
Krita 4.0 – A painting app for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists - reddotX
https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-0-0-released/
======
headsoup
I'm very much an amateur but Krita is a great piece of software for me and
does everything I need so far, for free. Much easier to use than GIMP, seems
quite comparable to Photoshop and the development is going strong.

It's also neat that they now include by default a lot of the deevad brushes as
it's a broad selection. Keep up the good work Krita team.

~~~
JoeDaDude
I like good tools as much as anybody, but I am always impressed with what a
little talent and practice can do with existing tools. This story was in the
news lately, about a woman that uses nothing but MS Paint:

[https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-
art/](https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/)

~~~
mattigames
That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing
but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made
their lives more difficult by purpose.

~~~
steamer25
I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make
music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to
yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to
me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.

Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints
promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a
different mindset than you're used to.

I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a
competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered
capacity free of such artificial handicaps.

Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make
extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very
evident when they're unplugged:

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290](https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290)

Music video for the same song: [https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-
_fU](https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-_fU)

~~~
Pamar
Regarding the “making composition difficult on purpose” I suggest the book
“Trust the process: an artist’s guide to letting go”
([https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570))
which has lots of interesting material on how to stimulate creativity, and
explicit advice about how to use the limitations you have as stepping stones
to move forward instead of like constraints that impede your progress.

------
Findus23
If you have not already check out David Revoy. He creates beautiful art using
only open source tools:

[https://www.peppercarrot.com/](https://www.peppercarrot.com/)

~~~
cheunste
Wow, that webcomic is really well drawn and interesting as well. I'll have to
keep my eyes on this one.

~~~
Findus23
Tipp: When you click on the "HD"-Button you get a really high-res version
(2500px wide)

------
kriro
I'm not an artist. Krita, Inkscape, Gimp, Blender is a pretty great
combination of tools to wiggle along as a programmer.

Congrats on 4.0. Great work.

~~~
nnq
Gimp and Inkscape are both _extremely_ sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in
usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use
Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res
pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was
the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of
the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is
horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves
heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its
popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator
has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally.

Linux desktop _desperately needs:_

1\. a good _raster photo editor_ with non-destructive editing capabilities

2\. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy
work on _stabilizing_ it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask
(though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around
masking to)

If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on
Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can
produce something _intuitive_ and _stable!_ Not need for tons of features,
just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And _using a "hipster"
new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new
developers..._ few people are willing to hack on an open source project for
the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...

~~~
hjek
> 2\. a good vector graphics app

Check out Scribus. I'd describe it as more of a serious publishing app, where
Inkscape may be more for artists. Scribus uses less resources and supports
multipage documents.

I've also had issues with the cage transform in Gimp, but it's fixed now, so
if you're on Ubuntu, just add a PPA with the latest version of Gimp.

> 1\. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities

I think Darktable does non-desctructive editing but I haven't used it myself.

> Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in
> usability, Photoshop in both features and stability.

I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software
for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely,
it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this
lack of features by not sharing their code for those.

It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra
features. What are those features missing in Gimp? (Gimp _does_ have CMYK
editing, if you install the gimp-plugin-registry package.)

> Linux desktop desperately needs:

Those non-free programs you mentioned can probably be run with Wine on
GNU/Linux.

~~~
nnq
TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid
stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything
else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that
annoys everyone.

> give up your freedom for a few extra features

Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those
features simply feel _perfectly implemented,_ they just f work. Heck, I even
use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more
natural than Illustrator.

And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the
day.

And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit.
Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works.
Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well
built".

Gimp is just bad at... _everything:_ (1) performance feels horrible, like
doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very
inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers
and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy
doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard
shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly
stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an
adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from
the layers panel etc.

I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I
could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it.
But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you
can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non-
destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff
like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same
doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was
once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of
touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and
the job got done.

Honestly, its hard to say what's _wrong_ with Gimp, because I can't figure out
anything _fully right_ about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe
Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and
unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how
off things are.

