
‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 - buovjaga
https://krita.org/item/goodbye-photoshop-and-hello-krita-at-university-paris-8/
======
huuu
If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can
understand the switch.

But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop
replacement. I think that's because a lot of developers think Photoshop is
layers and blend modes. But imho the real strength of Photoshop is the
interface. Not only the GUI but also the interaction design.

I can do with Gimp what I can do with Photoshop but it will take a lot more
time. In-place text editing, attaching effects to layers (drop shadows), non
destructive editing, it's all missing from most Photoshop alternatives.

Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article):
[https://natron.inria.fr/](https://natron.inria.fr/) I never heard of it but
it's looking great!

~~~
dingaling
For me the absolute killer feature for Gimp or Krita would be a way to save
the editing history, which is currently lost with all the levels of 'undo'
when you save in native format.

Versioning for image editing; I don't know how it would be done but by Jove it
would be a time-saver.

~~~
henningtegen
I am the main developer of a new painting application called Leonardo (
[http://www.getleonardo.com](http://www.getleonardo.com) ) which include this
feature for our native .LEO file format.

Leonardo is currently in early beta.

~~~
spoiler
I gave the beta a try and it seems pretty nifty! Great job!

Since I'm an programmer who's an aspiring artist, I have a few questions:

1\. _Is there a way to turn off additive brush-layering (ie the opacity does
not change when you stroke over the same place)[1]?_ I am used to Krita and
Photoshop having an option to toggle this. The only way when the opacity
increases is when the pressure increases.

2\. _Is there a way to create custom brushes?_ I'd love to be able to create
my own. Also, Krita has some nice ways of "scripting" brushes which was nifty.
The current ones are more than fine, but I usually make certain "helper"
brushes to speed things up a little.

3\. _Do you plan to open-source certain parts of Leonardo?_ It'd be great if
you open-sourced the specification for .leo and, the brush format, so it's
easier to create conversion tools. I'm not a marketing expert, but I imagine
having the ability to import brushes from Photoshop would be a _huge_ benefit.

4\. _Do you intend to support plugins?_

\--- [1]: [http://i.imgur.com/lqa6E9r.gif](http://i.imgur.com/lqa6E9r.gif)

P.S: Sorry for dumping ideas like this.

~~~
henningtegen
1\. Yes, we have one parameter we call "flow" that does what your GIF shows.
We also have a parameter called "opacity" that does what you want to do. To
create a brush that behaves the way you want do the following: open brush
settings panel (located on the upper right of the screen), go to the "flow"
tab, change "flow pressure" to 100%, go to the opacity tab and change "opacity
pressure" to 0%.

(we need to improve the brush settings)

2\. Yes, use the same brush settings as described above. You can click on
"tip" (round circle for standard brush) to change brush tip.

3\. We might open source the brush format in the future.

4\. Maybe in a distant future. The problem with plugins is that you have one
more API to keep backward compatible.

Thanks for testing Leonardo! Please feel free to email me if you have any more
questions or feedback: henning.tegen 'at' getleonardo.com

------
bsaul
Offtopic : I recently visited paris 8 university, and eventhough i'm used to
the insanely sad state of french universities, this one won by a large margin.
This university is the closest thing you can imagine from a war zone leftover.
I was attending a presentation of an intern, and i had to ask people if the
building i was in really was still in use...

You probably have to read "inadequate support by adobe" as " we didn't have
the money for the licence anymore, and adobe didn't want to give the software
for free".

~~~
aragot
I, French, once chatted with a German and a Russian guy. We've all been
students in excellent universities/schools.

The German said: "My studen room was so small, like 16sqm, you could just fit
a desk, a bed, a shower and a sink."

I, French, said, believing I had a tougher experience: "I know what it looks
like: We were 2 per room for the same size. In winter, heating was on and off,
we had to pay attention not to touch the walls while sleeping, otherwise the
dew would wet our blankets."

Then the Russian guy came... They were 3 people in the same surface. Heating
was optional. At the coldest of the winter, the whole building's electricity
would cut off for the night because it couldn't sustain the student's heating
units. They didn't have showers at all. They had three common "bathrooms" for
the building with sinks only. They could use them at will in the evening, but
they had to take turns for the mornings. As in, Mondays and Thursdays. It was
a reputated school in Russia.

Visiting a campus in Australia is surrealistic. I'm so speechless to describe
the difference in living conditions that, when I want people to imagine the
life in Sydney, I tell them to imagine banknotes falling from the sky. That's
what the living conditions feel like _compared to the old continent_.

