Krita: let’s make it faster than Photoshop!

Bart · May 4, 2015

After last year's succesful Kickstarter campaign, the Krita team has now set another bold goal: raising €20,000 to make the app faster than Photoshop.

Boudewijn Rempt writes:

The first Krita kickstarter campaign in 2014 was a big success! We raised more than 20,000 euros for Krita development. The support from our backers made the 2.9 release the best and biggest ever.
Now we're ready for the next Kickstarter project! We're really ambitious this year: we want to make Krita's painting performance as good as or even better than Photoshop's. Big brushes, big canvases, efficient memory handling. That work is a prerequisite for the second part of our 2015 Kickstarter project: animation: we'll be working on putting hand-drawn 2D animation right into the core of Krita.
Our initial goal is 20,000 euros. If we go over the initial goal — we defined 24 stretch goals. Each stretch goal is 1500 euros, and after the dust settles, the backers will be asked to vote on their favorite goals!
Check out the campaign page.

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

18 responses

Michael Rhodes

4 May 2015 at 18:29

Would love to support this, but first what about real support on Mac OS X instead of the “experimental” non-working version? If there’s no motivation to have total feature parity, then just drop the Mac version. I got real excited reading about Krita, and couldn’t wait to use it. Still waiting.

I just hope that backers who are on the Mac OS don’t get too crushed when they realize that Mac OS support is not even on the “to do” list.

I really want to be wrong, but I really doubt it. So, prove me wrong and I’ll retract every single word and back this really remarkable app and its goals.

DaedalJS
4 May 2015 at 20:30
shouldn’t you be saying most of this somewhere that the krita devs would be more likely to read it?
you should know experimental and unstable is on the path to a decently working version. they can’t get one without going through the other.
just because it isn’t happening as fast as you’d like doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen eventually. besides they can’t just drop everything they’re doing for their current users for a small pool of possible future users in order to push that forward faster.
you know, you could get a relatively small usb drive and install linux on it. (i recommend linux mint with cinnamon but there will be less things to do to get the latest krita if you use a KDE desktop, kubuntu would likely be the easiest) and try out krita on that.
not sure what kind of hoops you may have to jump through to boot to a usb drive on a mac though… i think i remember something about it only being able to boot from firewire drives or something like that by default.
Reply
1. Karlis
  5 May 2015 at 13:25
  Hi,
  I am a mac user also, but I think this attitude of not supporting project if it’s not useable for you at this moment somewhat wrong. I mean.. it’s your decision of course, but if you look at it all in long run, you will be winner anyway by supporting this. I will be honest, I don’t use Krita for professional work at this point, but I am looking forward to that and this is by far the best OSS project with a big potencial and I would regret if it would stop development and die like many others do, so please, don’t just look at this in short term and support it if you think you will benefit from it in future, otherwise future may never come.
  Reply
Boudewijn Rempt
4 May 2015 at 20:59
Hi Michael,
I’m actually considering doing a separate fundraiser later this year for the OSX port. It’s going to take a real amount of really dedicated work (and a better Mac, my ancient Mac Mini takes over an hour to build and deploy Krita before I can test every single fix I attempt…). I am estimating at least three to six months to fix the issues with the tablet support, with OpenGL (if those are fixable, Blender’s OSX guru just has given up on OSX), with making the gui look good and proper on OSX.
That’s why we explicitly don’t claim OSX support right now in the Kickstarter, and why I make the build available anyone, so nobody can be surprised to find that it’s not ready for real work yet :-)
In the meantime, there is plenty of work to do that, when we get to do the port properly, will still make Krita on OSX better than if we hadn’t done that work.
Reply
1. Michael Rhodes
  4 May 2015 at 21:18
  @Daedaljs –Thanks for the reply. Booting off an external drive with a new (to me) OS just to use a drawing/painting app is too costly, time-wise, to even be considered as a viable option.
  @Boudewijn — your reply is most welcome. Thanks for the upfront answers. When the OS X KS starts, I’ll do my best to chip in as much as I can afford. Fortunately I can wait for that to happen. Best of luck in the Kickstarter!
  Reply
2. Tom Telos
  5 May 2015 at 13:13
  Another Mac enthusiast here, and, as Michael says, I can wait.
  (Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, keep me more than busy.)
  Reply

zachTheperson

4 May 2015 at 20:45

The only feature that keeps me still using photoshop is Content Aware Fill. If Another software had that I would have no reason to use photoshop anymore :P

