
Krita 4.3.0 - dragonsh
https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-3-0-released/
======
laputan_machine
Krita is absolutely incredible FOSS, really well polished, feels a joy to use,
very intuitive.

There are a few quirks, such as changing the colour of a vector, you have to
'stroke' it (i.e. turn it into a raster) with a particular colour -- the
feedback loop for this is fairly painful, but admittedly there's lots about
the software I don't know, so there may be a better way.

~~~
natex
You can easily change color of a vector (stroke or fill) in the Tool Options
docker.

------
zachruss92
Krita is one of my favorite open source projects. I discovered it by accident
while learning about pixel art, it's quite popular for Indy game development.
I really appreciate it's polished interface that is not always a priority in
OSS.

~~~
app4soft
> I really appreciate it's polished interface that is not always a priority in
> OSS.

What you would say about AzPainter UI?[0]

[0]
[https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter](https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter)

~~~
ubercow13
I _love_ AzPainter, it's very reminiscent of PaintTool SAI on Windows. It's
one of the snappiest programs I've ever used, it starts faster than vim. This
is no doubt because it is written using its own simple UI toolkit. But it's
significantly less powerful than Krita/Gimp and the UI is quite quirky
sometimes, for example the way cropping works in the B version and the normal
version are completely different. But I use it despite these things because I
find it quite charming.

~~~
app4soft
> _I love AzPainter, it 's very reminiscent of PaintTool SAI on Windows... and
> the UI is quite quirky sometimes_

To be honest, _AzPainter2_ [0] (legacy version for Windows-only) had different
UI & toolkit from actual _AzPainter V2_ [1] (for Unix-like OS).

Actual _AzPainter V2_ UI has modern look (single window & multi window mnodes;
light & dark built-in themes), which could be customized additionally with
user created themes.[2]

> _But it 's significantly less powerful than Krita/Gimp_

It really depend on what you needs from painting app.

AzPainter has wide range of features & is 10 times faster in comparison to
Krita/GIMP.

Also, if compare _AppImage package size_ : AzPainter binary size is less than
3.0 Megabyte, where size of each binaries for Krita/GIMP actually reached near
200 Megabyte.

There is wiki-page (WIP) with comparison of _AzPainter_ Vs GIMP & Krita.[3]

> _for example the way cropping works in the B version and the normal version
> are completely different_

 _AzPainterB V2_ [3] is fully diferent from _AzPainter V2_ by design.

[0]
[http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA033749/](http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA033749/)

[1]
[http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainter.html](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainter.html)

[2]
[https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Themes](https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Themes)

[3] [https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Compare-
AzPainter...](https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Compare-AzPainter-vs-
GIMP-and-Krita)

[4]
[http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainterb.html](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainterb.html)

~~~
ubercow13
Yep, I'm only familiar with the V2 one and I never used the old Windows app.

It's true as a painting program it is more comparably powerful. One thing I
have to be careful of when using it to edit existing images is that it doesn't
support colour profiles AFAIK, so edits can be lossy if the image isn't sRGB.

~~~
app4soft
> _it doesn 't support colour profiles AFAIK, so edits can be lossy if the
> image isn't sRGB._

To be clear, _AzPainter V2_ actually in under heavy rewriting (next generation
would get new toolkit with Wayland support & more features).

As for now you could add feature request & bug reports for _AzPainter V2_
here.[0]

[0]
[https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues](https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues)

------
beering
Krita is awesome now, but it definitely wasn't showing great promise back in
its early days. Years and years ago, it was meant to fill in the image-editor
hole in the KOffice app suite. Basically, it was trying to be GIMP-but-KDE
even though it was doomed to have fewer development resources because GIMP
already existed.

I tried to use Krita back in its KOffice days. It felt like a bunch of
toolbars slapped together around an a basic image editor, and it was unstable
and missing features. Imagine my surprise when it reappeared years later and
looked and felt like a completely different program.

Around 2009 (according to Wikipedia) they decided to focus on one particular
niche - digital painting, and the goal went from "be GIMP but for KDE" to "be
the best digital painting program" and it's been a night and day difference.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
I started working on Krita end of 2003; long after the application was added
to KOffice and had gone through the KImageShop and KRayon names. It could do
nothing but load images... In 2004, people had joined me to hack on it. We had
the first release in 2005, and honestly, if it hadn't been for Krita...
KOffice 1.5 would not have been released. After 1.6 we realized we needed a
new direction, though... And I never was the first maintainer of
KImageShop/Krayon/Krita, of course.

~~~
kinow
It would be fun to see some screenshots with the evolution of Krita.

------
lollerz
I like that there is a paid version through Steam and Windows Store just to
support the developement. More FOSS projects should do that

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Are there any additional features in those versions? I get the impression
there are not, in which case I'd rather just donate, so Valve don't take a
cut.

