Krita 1.6 — State of the Art

brendan0powers writes to tell us Linux.com is reporting that while Krita 1.6 may have been released with the rest of the KOffice suite this week it is anything but a run-of-the-mill piece of productivity software. Krita is a 'fully-loaded raster graphics workhorse' definitely capable of standing up to most anything else available. Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

One of the more useful KDE apps

[chill]

While the comparisons to Photoshop and The Gimp are inevitable, Krita is one of the more advanced components of KOffice. For me, it long ago replaced The Gimp as my image editor of choice. If you are looking for a good image editor for Linux/BSD, you owe it to yourself to investigate Krita.

Huh?

[Overzeetop]

Okay, so I've never heard of it. Not unusual - there are lots of killer apps out there I've never heard of. But, um, how does it stack up to the other "'fully-loaded raster graphics workhorse'" programs out there. More importantly, what are those others. ATTFA, MS Office Picture Manager isn't one. Okay. So it must be more like...um...anything in the article...no.

Okay, so where does it fit in the Photoshop, PaintShopPro, GIMP arena? Is it simpler, easier? More powerful (it is a fully loaded workhorse, after all)?

Maybe this is just a "hey - all you guys with the old Krita - there's a new .x version now". Which is fine, but really front page news?

So, is this really sliced bread, or just a little bump in the feature set of KOffice?

Hidden Gem

[NereusRen]

When I first heard of Krita, I was surprised to learn that I already had it as part of the KOffice package! It quickly replaced The GIMP for my "basic advanced" image editing needs, since it offers a similar type of functionality but:

• Fits my theme, since I run KDE, and
  
• Manages to restrict itself to a sensible one window, with sub panels and panes that can be moved around within the window, or floated without losing focus on the other windows.

Can you tell what I didn't like about using The GIMP? :-) (Aside from system-specific bugs that I wouldn't blame on their developers, but still gave me trouble).

You don't hear about Krita nearly as often as The GIMP (or, of course, Photoshop), but it seems to be a great alternative. I can't speak for graphics professionals (not being one myself), but it gets the job done for what I need to do. I look forward to this new version, and I hope development continues on this hidden gem of an image editor.

what about RAW wounds?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What options are there to edit RAW photo files under Linux? "

A hex editor.

Re:what about RAW wounds?

[advocate_one]

Lightzone for Linux...

Re:what about RAW photo formats?

[bobintetley]

What options are there to edit RAW photo files under Linux?

As with all *nix stuff, the RAW handling is done by a separate component. Investigate UFRaw and DCRaw. UFRaw even has a plugin for the GIMP that works well. As an amateur photographer I use and highly recommend UFRaw.

Impressive

[TheViewFromTheGround]

I've been poking around with Krita 1.6, and I'm impressed. The Krita developers seem to have a much better understanding of how a simple-yet-effective FLOSS raster graphics app should work and look like. The GIMP has always seemed too complex for the casual user, but too shaggy and feature-poor for the serious graphics person.

The Krita developers are doing a laudable effort to grow their application carefully and intentionally, just like the Scribus has done, adding high priority features and implementing them well (Krita's new layer-groups implementation worked very well for me without getting in the way).

If it continues this way, Krita is likely to grab significant mindshare from the GIMP.

Tried it

[nagora]

Summary:

Very slow and clunky. Ugly as sin. Memory use a-go-go. Irritating KDE-style one-click interface for the file selector. Indispensable for its ability to handle CMYK and 16+bit.

I don't need it often and I'm always glad to close it afterwards, but until the Gimp handles 16bit at least for its working space, there's no way to live without it and do photo-manip under Linux.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I think you mean "nice KDE file selector": I know I detest the GNOME one... So, in short, that's subjective preference.

2. Ugly as sin? That's probably a function of your KDE theme. Redhat/fedora STILL deliberately mangles KDE to look and work like ass. Never use a kde package built by redhat or fedora...

3. Slow and clunky? Well, I dunno. Certain things do seem plain slower to process than the gimp, but only things that kind of interrupt workflow anyway (filter application). Less mature code -> less performance tuning, probably. But the fact the interface doesn't actually suck makes up for it :-) Two things currently make a large speed difference on my machine: disabling brush-shaped cursor and using crosshairs (probably the programmer made the brush-shape->cursor routine run every event loop iteration, which probably kills performance on tablets with their relatively high sample rate and pressure sensitivity changing the brush shape every iteration), and enabling opengl. But the latter made the selection indicators buggy on my machine, sigh.

I do hate one _major_ thing about it, something the GIMP does vaguely right: in the gimp, every xinput device's brush selection etc. is independent. So my "eraser" on my stylus can be a blobby eraser brush, and the stylus nib a thin line. Krita munges them all together. This is probably beginner-friendly or something, but it's the one reason I still fire up the gimp to sketch in, despite the fact the gimp is "for" photo retouching, and krita has more of a from-scratch-art orientation ?! Sigh #2.

