Last week in Krita -- week 8

Written by Boud

Tuesday, 02 March 2010 18:14

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to focus on writing Last Week in Krita with three hackers around -- which is the case right now. We're at a 44 commit/day high-water mark for monday -- work has been very brisk, and Krita is beginning to feel quite snappy, even with biggish images. Last week we had 101 commits, and we're at under 90 bugs now! This sprint is such a blast -- Vera, Dmitry, Adam and Peter have gone by now. Lukáš, Cyrille and Sven are still around (and me, of course, I live here. The bathrooms have both broken down, the house is all a-buzz with the sound of fans trying to keep up with cd krita; make -j6 install being executed and huge quantities of m&m's and other nibbles are being consumed.

Vision

I've blogged it, Cyrille has blogged it -- but let's set those three paragraphs down again:

Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.
Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering.
Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response.

That's what we're aiming for. I already dissected these statements -- they are quite dense and more full of meaning than they might seem at first blush. Reactions have been positive, on the whole: and it's important to state once again that we won't stop anyone from trying to fill any hole in the free software spectrum we might be leaving open now. Anyone wants to fork Krita to make a photo editor? That's fine with us, Krita is intentionally free software.

It's also not like we hate or disdain photography: a single glance at Dmitry's or Cyrille's equipment should be enough to disabuse anyone of that notion. But painting is where it's at for Krita. Pure creativity, concept art, cartoons, textures -- and that's a tall order already. Not that pruning Krita is not a painful process...

Code

Many Krita hackers were travelling last week, and when we were together in Deventer, we had a lot of things to talk about. Not just the vision, but Peter was present all weekend long to help us with discussions about interaction and usability. Whenever we strayed from the path, he would put us straight: "remember, this is your vision: what that feature, or this implementation be useful to a master painter?". Sometimes that means getting rid of some features we had cloned from Photoshop, even... A list of what has been discussed has been put up on the wiki. It's in a very short style, and we will have to make careful designs for some of these suggestions.

We also agreed on yet another api change for our filters: this time, the api will be much simplified, hopefully making writing filters a lot easier.

Boudewijn fixed a bug where Krita wouldn't be able to load JPG files from a path with a non-ascii character in it -- one would think that these bugs would all have been gone with the millennium, but no. He also started removing features: there is no krita-based Flake shape anymore: our vision for Krita is that it is not an office component. On the same track, he disabled a number of KOffice plugins that make no sense for Krita, like the database plugin. There are still issues here: it looks like KOffice co-packages some plugins that should be split, like the two shape selection dockers.

Cyrille worked very hard on making the shapes that we do support work well, added the alpha darken composite operation to the OpenGTL-based CTL colorspaces plugin (this is used for painting in wash mode), fixed bugs in the tile engine (which helped with memory usage), fixed crashes when loading jpg or tiff files with unusable profiles, used one of the Krita project's Wacom Art Pens to fix the rotation support, simplified the calculation of spacing between strokes, reduced memory usage again, and fixed the distance sensor when painting.

Dmitry optimized the image recomposition algorithm, fixed a crash in the filters and fixed a big bug where painting on a second layer would lead to recomposition artefacts.

Lukáš continued work on the next generation iterators; those aren't used yet, but should improve for instance filters when we port them. Lukáš also spent his evenings optimizing and improving brush engines: sumi-e got ink soaking, the soft brush aspect rotation, density -- to simulate dust on the canvas, airbrush, size changing, ui improvements, and the grid brush got fixed scaling and border jitter. And Lukáš also did more work on the abr-brush compatibility, loading also the dynamics of abr brushes, not just the mask. Now we need to do something with the dynamics!

Sven fixed the brush outline cursor feature and once again cleaned up a whole lot of code in brush engine department.

Vera Lukman fixed bugs in the popup palette and added some visual improvements: and then we discovered that Qt 4.5 doesn't recognize the tablet devices, while Qt 4.6 doesn't send middle/right mouse button events if you click using the stylus button. Now this is a problem -- it might be Qt, it might be X11, it might be the drivers, it might be distribution-specific, but right now there is no known-good setup that supports all the tablet features Krita relies on.

T-Shirts!

And group photo (Lukáš, Vera, Sven, Peter, Dmitry, front: Boudewijn, Cyrille, Adam):

Irina has organized the t-shirts, and Araprint has, with magnificent service, converted the design to make it possible to print in five colors and delivered the t-shirts to our place when we, because of a power-cut and attendant confusion, had forgotten to collect them:

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Comments (22)

2010-03-02 19:39:30 | Hugh - Big disappointed

Well, what a disappointment... I was eagerly following the development of Krita, checking every week to see the enhancements coming in versions 2.2 and 2.3. I was planning in starting to use Krita, and I've actually just finished installing Kubuntu. I was even thinking of starting to tinker with the code, maybe fiddle around with the interface...

