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Krita/KOffice Preview Version and Video Available
xiando writes "Developers aim at making
Krita a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other light-duty image programs like Paint Shop Pro should feel right at home.
LinuxReviews has a
5.5 MB preview video by developer Bart Coppens available, showing how the app looks and feels.
Check it out or
download the source preview packages
by Daniel Molkentin to try it yourself.
Developers hope to make Krita a part of the
KDE office suite KOffice 1.4, scheduled spring 2005."
"Krita" means 'chalk' or 'crayon' in Swedish. "rita" means 'to draw'.
IKN.
after messing with the gimp for a bit (sounds dirty doesnt it).. i am relieved to know there is a simpler program for linux out there where i can do my image editing... not saying gimp is bad.. just a little hard to figure out at certain points
Paint Shop Pro in the past because it was a good and easy program compared to Photoshop and have used Gimp but find it to be a bit more complicated than PSP. Still Gimp is an excellent choice for mst image manipulation operations. I just hope Krita brings the ease of use and intuitive part of PSP to Linux.
My penguin ate my sig
Seems to be an application linux has been missing. While gimp is great imho it's simply overkill for most users and though I don't think gimp's interface is nearly as terrible as a lot of people want us to believe it is simply unfamiliar for someone who has only experience with paint shop pro for example. /me is looking forward to krita being released.
Paint Shop Pro's functionality has been anything but basic for the past three releases. In fact, in some areas (like vector layers) it's been far superior to Photoshop for a long time.
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It looks like this project has been going for some time and potentially very interesting. I am primarily a KDE user although I run GIMP under KDE and have done for several years. I've learned enough of GIMP to be fairly competent with it. I kinda like it now I've learned how to use it. Although I've always hoped for a "Kimp" using the QT toolkit although with the exact same functionality.
I might give this thing a try but as of yet I'm not about to unlearn my Gimp!
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Are these people running Linux?
here.
I managed to coralize the first video just before the server went bye-bye: here
Hi there
"light-duty image programs like Paint Shop Pro"... What the hell are they talking about!? PSP can do everything Photoshop can! I think it's a far superior program b/c of it's ease of use. I do tons of graphics and I never touch that Adobe filth... Thank God that someone is trying to make a better art program for Linux, Gimp tries to be Photoshop way too much, so I have to boot into Windows when I want to do graphics....
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
As a shortcut junkie I really hope it uses some similar shortcuts as Photoshop or Paintshop Pro by default. This will make the switch much easier and make it more productive.
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
IMHO the open source world needs a simple piece of software that does what every digital photographer needs:
...
* Eliminate red eyes
* Lighten, darken picture (or areas of the picture)
* change contrast
* sharpen contrast of picture
* cut picture frames
* import pictures from camera
* archive pictures
* send pictures to online printer
Every piece is there. But not in one package and not user friendly.
When you read about GIMP, many people think it's not as good as Photoshop, cause it does no colour separation. But GIMP is featurewise more than enough for millions of digital photographers. But sadly not usable for Joe Sixpack.
IMHO open source could attract much more new users by making specialized solutions, that are simple to use, than by making the featurewise ultimate solution. But of course every developer is free to do what he wants to do
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Koffice, although its import/export filters historically have left something to be desired. Unlike OpenOffice, you just get a "clean" feel when you start it up. Not super bloated, and the default layout doesn't waste lots of screen space with wide margins around the image of the paper (I know that's a stupid nitpick, but it's been driving me nuts about OpenOffice.org)
Now the KDE integration efforts for OO have made it quite a bit nicer to look at under KDE, for which I am grateful. But I still have to say I hope KOffice becomes a front runner for Linux office suites. If everybody uses the OO XML document standard that's in the works they can all compete on an equal footing, and Koffice documents could be read by OO on Windows. Koffice is a nice piece of work, but (partially due to their KDE only status) they have had a hard time getting the critical mass of developers needed to do what they're trying to do. Without the power of KDE+QT they wouldn't be anywhere NEAR where they are now, as far as I can tell.
I wish Apple or someone would decide to use the KOffice setup (yeah that would be a lot of work, but still...) and give KOffice enough full time developers to get all the annoying little features stuffed in. Feature parity with OpenOffice.org is a must, and with MSOffice would be ideal. People are used to those features, and in a game like Office software that's all that matters.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
For the 60% of people that just want to view their picture, resize it, and do some various simple edits... he's a program for you.
Seriously, whilst Adobe is an excellent program for high-end image editing, it's not the be-all-end-all. For many users, Adobe is very much overkill.