~~~
o-__-o
Wow I could understand that mentality about the Microsoft store, but steam?
They are the most indie friendly platform.

Maybe ppl still upset that HL3 was the biggest hoax since Duke Nukem Forever?
But before I let you finish, TF2 hats and the steam platform were the two best
things Valve ever did for the world.

~~~
vimslayer
I didn't read parent comment as "Microsoft and Valve are bad and I don't want
to give them a dime, ever". I read it as "I want to direct 100% of my donation
to the project I'm looking to support, Krita". Which sounds reasonable.

~~~
Kye
Microsoft only takes 5%. That's a good deal for the ease of installing and
updating.

------
mekkkkkk
Krita is an excellent piece of software.

A year ago I transitioned from the Adobe suite to FOSS. To replace
Illustrator, Inkscape was perfect, but it took a while before I found a good
Photoshop replacement. Tried GIMP, Paint.NET and Seashore. All of them had
issues either with stability, feature set or UX.

When I finally tried Krita, my search was over. Even if it is clearly aimed at
digital painting (which I don't do a lot) it is great for general bitmap
tasks. And incredibly stable. It just feels like premium software.

On some level it is subjective of course, but I think everyone should give it
a try.

Thanks Krita!

~~~
distances
I've always thought Krita is a painting app. My image editing needs are pretty
modest developer tasks: cropping, scaling, exports to different formats,
occasional curve edits on photos. So no painting, just editing mostly designs,
sometimes photos.

I've really been pretty happy with Gimp. Would Krita also cover these tasks?

~~~
nacs
Absolutely. Krita easily has all of these features and more.

I honestly don't like how it calls itself "just" a drawing/painting program as
it seems to be just as capable as Photoshop if not better. Also waaay better
UI/UX than GIMP. Give it a go.

~~~
distances
Thanks! I will. I'm already using a KDE based system so being Qt app Krita
would fit in just nicely.

------
loopz
I find this drawing program simpler to use than GIMP, while having lots of
advanced functionality and maturity.

~~~
Santosh83
GIMP is a general image editing software while Krita focuses quite
specifically on digital painting and art, so it is not surprising that you
find it more ergonomic for drawing.

~~~
mschuetz
I don't to digital painting and art and I still prefer Krita. Although prefer
is the wrong term, I despise GIMPs botched, unituitive and cumbersome UI so
much, I'd rather code a figure in html/javascript and canvas or svg, before
I'd use GIMP. Krita on the other hand is relatively nice to use.

~~~
zelphirkalt
Initially it took some getting used to Gimp, but that was years ago, when I
had not used any GNU/Linux distribution and was still a Windows XP user. Now I
find Gimp's UI actually pretty logical and everything has its place. Not sure
what people talk about when they complain about Gimp UI. Perhaps you can shed
some light on the details you do not like?

~~~
mschuetz
It's been many years since I've used it the last time but I can remember that
even the simplest tasks required googling and actively remembering how they
were done because nothing was intuitive or logical. And the layer system was
virtually unusable, I couldn't figure it out. In Krita or inkscape, the UI
just makes much more sense so they are not as infuriating to work with.

~~~
tux1968
That was my initial feeling about GIMP when I first tried to use it years and
years ago. After many false starts and head scratching, the logic of it
finally sunk in and now I find it pretty straightforward and logical. You just
have to find a way to get over the very frustrating hump of understanding its
basic design. But if all your needs are met by a program that doesn't demand
that initial investment, all the better.

------
gcmrtc
Me and my daughters love Krita. Even with a cheap pen tablet it's a lot of
fun. I set up a monthly payment of 1€, a small contribution to its
development.

~~~
natex
My kids use it too. Looking forward to the new watercolor brushes.

------
wickerman
I do all my illustration work on Krita. I absolutely love it, after spending
most of my career working on photoshop. I use a Cintiq Wacom tablet on Linux
Mint and it works wonders.

------
haunter
I wish more open source projects have a focus on the user interface. Krita is
really good in that.

------
abrookewood
Krita is absolutely brilliant and works really well with drawing tablets.

------
jakobdabo
Can anybody give a recommendation? What would be the best Free tool for a kid
interested in Modern Art [1] (generally abstract, she likes the works of
Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko, for example), who'd like to learn to do
something like that digitally? Is Krita good for that?

Thank you.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art)

~~~
pkaye
Krita has a lot of brush effects she would be able to use (like oil, chalk,
watercolor) however you want to use a graphics tablet to use it in a natural
and intuitive manner.

~~~
jakobdabo
Thanks! Can you recommend a nice tablet with a quality display? She's obsessed
with colors, color-mixing, tones, shades, etc., so I think a display with a
broad and accurate gamut is a must-have for artists.