Re:How the heck do I load a jpg?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at work, I am force to use fedora, and I also wanted to use krita, and I also couldn't find how to save or load png/tiff/jpeg (and I am a krita developers !), the simple answers is that they have hidden the filters in koffice-filters (an optional dependency, how can you consider jpeg/png/tiff to be optional ?), but sadly koffice-filters depends on other koffice application, so if you wanted krita only, you are screwed :)

And as a longtime KDE user and contributor, I strongly suggest you to avoid Fedora if you want a good experience with KDE.
-- Cyrille Berger

Re:GTK port of Krita

[BrigadierFrog]

I don't think you quite grasp the power of using KDE with its enormous set of shared libraries. So I'll give you a link to help you along http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/ Read that, then try it out for yourself if your not convinced. Then, come back, and don't make a fool of yourself next time ranting on how KDE has lots of "baggage".

Why is being KDE important?

[acidrain]

Does it acheive a goal that couldn't have been achived within the GIMP codebase with less effort? E.g. different UI modes?

Surely a name starting with a K instead of a G wan't enough?

I don't see how this kind of replication of effort best serves the adoption of Linux on the desktop in the long run.

Re:Why is being KDE important?

[pherthyl]

Does it achieve a goal that couldn't have been achieved within the GIMP codebase with less effort?

Perhaps, perhaps not. In any case, Krita is surpassing the Gimp in some areas that people have been complaining about for years in Gimp, and nothing was done. As a developer, what would you rather do, argue on the Gimp mailing list until your face turns blue about wanting to change the interface, or just start your own project? Sometimes you have to make a clean break to get new ideas implemented.

Re:Why is being KDE important?

[carlmenezes]

Well, I agree with you and I don't.

Look at the distros for example. Lots of em out there and then Ubuntu comes along - when it did, we were like, "who needs ANOTHER one" - and does something right. People notice that and move to it. Other distros try to adopt some of the plus points. That's not wasted effort. I guess evolution of a species is the closest I analogy I can get to. The best survive.

So if Krita comes along and even though it duplicates 90% of the functionality, if Krita gets it right, then all that 90% of the effort is worth it.

It's diminishing returns, yes, but in the end, its the extra mile that distinguishes the leaders from the also rans. It may not be any extra functionality at all - just the way its been put together that makes it a winning combination. Then the power of open source takes over and everyone benefits.

I think thats great and thats kinda what evolution is - varying the combination of a lot of existing stuff ever so slightly to see which one produces the best. So its a double edged sword - a freakin amazing one at that :)

Re:Why is being KDE important?

[chill]

Yes, it did. For the longest time The Gimp was bound by "that'll be in 2.0, using Gegl". Gegl languihed for YEARS, before recently resurfacing but still not done - not even close. This is one reason the project was forked into Film Gimp, now CinePaint.

Personally, The Gimp's interface gave me fits and I found it very hard to work in. Since I on't use it every day, it isn't something I was willing to put a huge effort into learning. Krita is much more "natural" to me and had a much shallower learning curve.

KDE integration is more than just a theme and a K-name. That would have been almost impossible with The Gimp.

Finally, there is the name "Gimp". It means "lame" or "handicapped", which was a totally stupid thing to call a program. Yes, I know it is an acronym, but ut was a stupid idea none-the-less.

Re:Why is being KDE important?

[metamatic]

Finally, there is the name "Gimp". It means "lame" or "handicapped", which was a totally stupid thing to call a program.

Oh, I don't know, that's pretty much how the UI makes it feel.

Re:Why is being KDE important?

[Enselic]

In Swedish, Krita makes total sense, it means chalk.

Re:what about RAW photo formats?

[swillden]

What options are there to edit RAW photo files under Linux? Does Krita handle those format(s)?

There are several, and yes, Krita does, too.