~~~
xbkingx
> Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out
> anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe
> Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and
> unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of
> how off things are.

Ugh, this is so true. I've never done professional graphics work, but I've
used Photoshop on and off for small projects since they added color in version
2.0. I WANT to like Gimp and I give it a shot every year or so, but it never
clicks. I mentally prepare myself for a different experience and try to keep
an open mind, all while considering that my comfort will change with use, and
I always leave disappointed and frustrated.

I mean, how do they make simply selecting something difficult? Even layers
were unintuitive last time I tried Gimp. I've used a lot of janky software,
but Gimp is the most bewildering case. You immediately see really good ideas
expressed in the UI and then you interact with it and the whole thing
collapses.

I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, so I fired Gimp up for the
first time in months (v2.8.22 - I keep it updated with Chocolatey). It took 2
minutes to load (no image) from an NvME drive on a quad core system with a
1080Ti. That's 1.5 minutes longer than any other program I have installed.
Probably not optimized at install-time, when the user has time to burn, and
instead opts for optimization at first launch, when the user actually needs to
use the software. Bad start.

Open image. Select part and adjust brightness. Click OK. Click and drag
outside selection... and the brightness dialog pops up? But, wha... B/C is a
tool. Weird but okay. Apply filter, click and drag, and B/C again? Undo, wait,
no, have to cancel. Alright, let's move this selected area over... Why is the
entire canvas being moved? Undo. Trying rotate... 3 icons from the move tool
on the same line, but it only rotates the selection. Of course. Rotate
selection and hit enter... nothing. Oh, the rotate dialog isn't in focus. No,
wait. It is. Enter does nothing. Unfocused? Now Enter works.

Adding a layer. First click on new layer button not detected. Second works.
Select background layer and marquee a small part. Ctrl+C. Select newly made
layer. Ctrl+V. Probably can't see it because it's pasted on top of the exact
same part of the image. Select move tool, click and drag, no, nothing was
pasted. Click and drag again to be sure and the part I rotated earlier now
moves across the screen. Hide background and 'floating selection' to confirm
nothing pasted.

3.5 minutes and about 15 undos/cancel button clicks to do 'all' that. I
repeated the above in Paint.NET, including launching, in 15 seconds and 2
undos from one minor quirk.

It's like a luxury car assembled inside out. In theory, you have a luxury car,
but in practice you're sitting on cold metal with an engine block obstructing
your view of the road. Sure, a bunch of mechanics could take pieces off and
attach them properly, but you've been driving the car around town for 22 years
and this is the best they've managed so far.

~~~
soperj
I use gimp semi frequently. It's never taken more than 10-20 seconds to start
up. 2 minutes sounds like a huge outlier... I'm running on a x230 (over 5 year
old laptop with an i5) w/ Fedora.

~~~
xbkingx
Just ran it again. This time it took 23 seconds. All these on Win 10 x64 1709
using the highly accurate "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi..." technique.

PC: 6700k OC @4.5GHz, 32GB/1TB NvME (4x PCIE mode), 1080Ti, most background
processes off: GIMP 1st run: 90 s. GIMP 2nd run: 23 s. Paint.Net 1st run: 3 s.
Paint.Net 2nd run: 2 s. Paint3D 1st run: 2 s. Paint3D 2nd run: 2 s. Krita 1st
run: 7 s. (v3.3.3 first run ever) Krita 2nd run: 4 s. Gravit Designer: 6 s.
(first run ever) Visual Studio 2017 takes 18 seconds with a handful of
extensions.

Ugh, VS2017 update out...

Outdated version of Photoshop WHILE updating Visual Studio, 1st launch: 17 s.
Krita WHILE crypto-mining on 3/4 logical processors (pinned to 100% usage): 4
s. Paint.NET while opening 30 tabs in Chrome: 4 s. GIMP while opening
different 30 tabs in Chrome: 25 s. (reduce the chance of cache loads, not
scientific, Chrome finished loading first, by about 10 seconds)

On a Surface Pro 3 (Core i7)... Krita while installing Windows updates, 1st
run ever: 17 s. Krita 2nd run, updates still installing: 10 s GIMP, no updates
installing, clean GIMP install, 1st run: 243 second. Yes, 243. GIMP 2nd run:
17 s.