3D Viking
5 May 2015 at 02:03
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AoobQQBeVc
This might be what you are looking for
Reply
Deevad
5 May 2015 at 14:36
Krita has a ‘content aware fill’ feature since 2.9 ; It’s part of the amazing GMIC filter pack and named ‘Inpaint’.
Check the blog post here about the filter http://blog.patdavid.net/2014/02/getting-around-in-gimp-gmic-inpainting.html ( author of this blog post use Gmic for Gimp , but the filter is similar in Krita ).
Reply

Silvio Grosso

4 May 2015 at 23:56

@zachtheperson wrote:
> The only feature that keeps me still using photoshop is Content Aware Fill. If Another software had that I would have no reason to use photoshop anymore :P

I am happy to inform you that your quest for another software with this feature (Content aware fill) may end right now :-)
More precisely, with Krita 2.9.4, both on Windows and Linux, you could give a try to G’MIC [1] which sports a nice filter to achieve this goal [2].
I have recorded a short video to show you this G’MIC filter [3], which, BTW, works with GIMP 2.8.15 as well.
Actually, with Gimp 2.8.15, you can already run the latest G’MIC version, that is, 1.6.2.0 (which has even more goodies….) :-)

P.s: in case you are more interested in this filter I suggest you to read this blog [4] where David Tschumperle’ (the creator of G’MIC) explains much more in depth all details. You can even downlaod a zip folder (fspba-supplementary-material) with many images used to test and compare the results of Photoshop vs G’MIC for this specific effect.

[1] http://gmic.eu/
[2] http://blog.patdavid.net/2014/02/getting-around-in-gimp-gmic-inpainting.html
[3] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3095134/BUGS_REPORT/KRITA_2.9/KRITA_2.9.4-GMIC_CONTENT-ADWARE_FILTER.avi
[4] https://daisy.users.greyc.fr/daisy-etal-siggraph-asia-2013

Boudewijn Rempt
5 May 2015 at 10:45
G’Mic on Windows is still a big problem, though. Most filters work for the x64 build, but we had to remove it from the x86 build. The problem isn’t with g’mic, it’s with the compiler. We’re building Krita with MSVC 2012, which has a bug that trips up the g’mic parser code. I’ve tried msvc 2013 instead, but that isn’t compatible with Qt, msvc 2015 isn’t compatible with Qt _at all_. Cross-compiling usng mxe failed on the kde libraries and compiling with mingw on Windows gave enormously ballooned up binaries… And msvc 2010 won’t build parts of Krita!
(If this sounds like, help me please, Windows gurus, then that’s fully intentional, I’m not sure what to try next…)
Reply

Light Colored Lines

5 May 2015 at 04:48

i have follows all step to install Krita 2.9 version in my Xubuntu. but after that, my Krita is still on 2.8.5 version? am i wrong with the installation?

MtndewMan98
5 May 2015 at 06:47
This happened to me on my Ubuntu computer when I first tried installing from Krita LIME. I looked around on google and found that the instructions on this page worked.
Reply
1. Light Colored Lines
  5 May 2015 at 10:08
  why is it?
  “Unknown media type in type ‘all/all’
  Unknown media type in type ‘all/allfiles’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/mms’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/mmst’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/mmsu’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/pnm’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/rtspt’
  Unknown media type in type ‘uri/rtspu’
  ”
  https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-pDMtPlOl8zo/VUh6Txu9PvI/AAAAAAAAAK0/4HhM-j1L2zg/w932-h526-no/Screenshot%2B-%2B05052015%2B-%2B03%3A04%3A10%2BPM.png
  Reply
  1. Light Colored Lines
    5 May 2015 at 10:28
    and my Krita 2.9 isn’t fit to my monitor. here look:
    https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-FPW0ysy-o4w/VUh-9b8xyUI/AAAAAAAAALc/NHRn2D5tbv4/w1044-h294-no/Screenshot%2B-%2B05052015%2B-%2B03%3A26%3A10%2BPM.png
    Reply
    1. Boudewijn Rempt
      5 May 2015 at 10:49
      Weirdly enough, that’s a problem that mostly seems to occur on *buntu. If you drag the left-hand docker to two or three columns wide, it should be fine, and Krita should restart with that setup and fit in your window.
      I’m still not sure _why_ this sometimes happens, but there are other problems with the toolbox. It tries to be too smart, and allow people to have as many columns as they want, instead of fixing it to one or two as other apps do…
    2. Light Colored Lines
      5 May 2015 at 11:40
      thanks now it work! after drag the left-hand docker :))

AlvaroWS

5 May 2015 at 06:41

Cool. When I tried krita I was hugely dissapointed because it was slow as hell. Hopefully they can make it better.

18 responses

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