~~~
driverdan
16sqm isn't bad, that's about the size of most US dorms I've seen (2 people
per room). Heat cutting out is completely unacceptable though. Why would you
put up with that?

~~~
Kliment
You ask as if it were some kind of voluntary choice.

------
DigitalSea
Krita actually resembles Photoshop quite a lot, and while the feature list is
impressive, I don't think it replaces Photoshop 1:1 or is even meant too for
that matter. Krita is more aimed at digital painting, Photoshop isn't a
digital painting application, if anything, that's what Illustrator is for.

For a free application you have to give props to Krita, it looks fantastic and
plenty of digital artists and illustrators have been raving on about how great
it is since it came out. It definitely appeals to me more than Gimp, but I
would still probably use Gimp over Krita for general photo touching and
editing though. Even the about page on the Krita site itself speaks of
illustrators and more drawing purposes. I mean if it works as a Photoshop
replacement for some, then that's great. Undoubtedly a cool application.

~~~
paulojreis
> Photoshop isn't a digital painting application, if anything, that's what
> Illustrator is for.

You're wrong here. If you really mean digital painting, then Photoshop is the
tool of the trade, mostly because of the brushes "engine".

~~~
edgarvaldes
IMHO you can find a better brush engine in Corel Painter. Also, there is a
vast amount of Digital Painting and Sketching apps out there.

------
onion2k
Krita's site is under a lot of pressure right now. If you've never heard of
it, learn more here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita)

It's a Photoshop alternative in the same way Word is an alternative to vim.
You _can_ use them both to make a text file, but they have very different
specialisms. Krita is a very capable drawing package while Photoshop is a
print finishing app that got _really_ bloated.

~~~
eru
What do you mean by pressure?

~~~
onion2k
A lot of people are trying to look at it just to find out what Krita is, which
is putting a high additional load on their server. Hence the link to Wikipedia
instead.

(Maybe it's because I'm English, but I really thought 'pressure' would be
quite obvious in this context.)

~~~
keithpeter
"The Krita Web site is seeing very high traffic at the moment" might be better
for a multi-lingual audience.

Glad to see free/open source software getting some exposure. My College makes
GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LibreOffice available on its Windows desktops
_alongside_ commercial alternatives. Students get used to both.

------
Morgawr
If you are interested about Krita, may I also recommend checking out MyPaint?
The two programs are similar but very different also, I routinely use them
both.

What I like about Krita is that it's very powerful, its interface has a lot of
stuff going on (not a bad thing, it's very easy to understand and use) and
it's definitely the better digital painting application out of the two.

What I think works better in MyPaint is sketching and quick notes/drawing. It
has the concept of infinite canvas where you can keep drawing and drawing and
drawing. I also prefer its preset brushes over Krita's, but that's just
personal preference. My normal workflow is, if I want to draw some painting
with definite proportions and size and everything, I use Krita. If I just want
to sketch something or jot down some notes, I use MyPaint. My last infinite
canvas with MyPaint ended up being over 200MB of png with a very ridiculous
resolution because I kept writing and writing and zooming and zooming all my
notes and I didn't notice how big it actually became (I use it as a big
whiteboard for sketching my projects).

~~~
davidgerard
+1 - the loved one does a lot of digital painting and generally uses MyPaint.
Though Krita is pretty good too, and has specialised from being KDE's "me
too!" for GIMP to being specifically tweaked for artists.

------
ehurrell
While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and
designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment
"you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to
beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to
double-check the results.

~~~
carlob
That's what people said about Quark XPress, but failing to have a smooth
transition to MacOSX doomed them. It didn't even have to be a very smooth one,
since Adobe took forever to ship the ancestor of creative suite.

~~~
ehurrell
I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be
because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't
interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside
it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Adobe have done something - Creative Cloud and subscription-based purchasing -
and it's given the indie Mac app market (Pixelmator etc.) a huge boost.

More, I suspect there's a delayed effect where people are still holding on to
their non-subscription copies of CS. I'm a heavy Illustrator user; I'm still
on CS 5.5, but when the time comes to upgrade it won't be to Illustrator CC.