1. dcraw is the basis for most all F/LOSS RAW conversion tools. It's just a converter, translating from various RAW formats to 24bpp or 48bpp PPM files. It is, however, an excellent converter, so good, in fact, that it's superior to most of the commercial offerings, and some commercial tools have taken advantage of its BSD-style license to replace their proprietary engines with dcraw. It's a command-line tool, though, and since good RAW conversion requires playing a bit with parameters, it's not all that easy to use.
2. ufraw is a GUI tool built on top of dcraw that allows you to interactively fiddle with the conversion parameters to get a good conversion. It provides a pretty nice interface, including a good curves tool which is really important when you're converting to a 24bpp format like JPEG. Since the RAW image may have more than 24bpp of dynamic range, the range has to be compressed, and by tuning the range compression with the curves tool you can often retain image details that a more naive compression (like the one done by a typical digital camera) would have lost.
3. gimp-ufraw is a GIMP plugin that uses ufraw to import RAW files for editing in the GIMP. With it installed you can open RAW files in the GIMP just like any other format, with the differentce that when you open the file the ufraw interface pops up to let you control the conversion process. Since the GIMP currently only supports 24bpp color depth, the gimp-ufraw must compress the dynamic range.
4. krita uses ufraw to do the conversion. Krita isn't limited to 24bpp, but it also isn't nearly as mature or as fast as the GIMP, making it, to me, somewhat unpleasant to use.
5. rawstudio is an up and coming competitor to ufraw. It's still immature but is shaping up to be a very nice tool. It's focused on making it easier to do large numbers of RAW conversions relatively quickly.
6. bibble and bibblepro (my favorite) are commercial, closed-source tools that provide very high quality conversions, lots of tunable parameters and (esp. bibblepro) workflow-oriented features that enable the user to process lots of images quickly. For example, I took a bunch of family portraits a couple weeks ago and had nearly 200 images to sort through, identify the best and convert. Since the lighting and colors in the images were consistent through most of the images I was able to carefully tune the conversion parameters for one image and then "paste" the same parameter set to all of the others. Bibblepro costs $150 but if you do very much of this stuff, and aren't dead set on Free Software, it's an excellent choice. The non-pro version is cheaper, but I don't remember what it costs (you can guess which one I bought!).

I probably missed one or two tools. In addition, there are lots of variants of dcraw floating around with different option sets. I sometimes use one by Robert Krawitz that has option sets focused on making it possible to get from RAW to paper (using one of the very high quality Gutenprint inkjet drivers) with no loss in image quality or dynamic range. The results are far better than you can get out of any commercial print lab that I know of (most of them don't even accept anything other than 24bpp JPEGs, meaning you *must* compress the dynamic range before they print it, even though many printers can handle greater color depths).

To summarize: Yes, you can convert RAW images on Linux, even with purely Free software, and you can get excellent results, as good as you can on Windows or OS X. It may take a little more effort, though. Looking forward to when the GIMP moves to the GEGL engine, or when Krita gets faster and more full-featured, RAW conversion will be as good or better on Linux than any other platform.

Re:finally!

[tezbobobo]

Actually, my prediction is this will fail for other reasons. Photoshop is the tool of choice for me. I am the production manager for a newspaper and even if this were 10 times more capable, we still would not budge. Photoshop is part of a larger suite. It is the ability to use Photoshop in conjunction with Quark/Indesign which makes it powerful. There are a number of people who only use raster editors, but they're not in the print world.

What I'm saying is that anyone who would need 8/16 CMYK editing and profiling would still be left empty handed by the Linux world. Before anyone starts getting on my back about Scribus and 'save to PDF' crap, get out in the real world. When your dealing with printers with very specific PDF requirements, you need the customisability provided by Distiller. When they send you a colour profile to work with, It needs to be a easy as hitting Load Colour Space in Indesign. I guarantee they will not send a Scribus compatible file. And finally about Scribus - it is not the defacto industry standard.

Therefore, if you need a raster editor for Linux, you are almost guaranteed of not needing it for the print world - except for a minuscule amount of people - and can do with anything like Gimp which is sufficiently advanced for that sort of work, ie web work, backgrounds, avatars, etcetera...

My Two Cents

Terence Boylen
Production Manager
The Record Newspaper.

(Perth Western Australia)

Swedish coincidence?

[wilper]

"rita" is Swedish for "draw". Add the KDE K to get "Krita", which means "crayon" in Swedish. A coincidence?

Re:Okay, random questions...

[vurian]

1) No, the ui hasn't been "fixed" -- in 2.0 it'll be possible to drag & drop the palettes in different constellations (Qt4 provides that out of the box). And, in 2.0, you'll have only see the palettes that belong to the active view, but that's all. I like it this way and it's the standard for KOffice. There are people who like it, there are people who hate it, but I think spending development time on making it possible to accommodate both preferences is not worth it compared to features like better filters, speed improvements and so on.

2) It should be pretty good, we spent a lot of time making it possible to draw with different pressure curves for darkness, size and opacity. It is also possible to have a different current tool for your mouse, eraser and stylus (I tend to draw with the mouse set to pan and the stylus to brush). Oh, and the "paint directly checkbox" should fix your issues with the brush tool.

3) Gimp and Krita use the same gradients, patterns and brushes. File format exchange is problematic, hence the OpenRaster effort that is being spearheaded by Cyrille Berger for Krita and Oyvind Kolas for Gegl.