Tried GIMP again on my desktop, no unusual background processes. 3rd launch:
18 s. 4th launch with mining pinning 3/4 CPU: 23 s.

So, overall, one of the most often recommended FOSS alternatives, even by ME,
is a distant last place in these extremely ad hoc, unscientific, off the cuff
tests across 2 machines. It also made me hate Mississippi. I was really hoping
GIMP would have some trick up its sleeve to surprise me, but it did not. And
this is not far from my past experience on Windows.

Maybe (hopefully) it's better on Linux... one sec...

Mint in VirtualBox: GIMP 1st run: 5 s GIMP 2nd run:2 s.

Hahaha. That just tickles me. It appears GIMP is the iTunes of graphics
programs on Windows. Down the rabbit hole...

Within Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu with vcxsrv as X Windows server)
GIMP 1st run (with some bash errors related to OpenGL): 43 s. GIMP 2nd run
(still some errors): 5 s.

It's like they anti-optimized the thing for Windows.

Take away: I'll never recommend GIMP to a Windows user again. Linux? Sure, if
the UI doesn't bother you, enjoy! But, it's a miserable experience on Windows
compared to every other option and should only be used if a particular
function can only be performed in GIMP.

~~~
soperj
Just wanted to say kudos! That's awesome that you did all this. Should relay
this to the gimp people some how.

------
Hoasi
Flabbergasting. Krita's development started almost 20 years ago... and it is
the first time I ever hear about it.

~~~
lmm
My impression is that the American software community sometimes doesn't pay
much attention to what's coming out of Europe. Have a look at other KDE-based
programs if you haven't already - IME KVirc, Kile, KTorrent, and indeed
Konqueror and KMail are best-in-class.

~~~
Moru
I think a large portion of the problem discovering things here is that they
often have very counterintuitive names. Krita is very logical for me as
swedish but outside Sweden not so much I guess.

Apache is a webserver? Really? Konqueror is probably a game, right? :-)

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Well... The project was originally named KImageShop. Not entirely
unexpectedly, that ended in lawyerly trouble. Not initiated by Adobe, though!

------
buovjaga
I was happy to see Boud create this guide for non-dev contributions recently:
[https://phabricator.kde.org/T7842](https://phabricator.kde.org/T7842)

"There are over 1000 bugs and 350 wishes reported against Krita per year, and
that number is rising. The Krita developers cannot handle that stream on their
own! Please consider helping out by triaging bugs. This document gives some
simple guidelines to get started, and some common cases that can often be
answered with a standard text."

------
Fej
Kiki is still the cutest.

She's more important than she seems - branding is everything, and Krita has
one of the best mascots in FOSS, a field in which aesthetics has traditionally
not been a priority.

How better to spread a program for artists than with a mascot that begs to be
drawn?

~~~
MayeulC
Actually, for a digital painting program, I would expect it to be the case!

Usually, in my experience, the mascots of FOSS software were quite criticized
as having too many features to draw, etc... Not easily recognizable as logos.

I have no idea whether this is valid criticism or not. But when you ask me
about Krita, I think about Kiki. I can't tell what the icon looks like on the
top of my head.

On the plus side, some say that we are much better mentally equipped to
recognize faces than abstract figures. So, maybe this was just something not
fashionable in the past few years in the flat corporate/branding/design world?

------
coldcode
While it looks very powerful, does anyone know if the miserable light gray on
medium gray UI can be changed? I despise this modern trend (Pixelmator drives
me nuts too) as I have difficulty reading text with such low contrast. This is
terribly unfriendly to people with vision difficulties.

~~~
diggan
Yeah, Krita has themes/skins, here is a few:
[http://www.davidrevoy.com/article124/themes-for-krita-and-
kd...](http://www.davidrevoy.com/article124/themes-for-krita-and-kde) The top
one seems darker. Otherwise you can always edit the `.colors` file of your
choosing to be even darker.