~~~
ehurrell
I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a
long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me
some artist friends really like it.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Yes, I'd agree that it's been common to "skip a version" or similar.
Effectively you get Photoshop (or whatever) at a reduced cost.

So you can see the logic behind Creative Cloud: Adobe have both prevented this
behaviour, and struck against piracy. They're clearly betting that this will
outweigh the reduced sales, and that Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign are so
essential that few people will pass it up. I'm not convinced they're right.

~~~
tormeh
Without piracy Adobe would die. It's essentially their noncommercial
subscription plan and keeps Photoshop available to students etc. It's a part
of Adobe's business model.

------
Coding_Cat
I absolutely adore Krita, it really is one of my favourite programs. It's very
intuitive in its controls and very good at "getting out of the way" when
you're painting.

For example, it has a quick-selection wheel that pops up when you press right
mouse button. It's a radial design with the outer layer being your favourite
brushes, then your last used colours and in the middle it has a colour-
selection triangle. This means that if you're drawing in full-screen mode
(hiding all the controls) you hardly ever have to switch back to the menus to
tweak stuff (changing brush size is also done by holding shift and dragging),
only to switch layers really. (that is my work-flow at least)

And, if anyone is looking for an OSS project to contribute too: Development is
very active and open, it's written in C++ Qt/KDE. :)

------
raverbashing
"but because of inadequate support from the company the department decided to
replace that."

I read that as "Adobe got greedy"

Well, good for Krita.

Part of PS/AI success is that students use it at Uni (and later on at work,
and most of the workflow, even going to printing uses it)

~~~
ygra
Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's
products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My
workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished
SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice,
but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another
colour space _and_ colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved
to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore
it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not
the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding
anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible,
too. Except for Illustrator.¹

The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free
(both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn
hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there
are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™.

TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because
that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the
alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas.

_____

¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an
experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch
from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.

~~~
patrickg
Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos
for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk +
spotcolors etc.
([https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html](https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html))

~~~
ht_th
I almost always use the cards from either [http://svg-
cards.sourceforge.net/](http://svg-cards.sourceforge.net/) or
[https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-
cards/;](https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-cards/;) both are open
source.

------
muraiki
I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe
launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise
of being able to offer updates more often, along with providing some small
features like storage of files in their cloud. Basically, they wanted to
charge yearly since users would generally skip a version or two before seeing
enough of a motivating feature improvement. (Prior to this Adobe tried x.5
upgrades) The cost of licenses varies depending upon an institution's
bargaining ability.

For the "benefit" of getting SaaS we could either pay an extraordinary amount
over our previous license in order to get the same number of licenses, or we
could get a site license for only a fairly large amount more than our previous
license. Mind you that we had little warning about this change, and academic
budgets tend not to follow the typical business cycle.

Now the benefit of the site license is that all your users can become
dependent upon Adobe, so when they raise the cost in the future you'll be more
than obligated to agree.

Upon hearing about this changes, which brought _no real benefit to users_, one
local school actually had Adobe's salesperson ejected from campus. :)

In terms of support, CC had a special enterprise edition with its own
installer that generated CC packages for deployment. It was not the smoothest
deployment for many institutions, it was difficult to maintain, and when I ran
into a problem with licensing it took running into a higher level Adobe rep at
a conference before I could make progress (our own rep eventually stopped
helping). Also, there was some software included in Enterprise CC -- software
that could actually benefit from "the cloud" in creating websites -- that
would not work out in a mult-user environment unless you wanted your users to
erase each other's Adobe cloud hosted websites. Yes, this behavior was
documented, but being that it was one of the few useful "cloud" features CC
offered, it was pretty disappointing for it to be unusable with our site
license.

Entrepreneurs, listen. I know education is a tough nut to crack. But I'm sure
it's not just education that is fed up with Adobe. Remember that Quark was
once one of the big guys, but their licensing and support was so bad that
InDesign took over. Yes, I had teachers complaining about Quark's licensing --
not the cost, but the horrible, broken license server. These kinds of things
can destroy your business.

PS: You would not believe how many users ask for Adobe Acrobat just to save
Word files as PDFs. Office has (or at least had) a built-in plugin to do this,
and OS X supports exporting to PDFs natively via print.