Why ? Because I was hoping to use Krita as a replacement for Photoshop, mostly for advanced photo manipulation and collage.

Now I suppose I'm stuck with Gimp (mind you I also use digiKam, great alternative to Lightroom). The problem is that even with the upcoming 2.8 release, Gimp is still missing features such as adjustment layers and a decent brush system, which are pretty much essential (I can't figure how it's actually possible that Gimp has such terrible brush settings...)

Krita was the only open source app to have those features (along with native 16bit per channel support , colorspaces and much more). It only needed a bit more spe...
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2010-03-02 20:46:59 | industrie13 - same here

Like the previous poster already said I'm disappointed too by the new direction and "vision" Krita is now taking.
I always looked at it as an open source pixel based (in opposite to vector) image manipulation and creation program which is (or at least should be) more capable, usable (in terms of usability) and more integrated into the KDE Workspace than Gimp. And I felt, that it was really close to that.
Please take into consideration how many open source users are doing digital painting and how many do image manipulation. I think, whith this step you are lowering the userbase of Krita enormously.
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2010-03-02 21:18:27 | blueget - me too

I'm also very, very disappointed by this move. I and many others only use GIMP because there's no alternative, I really looked forward to be able to do my photo editing in Krita with its wonderful user interface and great brush system!

Screw the "vision", I want to get rid of the GIMP!
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2010-03-02 21:57:39 | Boudewijn Rempt - Well...

Well... It shouldn't be too much of a surprise, really: already at LGM 2007 in Montreal I said at the end of my presentation that Krita was going to be a Corel Painter replacement, not a Photoshop replacement, Of course, Krita was started as KImageShop, as a Gimp replacement many years ago -- but for the past four or five years, we have tried to get away from that.

The vision statement we developed with Peter Sikking only makes explicit what we have been feeling all this time, and having a vision makes it possible to focus on implementing it -- not having a vision led to the inconsistencies we have now.
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2010-03-02 22:31:23 | JM

I'm going to buck the trend it seems, and give my congratulations. This couldn't have been an easy decision, but I think that in the long run it is for the best.

Gimp is (slowly) getting better, and there are other alternatives photo editing. However, excepting MyPaint I am aware of no purely "creative" image apps that are F/OSS; so creating something more in line with Painter can do some real good.

So, again, congrats on having the wherewithal to make this decision, and I'll be looking forward to what it leads you to.

P.S. Am I correct in thinking Krita is leaving KOffice?
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2010-03-02 23:35:05 | Kevin Kofler

But I don't see why Krita can't support both use cases, it seems there's a huge overlap and only a small amount of features which are only useful for one use case and not the other.
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2010-03-03 01:59:00 | Danni Coy - A little dissapointed

Currently there is no photo editor on Linux that currently supports 8 bits per channel and layers. I feel that it will be still years before the gimp ports completely to GeGL and I doubt whether Digikam will ever support advanced editing features.

Otherwise I do have use for a painting program and I may be able to comboine Krita and digikam to do my photo editing.
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2010-03-03 02:05:31 | Marc - Awesome.

Thanks for being so focused. I do a lot of illustration work, and I'm VERY happy to see Krita take this direction.

Yay, time to go hug my sketchbook and tell it the good news
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2010-03-03 04:51:19 | JM - best of both worlds?

http://blog.cberger.net/2010/03/02/the-difficult-choic e-of-removing-features/
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2010-03-03 07:52:20 | Deevad - Pure awesomeness !

"concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering"
This sound as a bright future for many few digital artist as me that did the hard move (for the tools ) to switch to linux. With a good software, you will certainly welcome many artist and creative studio to switch. Long life to Krita !
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2010-03-03 08:32:30 | Tonttu - Extensions

I hope coding and handling extensions for Krita will be made easy. Maybe an update system like in Firefox?

The Adaptive GIMP project with its tasks looks really practical. I guess even if Krita focuses on painting you can still split things into specialized task sets. 3D software packages often have different modes that change the UI, like model, animate, simulate, render. Even Modo, in the years it didn't have animation capabilities, featured layouts for modeling, UV editing, painting and rendering, plus you can totally customize the layout yourself and save it.

When Krita's userbase grows and extensions start to pop up, a "GIMP replacement" Krita for photography could be customized (pre-packaged with plugins like GIMPhoto).