~~~
coldcode
Cool thanks!

------
Keyframe
People compare Krita to Photoshop, and that's fine. There's another space
where it shines and people might not know about that. It's animation. Friend
and I have been working on a hand-drawn short animation (~10 minutes) for a
few years now and it's just about done (final stages of sound editing). We
started out in Harmony, but we were extremely disappointed with it. We tossed
around the idea to switch over to TV Paint (raster based), but I thought that
maybe there's an OSS something for it? Being an OSS fan and advocate, after
all. If Toonz were released earlier, we might've tried that (not really,
considering years of experience with it). We even considered Photoshop - it
now has a nice animation workflow built-in, but I didn't want to go away from
OSS until I explored all the options. So, there was Krita. Let me tell you,
not only is it great, it easily cut down our animation time by a large
percentage over if we were using Harmony. It's awesome tool for 2d hand-drawn
animation with still A LOT of room to grow, workflow-wise.

tl;dr; If you want to animate by hand, give Krita a chance. It's better than
Harmony and Toonz (again, for hand-drawn animation).

~~~
mephitix
Since you're on the subject of animation another amazing tool, specifically
for pixel art, is asesprite. [https://aseprite.org](https://aseprite.org)

Among many other features it has onion skinning, play controls per layer, and
looping over custom-labeled set of frames.

I used it for my first game last year and it made everything so much more fun
:)

~~~
Keyframe
I'm aware of this tool, but this project isn't pixel art. Traditional
animation. I've tried working in that style several times, but it's so damn
consuming! Not that I won't try again.

~~~
mephitix
It is really time consuming. But somehow more approachable for a non-artist
like myself. I've tried freehand drawing but I wasn't happy with the
results... I need more knowledge and more practice.

------
wnm
Based on the app description and homepage I always thought Krita can't replace
Photoshop for the few things I need to do for basic webdesign stuff. But
reading the comments here made me reconsider. Has anyone used Krita for web
stuff (icons, headers, banners, editing screenshots, etc?

Since the developers are reading this thread: I saw that you have a simple
press page [0], if you want something more detailed, I can hook you up with a
free PressKitHero[1] account.

[0] [https://krita.org/en/about/press/](https://krita.org/en/about/press/) [1]
[https://presskithero.com](https://presskithero.com)

~~~
bluGill
Krita is not targeted as a photoshop replacement. It was at one time, but 15+
years ago they realized that many people are willing to pay for photoshop and
thus Adobe has a large amount of money to throw at developers (at least some
of them good) and so they are unlikely to catch up. They then shifted focus to
be the best programing for drawing instead, a niche that Photoshop can cover
but it isn't what their customers want and so it isn't well served. Photoshop
is mostly used by photographers who need to touch up a photo, this is art but
a very different style of art from someone who starts with a blank page and
draws a picture.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
2010 actually: [https://krita.org/en/item/last-week-in-krita-
week-8/](https://krita.org/en/item/last-week-in-krita-week-8/) \-- though my
own focus has always been painting, and I started working on Krita in 2003.

~~~
bluGill
I stand corrected.

------
ris
I'm still a _bit_ sad they decided to de-emphasize the photo-editing-targeted
features - it was (and still is) miles ahead of GIMP in terms of deep color
support.

~~~
zanny
A majority of the advances in Krita come from the crowdfunding campaigns, and
those are centered around the painting part. I'm sure if there were a senior
dev in the project who had the desire to improve the photo editing parts the
foundation would let them crowdfund that independently of the drawing work.

------
guiltia
I wonder why my Krita in Windows (3.0 - 3.4, also 4.0) has some lag (around
100ms or so) when switching presets. During that, I can't even move the
cursor, which is quite annoying since I use switch presets shortcut very
often.

