This is is kind of a long shot, but if anyone is looking for an open source project to contribute to, IMO Krita is very close to being a full-fledged matte painting tool for VFX workflows, but it needs a color corrector for scene linear colours. I've outlined what I think it should do here:
https://krita-artists.org/t/color-corrector-for-scene-linear...
I think the biggest hurdle to clear is that it needs a custom color widget, the OS widgets are not suitable due to assuming a 0...1 range.
Krita's a great piece of software and I readily admit I'm jus shamelessly trying to get someone to fix my pet peeve. But I also really do think this one feature is mostly what stands in the way of ditching Photoshop and using Krita for VFX work. In many other ways, including OpencolorIO support natively, Krita is already way ahead of Adobe's offering.
Given the multiple features added in this release (and not trivial features, either), I’m puzzled as to why this was called 4.4.2. Feels easily worth being called 4.5.0. In common (basically universal) usage, the number 4.4.2 implies a patch release with only bug fixes.
so i drew a picture for my daughter and couldn't figure out how to print it, because krita has no print function. between krita and gimp, i know why adobe can charge anything they want for Photoshop. i honestly think its subterfuge
I vastly prefer Krita to Photoshop for digital art (though I am just a hobbyist), but to each their own.
It sounds like maintaining print functionality took significant effort, and they decided it was a better use of man hours to put more time into the core functionality and suggest people use a different application to print their output if they need to do that.
I genuinely don't remember the last time I saw someone print something directly from Photoshop. Even professional photo studios I've worked with always save their files (usually to TIFF), open them in a previewer to double-check then and then send them to the printer directly.
This isn't one of those "FOSS devs sticking to the UNIX philosophy to a fault, usability be damned" situations. Printing is the kind of thing that is either done so rarely that the literally only two extra clicks aren't going to matter or so frequently that you want to be using a batch workflow anyways.
No offense if it just didn't occur to you at the time (I've been there), but "I'll just save the image and print that" is something that I image the vast, vast majority of computer users could figure out in no time and is surely not a significant factor in Adobe's market dominance.
However they do use a cross-platform gui toolkit that has built-in printing support (Qt QPrinter) so i do find this a little surprising -
I searched for any more information in the issue tracker. The closest I could find was https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 , which might be a concern but not really for desktop printing.
We actually removed PDF export because there's no good libraries to handle PDF cmyk support.
My gut reaction as a programmer was: CMYK? How hard can it be? But then, I am no user of CMYK. All my experience is RGB, and in fact I am bad enough at color to not really notice it when color profiles are significantly off. CMYK is an unknown unknown for me, I don't even understand the troubles they are having.
So I think this touches a core problem of open source: The average hobbyist does not feel this itch, hence can't scratch it. You need someone with good understanding of the printing industry, maybe access to professional printing hardware. Hard to do on hobby time or as a lone programmer. This is an example of a whole class of problems where OSS tends to do worse than the industry average.
BTW, it pains me to say this as a regular user, krita is very good software.
Well... We think it just isn't that critical a feature, given that Krita and Scribus work together quite well. Especially in this day and age when the the vast majority of images get uploaded to pixiv, twitter, artstation, deviantart and the like. Compared to people asking for help with that, because they don't know how files work, the number of people who ask for a printing feature is minuscule.
I'm assuming you're a Krita developer, so I'll start with saying thank you. It is harsh of me to critique a gift I received for free and you created in your spare time.
But I happen to have a personal stake in this discussion. I'll cite my post from 3 days before this about a little project I was doing:
I took screenshots [...] cleaned them up with krita.
next part of that sentence should have been '.. and tried to print them, then thought WTF??? and printed via some other program.
About every parent at our school prints a lot of little things for the kids, to color or play.
As computer nerd I get questions about good program for X, and recommend e.g. paint.net, photopea, gimp, ... For my public, not printing seems a blocker.
So if you get these requests once every 2-3 years, some part of your potential audience seems missing.
It's things like page layout, margins, bleeds, printer profiles, support for printer features... Adding proper printing support could easily take six months, even if Qt already supports the basics. And then it still wouldn't be on Scribus' level.
> Why not use a different software suite altogether?
If having a print button and a janky pre-print dialog box is worth 200$/year to you then by all means, move your entire workflow to Adobe. Or better yet - put those 200$ on a bug bounty to implement it - I'm sure somebody would jump on it.
> I love the classic response here:
This is the exact same response as you'd get from Adobe if you requested a feature from them. If a request doesn't carry a direct profit incentive for a company, they will completely ignore it - and if you worked a lot with Adobe software you would be very familiar with that.
Yet somehow, people get more mad when small FOSS dev teams don't jump on their pet peeves immediately than when multi-million-dollar companies that they pay hundreds of $ ignore years of pleading by even rather large players in the industry to implement some pretty basic things.
I think the Unix philosophy which many of us strive to do would have key pieces of software do as few of things as possible, so divesting from print allows other applications to do that better.
The website needs some help - at least on mobile. If you don't know what Krita is, the site isn't abundantly clear or explicit. At least it doesn't tell the uninformed users right at the top. Maybe the site isn't meant for non-users, but it sure would be nice if the About gave the "elevator pitch" description of the software right across the top.
I think the biggest hurdle to clear is that it needs a custom color widget, the OS widgets are not suitable due to assuming a 0...1 range.
Krita's a great piece of software and I readily admit I'm jus shamelessly trying to get someone to fix my pet peeve. But I also really do think this one feature is mostly what stands in the way of ditching Photoshop and using Krita for VFX work. In many other ways, including OpencolorIO support natively, Krita is already way ahead of Adobe's offering.