Layouts in Modo:
http://www.vtc.com/products/LuxologyModo401/TheInterface/87130
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2010-03-03 10:56:20 | Fri13

I like that Krita is now focused to drawing. Even it might have problems with belonging to KOffice. But I still do not understand why Office package should include a photoeditor etc. I think KOffice could include basic functions like what Scribus does. And let the Krita be de-attached from that package to own pro tool.
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2010-03-03 15:35:39 | Griatch

Excellent news.

I never saw the point with photomanipulation features in Krita. For me at least, it just felt like a waste to for an open-source project to re-offer the same things GIMP already do (or will soon).

When reviewing Krita initially, I saw no need for yet another "PS-style" program. But a Painter-style one, that's another matter! Now that GIMP has made it perfectly clear that their focus is not from-scratch painting or natural-brush simulation, there is a clear need here to fill. Ditching the extra features to focus is a good call.
"Market-wise" (if one can talk of such in an Open-source world) this even fits nicely alongside e.g. MyPaint - while that program is great for painting it is not aiming at proper naturalistic Painter-style brush emulation and workflow.

I'm still a bit sceptical about the connection to KOffice (which is really not my cup of tea), but small steps... I'm happy to say I'm a lot more excited about Krita now than I've been for m...
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2010-03-03 16:09:44 | Tonttu - Extensions

I hope coding and handling extensions for Krita will be made easy. Maybe an update system like in Firefox?

The Adaptive GIMP project with its tasks looks really practical. I guess even if Krita focuses on painting one could still split things into specialized task sets. 3D software packages often have different modes that change the UI, like model, animate, simulate, render. Even Modo, in the years it didn't have animation capabilities, featured layouts for modeling, UV editing, painting and rendering, plus you can totally customize the layout yourself and save it.

When Krita's userbase grows and extensions start to pop up, a "GIMP replacement" Krita for photography could be customized (pre-packaged with plugins like GIMPhoto).
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2010-03-05 13:48:36 | n-pigeon - Awesome

Cool T-shirts
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2010-03-07 22:31:43 | Ethan

Cutting features is never easy and rarely popular, but I'm glad you're doing it. The more an application supports, the more time has to be spent on maintenance and compatibility and the less can be spent on real development. You're doing one thing and doing it better than it has even been done before; that's admirable in my eyes.

I hope everyone had fun and the sprint and I hope they know their efforts are appreciated.
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2010-03-10 22:57:16 | Hardy - kipi-plugins?!

i've read this blog some days ago and i was a little disappointed of the new direction ... but after reading some older (not too old) blogs the krita-project have a focus but don't let the "Photoshop"-users left ...

If i'm right, you will implement a plugin-interface, so that someone other can implement the missing features (the ones, that krita doesn' focus...)

So my request is: can krita use the kipi-interface or define another one with the digikam and gwenview project, so, that there is a bigger userbase ... we all will have a bigger advantage ... and maybe implement the removed functions ...

Until now, im working with PS7 in Linux ... and my hope is, that krita will fill the lap (i'm no designer, gimp is not my way!?!)

Thank you all for your great work!!!
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2010-03-11 08:48:04 | Boudewijn - Kipi plugins

Right now, Kipi plugins are mainly useful for working with sets of images, not for implementing filters, so kipi support is not that useful in Krita. And kipi only supports a very limited set of colorspaces and channel depths, which again makes kipi not very useful for Krita.
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2010-03-10 23:53:01 | Hardy

Sorry, my workload is missing (no designer):

load some photos, mixed them on different layers and make a kind of border ... you can see it on:
http://www.tctriton.de/index.htm?galerie/tauchevn.htm

my hope is, that i can do all of this in krita
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2010-03-11 08:49:19 | Boudewijn - You can

You can, but it's not what we are creating Krita for, so it's more or less by accident and not something we support directly, for instance by creating border plugins or something like that.
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2010-03-11 22:40:15 | Hardy - Krita don't have to ...

Krita don't have to support this, but if there is a plugin-interface i'm shure that there are many ppl. out in the wild, who will use this interface and so i'm hoping ...

My only wish (Chrismas is over, i know), give other supporters the possibility to bring the functionality they want (plugins ...) and focus the krita-project to their mission, so it will be a win-win for all.

I love the weekly report. Thumbs up
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2010-03-12 03:43:10 | damian - What about a simple app?

If Krita is becoming professional then apart that photo editing shouldn't it be a simpler, netbook-fitting application? (for sketching painting and maybe even editing too)
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