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I'm really digging Krita
2 years ago
One of my goals for 2024 is to be 100% on Linux, which means leaving behind Photoshop. This also means I have to basically, completely reinvent my entire art style. Fortunately, the open source "Krita" is proving to be quite the replacement in which to chip away at this goal.
I'm honestly pretty surprised about how good Krita feels and how well it works. The learning curve has been fairly steep, but not anywhere close to what I was expecting. The program, especially the hotkeys and interface, are absurdly customizable. Surprisingly customizable. It feels more like Blender than it feels like Photoshop. I've installed Krita next to photoshop, for now, and have been translating my custom shortcuts and user interface settings. It won't be a perfect match, but it'll be close.
Several of the features are mind-blowing. The brush engine is the best of Photoshop, Painter, and Sai, as far as I know them, all combined into one program. What Krita lacks (filters, a decent text editor, .kra files don't open in material slots in Blender) it more than makes up for with this brush engine. It's bananas. I'm only just starting to scratch the surface. Fortunately, the official Youtube channel has a SPLENDID tutorial series available. They only have 72K subscribers, which is criminal, given the quality and straightforward nature of their in-house tutorial series.
Also like Blender, something else I really like about Krita is that it's open source. It's free, and it's yours. The small print emphasizes that -you- own the software, and -you- own the art you wake with that software. In fact, you own the copy of Krita. It will never dial home, and it will never spy on you. The open source nature of this software provides a very safe and secure platform on which you can make art that can't be switched off by the parent company. The program will never change. There will be updates, but you may use whichever version you feel like.
I've found the proposition of using 100% open source software to be very attractive, and I'm so happy to being so close to that. It's way more doable than I ever realized. Meanwhile, I can't believe what I'm seeing with modern companies suddenly altering or even taking programs away, programs that people needed to get work done.
I can't recommend Krita enough. The thing even has a 2D animation engine.
Sorry I'm always so quiet. I'm a very weird person, as it turns out. I'm sure that as I continue getting better, I'll be less and less weird and more socially available. In the meantime, I'll probably babble on here about cool things that captured my attention for one reason or another. Krita certainly did.
I'm honestly pretty surprised about how good Krita feels and how well it works. The learning curve has been fairly steep, but not anywhere close to what I was expecting. The program, especially the hotkeys and interface, are absurdly customizable. Surprisingly customizable. It feels more like Blender than it feels like Photoshop. I've installed Krita next to photoshop, for now, and have been translating my custom shortcuts and user interface settings. It won't be a perfect match, but it'll be close.
Several of the features are mind-blowing. The brush engine is the best of Photoshop, Painter, and Sai, as far as I know them, all combined into one program. What Krita lacks (filters, a decent text editor, .kra files don't open in material slots in Blender) it more than makes up for with this brush engine. It's bananas. I'm only just starting to scratch the surface. Fortunately, the official Youtube channel has a SPLENDID tutorial series available. They only have 72K subscribers, which is criminal, given the quality and straightforward nature of their in-house tutorial series.
Also like Blender, something else I really like about Krita is that it's open source. It's free, and it's yours. The small print emphasizes that -you- own the software, and -you- own the art you wake with that software. In fact, you own the copy of Krita. It will never dial home, and it will never spy on you. The open source nature of this software provides a very safe and secure platform on which you can make art that can't be switched off by the parent company. The program will never change. There will be updates, but you may use whichever version you feel like.
I've found the proposition of using 100% open source software to be very attractive, and I'm so happy to being so close to that. It's way more doable than I ever realized. Meanwhile, I can't believe what I'm seeing with modern companies suddenly altering or even taking programs away, programs that people needed to get work done.
I can't recommend Krita enough. The thing even has a 2D animation engine.
Sorry I'm always so quiet. I'm a very weird person, as it turns out. I'm sure that as I continue getting better, I'll be less and less weird and more socially available. In the meantime, I'll probably babble on here about cool things that captured my attention for one reason or another. Krita certainly did.
I once considered changing to Krita, but I'm so used to the version of Photoshop I have.
I'm happy to know you are doing alright and I'm super ok to see more of your updates. ❤️
I hope you'll see more and more updates from me as I get comfortable with this new setup. :>
I've been using krita for two years now and I'm very happy to be out of the damn photoshop.
it has many tools that allow you to create everything much faster and without lag! (yes, photoshop I'm looking at you)
but like any program, it is not perfect, it has its weaknesses such as: the text input is still very simple and allows minimal customization, the system for 2d animation frame by frame needs to be polished a little more as it takes a long time to render stroke by stroke.
Even me, a diehard Windows user, has been considering a switch to Linux at this point.
All these companies building software they want on a subscription while spying on you and even selling off your info for extra profit is disgusting.
According to a few contractor buddies, no one at Microsoft uses personally 11. They either use 10 or Linux. The same goes for most people who work in corporate offices, since "spyware" is a technically correct word to use when describing it. It isn't hyperbolic to call it that, and it's a terrible shame.
A ton of my network is jumping or has already jumped to Mint. I've been using it alongside windows for about a year now, so all I need to do is learn Krita and I'm off.