While I do use the functionality of strong programs such as PhotoShop every now and then, I've found the PSP interface quite convenient for much of what I use. At this point I'm stuck between PSP and GIMP, with GIMP having been my only choice for 'nix.
Based on the comparison to PSP though, I'll probably check out Krita (wish there were screenshots). Sometimes you don't want to do a lot of cool "stuff," in fact most of the time I just want to resize my image and fiddle with the colour depth to make thumbnails for my webpage...
"Pre-development", do you mean this is before any code is written? Were those screenshots drawn in crayon? If you're releasing code for public consumption it's no longer pre-development. Call it alpha/beta whatever, but it's time to stop hedging bets and call everything "pre-pre-pre-release".
If part of the greatness of the open source model is people using code early and often and giving you feedback, then punting all issues back saying "we're not going to support you, this is pre-pre-pre-release" just goes against that model.
If they want to make it easy, they are going to need to do something like what was done in Kai's PhotoSoap. This is the *only* image editing app (besides iPhoto) that I've seen computer novices be able to figure out. The tools were simple, made sense, and the UI was great. And it worked well, too.
Luckily, Digikam performs all of these functions except for the last one. Try it! You might like it:
http://digikam.sf.net
From the web page regarding "Why another paint program":
"This program will integrate with KDE better than GIMP does."
Great. Half of my applications integrate with KDE, and half integrate GNOME. (Actually, a few integrate with nothing).
I've had to explain this to my Windows-using friends who I am trying to convince to use Linux, and not surprisingly they answer "Well, why not just use Windows, where everything integrates with everything else?". They don't buy the idealistic "more choice" argument when more choice means less functionality.
I have made this suggestion other places but I have always wondered why don't applications make UI profiles or modes that scale the options as what would be needed for a particular task.
:)
With a word processor as an example you could fit in the same application 3 main profiles:
basic pure text notepad like interface
basic formating wordpad like interface
advanced formating word/openoffice writer like interface
page layout advanced desktop publishing like interface.
In each mode you would have only the options available that make sense for that mode. You would always be able to switch between modes and promote/demote to/from other modes as is possible.
The gimp could be a little different. Instead of a graduated level of features you could have UI profiles for different types of tasks:
1. Digital photo cleanup, just has basic features to eliminate red eye, clean up blur/sharpen resize brighten darken, crop etc... easy to get to on the tool bar.
2. Digital manipulation, similar to above but put the photo based features in the back ground and have script-fu stuff in the tool bars and easy to get to.
3. Media creation, similar to what the gimp has now.
4. Others that people can come up with.
Gnome has gone on a spree of getting rid of un-needed features in the UI but I think they should have a tiered approach to the UI.
Just my idea. go and whip it up real quick
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I wonder if the author has, by any chance, had the possibility to play around with PaintShopPro lately. To call it a "light-duty" is one of the biggest over-simplifications I have ever seen. Just have a look at its features, it almost beats Gimp and is as close to Photoshop as one can get (treating, of course, PhotoShop CS as a reference point!)
http://www.automatiq.se
Given: I use Debian Sid/KDE 3.3 daily
Observations: Krita has years to go. GIMP is not difficult to use. What people are describing as difficult seems to be weighed on the amount of time one has to read up on the GIMP tutorials versus reading up on the Help for Krita.
Note: Digikam is what you want if you just want to touch up your digital images recently shot from your personal camera.
GIMP and Cinepaint are what you want to use if you want to utilize your digital images and turn them into a portfolio.
Comparing Krita to GIMP and declaring Krita the easy-to-use alternative is really misleading people. That's like comparing Scribus 1.2 to LaTeX/Kile and declaring Scribus 1.2 the only choice for PDF documentation publishing. Any one can tell you that if you are doing large technical documentation (books, presentations, etc..) you want to leverage LaTeX. But then you might have to get off your butt and learn it. Scribus isn't a breeze to learn but nothing like that visual feedback mechanism of instant gratification to give one a sense it is more intuitive, powerful and thus easier to utilize.
Both Scribus 1.2 and LaTeX are wonderful tools. I recommend learning both and leveraging them where they make sense.
Scribus 1.2 is like a poor man's scaled down version of Create 11, by Stone Design that runs only on OS X (100% Pure Cocoa app).
Stone Design Create
http://www.stone.com/Create_Screenshot.html
My flPhoto application does all but the last (it does support local printing, of course), available at:
http://www.easysw.com/~mike/flPhoto/I print, therefore I am.
this and the QT/cocoa bindings will make it a good alternative to photshop on OSX.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Inkscape. It's farther along than Sodipodi.
http://www.inkscape.org