------
unhammer
Getting a presentation from [http://davidrevoy.com/](http://davidrevoy.com/)
sounds like a motivating way to start using the program :-)

~~~
boudewijnrempt
There's a really nice video course for Krita:
[https://krita.org/item/muses/](https://krita.org/item/muses/)

------
michaelbuddy
Krita has a few unique features. I love the tiling mode to help you draw
seamless textures. I love all the brushes out of the box. I do not love the
performance on Windows. Maybe Linux is better but both 2.8 and the new beta if
you start drawing with big brushes on a big canvas, even with a late model
computer setup, it bogs really bad. Now you could argue that a 4K image is
gonna take performance. BUT it's the first preset document with like 3-4
brushstrokes and it's starting to lag bad. I would consider my experience with
the windows version Alpha at best due to performance issues.

If you like graphics and want to do something to save money on a lot of
licenses - look at replacing illustrator with Xara on Windows or Affinity
Designer on Mac. Or try to roll back to an earlier Photoshop like CS2. I
really really want to love Krita and I'll give it a shot on Linux when I get
the chance but sheesh, any classroom wanting to adopt it en masse is
definitely trading one evil for another.

I have no desire to buy photoshop cc at this moment in time, I like to
purchase licenses. I'll stick with CS6 as absolutely long as possible. But
educational pricing on Adobe software has always been pretty good. Time spent
in school is impermanent so it fits pretty well with the CC model.

------
aidos
It looks nice, never seen it before but I'll try to find the time to have a
play with it.

Photoshop, like other well established tools, is nearly impossible to replace.
There are whole industries born with it in their hands, and you'd have to pry
it from their cold dead bodies.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with PS. It does so much more than I
could ever imagine, with features I will never know about.

For web development it's a bit suboptimal, but it's still the standard. It's
not streamlined - we have pages with standard headers etc, I know there's some
support for embedding PS files in other PS files but it's not the promoted way
of working. It allows people create graphics that are unsuitable for the web /
hard to unpick into layers that you can use (better css support has made
things better but I spent over a decade trying to get suitable flat images out
of PS files).

These days, no longer working with designers in an agency, I just do
everything straight to html/css so that it works without jumping through any
hoops.

------
zirkonit
Whoa, today is the first time I've heard about Krita. Visually, seems very
powerful, original, and a much more interesting PS replacement than Gimp is.

Gotta download and try it out!

~~~
shmerl
It's pretty well known to KDE users ;)

------
jjcm
Krita is great for what it is, but saying 'Goodbye Photoshop, hello Krita' is
akin to saying 'Goodbye tractor, hello vespa'. If all you're doing is trying
to get from A to B, a vespa certainly may be a better option, but don't think
that a vespa can do what a tractor can do.

Even GIMP is far behind what Photoshop can provide. Want a really good look at
what the differences are between the two? Look at GIMP's development roadmap:
[http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap](http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap)

It's usually a pretty quick view of the delta between the two programs. Krita
is missing most if not all of these too. Some of the big features Krita and
Gimp are missing:

1.) Non-destructive editing capabilities. Krita and GIMP have masks, which is
a start, but neither support smart objects (dynamically sized/edited objects
that don't destroy/replace pixel data on resize) or adjustment layers. This is
huge. Unless you're a painter, no one in the industry uses destructive editing
techniques.

2.) High bit depth. This is another big one. Since most of the crowd on HN are
more familiar with code than design, I'll put it in code terms: pretend that
you had to do precision work, but a Math.floor() function was called every
time you did any arithmetic. When you're doing light adjustments/corrections,
blending, color correction, and such, the work can introduce heavy banding
when you're working in 8bits per channel. By switching to 16bits per channel
you provide way more fidelity on the individual pixel level, eliminating a lot
of banding in your final product. Even if you have a monitor that can only
display 8bit color, working in 16 can change your end result drastically.

There are some minor features too that bug me. The inability to add a mask to
layer groups is a big one for me. Layer effects (while often overused and
gaudy) can be really helpful for design work - need to change the color of an
icon that's raster art? Just drop a color overlay on it. If you have style
swatches, it can be really easy to do fast mockups using this. This in
conjunction with Layer Comps (also something missing in Gimp right now) can
really help in switching between two or more alts.