My other big reason was simply the freedom. With Linux, I can do anything. Every single component of it can be customized or replaced, there are multiple desktop environments available, and so on. So I can build a system that is exactly the way I want it. Also, there are no restrictions, Linux won't tell me "No, you can't do that". The only downside is that since it gives me full freedom, it also won't stop me from doing stupid things. XD I could absolutely start deleting core system files if I wanted to. :D But as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. :P
Back when I worked on this for GSoC, the maintainer (and founder) of the project was Boudewijn Rempt, now I think the project is in his daughter's stead.
I'm the friend Keshiji mentioned below. My contributions to the project were rather modest (the hatching brush engine, a sort of impasto-like filter whose location in the menues I forgot, and a bunch of bugfixes and UX improvements). I'd say my most enduring contributions were: "save incremental backup/version" (this was a request from an artist and I thought was genius), and fixing alpha premultiplication for color blending (before this, when you used the blending brush near the borders of your pictures, your colors would be smudged black instead of just mixing with transparency).
I'd attribute a lot of the codebase's slickness to Boud's good eye in choosing volunteer devs and his project leadership, of course the rest is because the devs that have contributed to the project are indeed very good :)
It's a pleasure to meet you, and I want to thank you for contributing to Krita!
And yes, Dmitry is al all around great guy, but so are all of them. And poor Boud, he worked so hard and put so much love and effort into Krita. It was basically a full-time job for him but without getting paid, while he also had to maintain his own business to earn a living. He was also very supportive of my idea of holding a panel about Krita at Eurofurence. He is a really great guy, and I hope he is doing fine. I haven't talked to him in years.
"save incremental backup/version" - Oh that was you! Nice. :D It's a great feature.
"fixing alpha premultiplication" - I also want to personally thank you for that, because the blending brush engine is critical to my workflow. Basically, almost all my brushes are using that engine. XD
So hey, great work! Perhaps you could consider becoming a contributor again. ;)
Most of what was written was during Google's Summer of Code!
But there used to be a German furry on the permanent dev team. :) Not sure if they are still active, to be honest.
Actually, I've quickly arrived at the conclusion that for drawing and painting specifically I prefer Krita over Photoshop by far! I personally feel that Krita is just designed with artists in mind: It may not have the fancy image editing options of PS, but it has great brush engines, it had a blending brush long before Photoshop ("mixer brush") did, and the popup palette IMHO is just amazing. The fact that it is native to Linux is really just a bonus. Plus, the developers are super nice and approachable, they listen to feedback and new ideas. I have reported bugs that were fixed on the same day more than once, and I'm proud to say that there are a few smaller things in Krita today that were my suggestions or feature requests!
All the art in my gallery was made with Krita and I wouldn't want to use anything else now. I'm also making my own brushes and using them exclusively because with the options available I can make brushes that behave exactly how I want them to.
The only downside I can say is that Krita was never meant to be a general-purpose image editor like PS, and since GIMP, unfortunately, sucks at being that, if you want a good general editor then PS is IMHO still the only option. :( You can... make do with GIMP, but it's painful.
Meanwhile, I'm also using Blender for everything 3D. It used to be the case that for sculpting you still wanted Z-brush, but not anymore. Although Z-brush is still the best program for sculpting specifically, the sculpting tools in Blender received a revamp a while ago and are now pretty darn decent!
Finally, I also want to get into game dev eventually, and here enter the Godot engine! It's also open-source, Linux native and while it can not fully compete with Unreal or Unity*, it is pretty decent and keeps getting better. (*Actually, now that Unity has self-destructed, Godot is getting a lot of attention and a lot of new funding! So I'm expecting it will only keep getting better at an accelerated pace now.)
And the best thing about Godot? GDQuest on YouTube has a ton of free educational material about how to develop indie games with Krita, Blender, and Godot as a power trio!
Anyway, look at me ramble on. XD Sorry, I'm a huge fan of Krita and Blender, and open source too. :) I'm practically a 100% open-source user with the exception of my games for quite a while now, and I love it.
And yeah, the amount of careful documentation on all three programs really says a lot for how seriously the entire community and dev teams take them. The guy who does the official Krita Youtube channel is absolutely fantastic. I'm still going through his "how to make brushes" series, and it's mind boggling how deep it is. It's all a breath of fresh air, and really gives me a tremendous peace of mind about guaranteeing the stability of my workflow for the foreseeable future. I will never have to worry about software crippling OS updates or surprise paywalls ever again.
I'm also in love with your art, especially now that I know you know Krita. I am going to be taking a lot of mental notes from your work.
Some things you definitely want to check out if you haven't already:
The guide for building Krita, originally written and illustrated by the amazing Deevad (David Revoy), creator of the Pepper and Carrot comic
The official Krita community site
GDQuest - game dev with Godot+Blender+Krita
GDQuest YouTube
Deevad's YouTube
And finally, thank you! :) You honor me. And I'm glad that I could give you a bit of inspiration. After all, my whole reason for making art is to share it and hope that people can find something positive to take away for themselves. :)
It's always great to see/hear actual artists being successful with it, and not only me without artistic cue pushing for it because of FOSS.^^
So, yeah, really awesome!