita is awkward in various places (i really dislike how paste works with automatic cropping, placing the new paste whenever it feels like and despite the 18913 paste commands there is no something like &quot;paste into selection&quot; to automatically scale the pasted image to fill the selection boundaries, which is extremely useful). These can be worked around of course (and the paste into selection thing can be done with a plugin), but i still find PSP7&#x27;s UX much better overall.<p>From a plugin perspective sadly the plugin API is very limited: there is no way to &quot;monitor&quot; an image for changes, for example, so in my plugin (and this is something i&#x27;ve seen many other plugins do) i have to use a timer to constantly grab the image and upload it to the GPU. This is fine for ~1024x1024 and ~2048x2048 textures (depending on yoru PC) but having some sort of &quot;the image changed at rect x1,y1,x2,y2&quot; event would <i>really</i> speed things up. Similarly for things like checking if a document is closed (so you can get rid of its references) you have to enumerate all open views and see if there are any remaining views with the document.<p>I did consider building Krita myself and trying to contribute improvements but the build process is a bit shaky and even after i managed to build it, it crashed at startup. As Krita is something i&#x27;d probably rely on going forward for my own gamedev needs, i&#x27;ll probably try again though.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;runtimeterror.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;kritaview3d&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;runtimeterror.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;kritaview3d&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;X4k0qeU.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;X4k0qeU.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ciAZmgKe3Ao</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZAxiXQVLcRw</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;I5RXHqy.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;I5RXHqy.png</a>

What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.