These programs are a long way off from being Photoshop. Whenever I see a story
like this where Photoshop is replaced by GIMP/Krita, what I see isn't that
these things have the capability to replace Photoshop, but rather that the
people who replaced it were only using a tiny subset of Photoshop's
capabilities, and found something more suited to their usecase.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Well, I guess you haven't checked out Krita since 2003. Krita got adjustment
layers (which are basically masks with a filter that applies right there in
the layer stack) in 2004 (2005, it's a long time, and I can't be arsed to
check on the exact date).

16 bit integer, 16 bit float and 32 bit float followed in the same year.
OpenEXR has been supported for about a decade. OpenColorIO was added two years
ago, so there's the LUT functionality needed for movie and vfx people.

And have you actually tried Krita? I mean, group layers were a 2004 or 2005
addition as well, and you can add transparency masks, local selection masks,
filter masks or transformation masks to groups just like you can add them to
vector, pixel, clone, filter, fill (color, pattern, other generators) or file
(external file added in your layer stack) layers.

Smart objects? There are vector layers, where you can add any svg image or
editable vector object.

Layer effects? Well, that's something we're working on. It isn't too
difficult, but a lot of work just typing in all that code. Previously, we
assumed that people could make do with filter masks and layers, but well, this
is one thing where we'll do a clone job, I guess.

Color overlays? Gosh, take a fill layer with a color and the right blending
mode. Or do something else -- a HSV colorize filter mask, for instance.

------
JeremyMorgan
I've been really surprised recently by Paint.Net. It actually does a lot of
the "basic" photoshop stuff really well. It may be difficult to create
graphical masterpiece type stuff but for the basics it's great.

Would be nice to see something like that cross platform with a decent UI. Gimp
is cool and I've spent countless hours with it but the interface is simply
clunky.

Will definitely check this out.

------
stefanix
Discovered Krita a while a ago. The brush parameter system is excellent. You
can really go nuts with all the settings. Defaults are good too.

------
alphadevx
Never used it before, on first glance it reminds me of Manga Studio (which I
love). Anyone ever use both and can offer a comparison?

------
amelius
I'm looking for a system that can do calligraphic pens along paths. (I use
this for cartoons).

I know Adobe Illustrator can do this. But Inkscape can't. (Yes, it has a
calligraphic pen, but it is too direct, i.e., it doesn't allow the paths to be
changed using the anchorpoints; it also doesn't allow the calligraphic strokes
to be converted to paths).

------
zak_mc_kracken
I suspect the cost had more to do with the switch than the product itself but
it's a bit mystifying to me while a school focused on art and image editing
wouldn't teach Photoshop to their students since there's a 100% chance they
will have to work with it on their job.

------
awjr
The Krita website is running a tad slow [https://krita.org/download/krita-
desktop/](https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/) however download is
possible if you are patient.

Looks like a very interesting tool for creating art/comics.

~~~
GordonS
I suspect the current performance of the website might have something to do
with Hacker News :)

~~~
raghukamath
the website is up again!! :)

------
otikik
Just to let you know, I confirm that Krita is _very_ unstable in a Mac. The
"fatal failure and you lost everything you did" kind of unstable. So far I can
not recommend Krita+Mac for anything other than tinkering around.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Definitely! Don't use Krita on OSX for real work. It's labeled as
_experimental_ for a reason! And that's the guy who did the port talking.
Also, there are lots of features missing still. It's there to show that it can
be done, but the Mac port of Krita needs funding -- about 30k euros, at least,
to make it work well.

------
frankzander
Krita is not an Photoshop surrogat ... it's not even a surrogat for Gimp.

~~~
leinir
This is a very apt statement. It is not a surrogate for anything. Krita is its
own thing. A tool designed very specifically for digital painting, and not
trying to clone or replace anything. That it /can/ replace some things is a
lucky coincidence.

------
iamcreasy
Anyone knows if we can access the 4 hour long David Revoy presentation? It
would have been awesome!

------
ThinkBeat
Krita doesnt have proper support or Macs yet.

------
evo_9
Obligatory Pixelmater mention.

------
forrestthewoods
What a load of bullshit. Photoshop for students is $10 a month. That's $120 a
year. Most students at most schools are throwing away probably $1000/year on
textbooks (in the US).

Krita doesn't even work on OS X for crying out loud. This is not good for the
students. Not good at all.