~~~
pkaye
There is a list of supported tablets on the Krita website. I think Wacom and
Huion are the most popular. Wacom is mainstream and well supported but more
expensive.

[https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/list_supported_ta...](https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/list_supported_tablets.html)

Also check out David Revoy. He has a great deal of tutorials using Krita.

[https://www.davidrevoy.com/categorie3/tutorials-brushes-
extr...](https://www.davidrevoy.com/categorie3/tutorials-brushes-extras)

In terms of displays, I just use a high quality IPS monitor. Some people use
tablets with screens because I have no experience with that.

------
29athrowaway
Krita feels just better than GIMP + MyPaint. Also works better on HiDPI.

~~~
xvilka
GIMP stuck at GTK 2 which prevents them to work properly on modern hardware. I
hope they release 3rd version soon. They should have made Kickstarter
campaigns like Krita did.

~~~
HenriNext
Funny that GTK was originally created for GIMP (GTK was acronym of "Gimp
ToolKit"), and now they are 10 years behind the latest version of their own
toolkit.

~~~
coliveira
This shows how crazy the GTK rewrite was. Not even GIMP was willing to rewrite
its code to use the latest version.

------
Kye
It would be cool if Krita's continued excellence encouraged other user-facing
open source to focus on usability. They could push software to be better the
way Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle and focus on desktop usability/stability
pushed Linux in general to get better.

------
aaanotherhnfolk
My favorite in this space has always been Paint.net, but it is Windows only. I
tried Krita a couple years back and it was too buggy to become my OSX
alternative. But reading in this announcement that they've spent a year
focusing on bugfixes warrants giving them another try.

~~~
morganvachon
There is a Linux-first clone of Paint.net called Pinta[1], but development
stalled a few years ago[2] and the lead developer was asking for contributions
to the codebase as of six months ago[3]. It has since been pulled from several
distros' repositories, though it can of course still be built from source. It
was a fantastic alternative to Paint.net when it was in development, but the
last official release was quite buggy. Thankfully, work has resumed on it[4]
and hopefully it will have another stable release soon.

[1] [https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/](https://pinta-
project.com/pintaproject/pinta/)

[2] [https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/releases/1-6](https://pinta-
project.com/pintaproject/pinta/releases/1-6)

[3]
[https://communiroo.com/PintaProject/pinta/discussions/370/pi...](https://communiroo.com/PintaProject/pinta/discussions/370/pinta-
was-great-now-non-functional)

[4] [https://launchpad.net/~pinta-
maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/pin...](https://launchpad.net/~pinta-
maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/pinta-daily)

On the other side, I can say that Krita has definitely improved over the
years; it's stable enough now for me to use at work as a Photoshop alternative
on Windows (though I still do most light editing in Paint.net).

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
I only recently discovered Krista, during the pandemic my son was not at
school. I wanted to encourage some creativity and had a old pen tablet.

What an amazing software. Thank you.

------
wiz21c
I've used Krita a few hours and it's very stable.

------
Maha-pudma
Are there any guides on how to get started with this?

~~~
zakki
I found this YouTube a week ago:
[https://youtu.be/TH2EDTNjvBw](https://youtu.be/TH2EDTNjvBw)

~~~
Maha-pudma
Thanks, I'll give it a look. I can draw cartoons by hand but have never tried
on a computer before short of trying with a mouse which never works.

------
Borlands
Amazing piece of software, with pleasant UI and really great funcionality.

------
whatsmyusername
The only thing preventing us from pushing Krita instead of GIMP on laptops is
the anime startup splash.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Well, if that is SO important, you can, on windows, create your own .lnk file
adding the --no-splash startup option, on Linux add it to the .desktop file
and on MacOS do whatever people do on MacOS.

But honestly... I cannot imagine any environment where Tyson's Kiki splash
images are a real problem.

~~~
zanny
Just FYI folks _this_ is quality assurance, when one of the main devs is
replying to the bottom comments on the HN thread.

