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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.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
- 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?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 options are there to edit RAW photo files under Linux? "
A hex editor.
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.
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.
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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.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
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.
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
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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)
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"rita" is Swedish for "draw". Add the KDE K to get "Krita", which means "crayon" in Swedish. A coincidence?