Krita: Darned Decent Photoshop alternative

[Gare]

A friend of mine turned me onto this tonight. It's called Krita, it's open source and it's free.

Most impressive with an open source program is the fit and finish. It has the feel of an older version of Photoshop, like version CS1 or something.


You can't beat the price. I felt right at home with it from the first launch.

Krita paint and photo retouching program

-g

[handrawn]

I've used krita - I have to say that in the windows version the graphic rendering can be iffy with intel HD graphics and the brushes can be laggy - really need a 'proper' GPU graphics card on a computer with some power behind it I think

still as you say it's free...

[MarcT]

Thanks Gary, this looks interesting !

I like the tiling auto-update feature, I don't remember seeing this in another software, M.C Escher would have love this !

The cage deform also looks amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9s7dNuSe4

Marc

[Gare]

Hey, Mark—

A friend just passed me the reference late last night. I installed the program, it smelled a lot like Photoshop for free, I shared the link. I've not done a lot of investigation work.

I've not experienced a lag as handrawn has mentioned. I use an nVidea gaming card.

My Best,

[RKissane]

Marc is right that cage deform is wonderful. I can see a a lot of use for this feature by illustrators.

As a drawing platform, I wonder overall how this compares to GIMP the other big name freebie?

I will have to looking into this. Thanks Gary for the heads up.

Ray

[Gare]

I don't know how to say this without sounding partial: GIMP has a ton of features and became Industrial Light and Magic's de facto bitmap editor after Adobe refused to give ILM a deep discount for the number of seats they wanted. Even though this was long ago, I find it fascinating that John Knoll was head of the animation department at ILM...and also the co-creator of Photoshop!

But GIMP has never had an intuitive UI. The average artist needs to be exceptionally patient with GIMP to get their work done. In contrast, Krita feels as though it was built from the interface>up. Open Source programs are notorious for beginning as a great idea, and the UI design comes last. And I doubt that gimp will ever get a decent UI because under GNU, were you to improve the "product" you have to make your improvement open source, available for others to modify. Where's the ROI there?


Krita, for free, and Affinity Photo ($39 on a discount day quite often) are part of a new wave of free or very inexpensive "stripped-down" programs that aren't caught in their own development muck. Theses small fee, focused programs are designed to do a core thing, and leave the esoterica for other larger, more expensive programs. Photoshop, which I still use, albeit version CS5.5, has grown into an impenetrable monolith, weighty and the only program you need for retouching. Or is it?

My Best,

Gary

[RKissane]

Gary,

I agree about the interface for GIMP. I just never could get into using GIMP because of the interface, I found other programs for small task much easier to use all through they may not offer as much power for.

I have seen Krita before but never spent much time looking at it. I think I will do some more looking into it.

Ray

[gwpriester]

The main functions I do on Photoshop is convert my RGB stereograms to CMYK and to convert a bitmap to Grayscale, both of which Krita does. Thanks for the tip OG.

[Gare]

You're welcome, OoG! Use it in good health and prosperously!

I have seen Krita before but never spent much time looking at it. I think I will do some more looking into it.

Ray

Well, as I said, the price seems affordable.



This is water under the bridge by about a decade, but Jarrod P., who left DAZ eons ago, asked me to design a UI for GIMP. But then their accounting department asked him hard and long how could they make any money off of "their" version of GIMP?

Sort of a pity, because 99% of the power of gimp will remain an undiscovered secret.

I see Krita as sort of ArtWeaver on steroids, or this year's version of ArtWeaver. There are lots of paint programs out there, few that live up to the term "professional", but they are true paint programs.

I could tick off perhaps 6 or 7 "musts" in a paint program to make it worthwhile for a professional...Krita qualifies. It's got some stuff even Photoshop Cloud doesn't have, such as vector layers.

[ss-kalm]

Thanks for the heads up about Krita, Gary.

Like others I've tried GIMP, but never managed to get my head around the UI.

Never used Photoshop, as I can't justify the expense ... Have no idea how many people that use Photoshop use pirated versions, but it sometimes appears that everyone over the age of 14 has a copy ... From the above comments it would appear that Krita may fill that gap in my software nicely.