I've got no problem whatsoever on Ubuntu though, aside from some random
crashes when doing free transform.

That being said, Krita is still my main tool for painting/drawing and some
picture editing. The interface is IMHO very intuitive (or maybe just more
Photoshop-like) which is nice

------
soapdog
Just installed Krita 4.0 on my Surface 4 Pro. Like many other software ported
to Windows, it can't handle hidpi screens well, all the UI becomes so tiny
that the program is not really useful.

Anyone has tips for running Krita on hidpi screens on Windows?

~~~
edh649
Changing the program compatibility setting 'Override high DPI scaling
behaviour' may help with this (I haven't tried with Krita yet, but I had a
similar problem with Matlab & Simulink which was fixed by this)

------
Sevrene
I really want to love Krita, and I sort of do. The only thing preventing me
from doing so is the absurd amount of crashes on my macOS machine. Is this
just a Mac problem? Has this been addressed in this update? Am I doing
something wrong?

~~~
opencl
This seems to just be a result Apple's poor OpenGL stack. Krita has been very
stable on both Linux and Windows for me.

From their roadmap page: "We will spend more time on macOS. Even though
Apple’s support for the technologies Krita needs, like OpenGL, sucks."

~~~
chendragon
Any hope for support of things like Metal at all maybe?

~~~
boudewijnrempt
No, none at all, I'm afraid. That would need a really dedicated person
interested in working on both Qt and Krita. We did have a summer of code
project where a student updated Qt's painting code to work with Apple's openGL
implementation, though.

And Krita shouldn't be more unstable on macOS than on Windows or Linux, but it
doesn't get tested as well, and there are so few macOS developers who want to
take a hand. Personally, I develop on Linux but use Krita on Windows, when I
find time to work on my own comic. The macbook pro only gets opened to make
builds or fix the occasional macOS-specific bug.

------
methodin
Krita + Gimp is a great combo - I'm extremely happy both exist in the OSS
world! Hoping to use Krita more as I start getting into texturing models -
it's been great so far for basic images though.

------
macawfish
FYI, the killer feature of krita 3.x was per-layer frame animation with onion
skinning!

I'm wondering if it works well with the new svg vector layers in this release?

------
noobermin
I introduced my gf to Krita. While she generally has to use photoshop to work
with others, but she loves Krita generally.

------
khanan
Oh god, I love that russian accent in their demo-movie... I don't know why,
it's just so... adorable...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The linked page has a video on showing off the new features with the worst
choice of music I think I've ever come across - it's like a dirge. I had to
mute it; and usually I listen to anything.

Imagine an old, barrel-chested, brusque Frenchman smoking galoise at a
roadside café; "merde" he says under his breath ... then they used that as a
sample, and inspiration, and created a piece of music from it ...

~~~
boudewijnrempt
We had two videos this time! I always give people who volunteer a free hand,
but I have to admit, my computers are always muted. They should be seen, not
heard, so I never listened to the music myself.

------
j1elo
I recommend checking the Wikipedia's table of KDE applications; there are some
gems to be discovered:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:KDE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:KDE)

------
valeg
The best free app for a meme making. Congrats!

------
0xroy
This is a much better tool for artist than GIMP thanks to one thing: Krita
handles CMYK, much better for printed jobs.

------
microtheo
Let's not forget to thank the developer for the amazing windows port and the
integration with the windows store!

------
andrewflnr
Wait, since when does Krita support Windows? Did they finally yank all the
weird KDE dependencies so I can run it in an xfce environment? That would make
me so happy...

~~~
zanny
Almost every KDE app for the last 2 years has been portable to other desktops
and OSes since they broke up the kdelibs into frameworks and moved to Qt5.

------
daveheq
Scary music for such a colorful video.

------
beepboopah
Does this have color blind mode yet?

------
singularity2001
not running in browser? (via wasm)?

~~~
majewsky
Not running in the browser is a feature.

~~~
ukaric
Pretty much everyone is shoving everything into the browser that is one of the
problems.

