The time when Krita was borne as KImageShop, as a Gimp-for-KDE is long gone. Not sure when this idea was killed, but it is clear that it has never really be the intention of the current team. The ambiguity of being only a paint application might only have been lift last weeks, and not trying anymore to be both. But now was the best time to lift it, Gimp is now going in a direction where it will be an excellent image manipulation tool, it does not make anymore sense to try to have half-baked support for this kind of work in Krita. Instead, we need to focus on what is truly missing, a high quality paint application that covers all the artists needs.
But this focus of Krita is not new. What is new is our willingness to focus on it.
Boudewijn has always said that he started on Krita to make a linux application that makes the most use of his newly tablet, he even said at LGM 2007 that he wanted Krita to be a “corel paint killer”. More recently Vera joined us in the hope of helping us to make a good open source painting application.
Personally I started with a joint interest for drawing and photography, and probably considered at first that I wanted to contribute to an application that work for both use. And this would explain why most photographic specific features were written by me. But when I started to make digital pictures, I thought that one of the main interest over silver film was the post-processing, but I have come to realise that colour and brightness adjustment were all the changes I wanted to do, and that otherwise, the pictures need to be shout correctly, correct framing, correct positioning of objects, this require more work in the composition, but this also give greater pictures than cloning. Meaning, that I have mostly used Krita for drawing attempts.
But some other members joined us for photographic interest, and some people would still want to use Krita for those uses, I hope that we manage to work together and allow them to find their place in the Krita Community, either the new extensions website will prove sufficient, maybe a krita-photographic-extension package will be made available by distributions, or it is even possible to build a different user interface on top of Krita libraries.
This is something we are ready to help with, but what we feel is important is that when a painter starts Krita, he get all what he needs, and nothing more.
There is always the possibility of having an image manipulation program *and* a drawing program using the same engine. This could easily be accomplished by a different default set of tools much like Kivio is being revived now as an offspring from Karbon but with some new tools and dockers.
If y’all have renounced to have a native KDE program for managing digital photos because of Gimp being such a good piece of software (so “good” that still needs to convert 16 bits/channel RAW images to 8 bits; or which still has no decnet sharpen filter like Photoshop’s one), and being OpenOffice much more eficacious and less buggy, why still working in Koffice instead joining OOo team?
If y’all, devs, have decided that is more important to have a native KDE drawing program, which is something much less people than a digital retouching program need, it’s ok, but then why not collaborate with OOo Draw team instead of duplicating efforts. Kword and Krita (when Krita still was a photo retoiching program) were two of the main “stars” of Koffice; Kword is unusable, and Krita is becoming a program for professionals of digital drawing, so, what’s the point of Koffice? Wouldn’t it be more productive to renounce completely to have an office suite for KDE which works worse than OOo and it’s incomplete, and collaborate in making OOo more powerful and as much integrated in KDE as possible?
Regards.
For the gimp comment, maybe the gimp is not ready yet, but it is getting there very soon. As for the comment on drawing people, I would claim there is as much people interested in drawing than in advanced photo editing, but since neither of us have real numbers, both claim are empty, and even if there are only a thousand of them, currently they have no good application on linux.
When it comes to OOo, first, I will let you try to answer the question of why there is almost no not-paid contributor to OOo ? And second I would think KOffice and OOo fits two different purposes, one aims to be a light weight, easy-to-use office suite, and the other one is a full bledge office one. (as for OOo Draw it does not come close to compare to Krita, might be comparable to Karbon, though)
Actually, Gimp won’t be getting 16-bit support in 2.8 and even that is maybe a year away.
Some real numbers about photo editing: I just did a search for gimp at dpreview.com for the past year and got 1,694 results. So there seems to be quite a lot of interest.
Btw, do you have any pro matte painters testing Krita right now? I understand they often build on photographed material.
I hope you get the attention you deserve this year and maybe an easier way to install on Windows
For the gimp comment, maybe the gimp is not ready yet, but it is getting there very soon. As for the comment on drawing people, I would claim there is as much people interested in drawing than in advanced photo editing, but since neither of us have real numbers, both claim are empty, and even if there are only a thousand of them, currently they have no good application on linux.
When it comes to OOo, first, I will let you try to answer the question of why there is almost no not-paid contributor to OOo ? And second I would think KOffice and OOo fits two different purposes, one aims to be a light weight, easy-to-use office suite, and the other one is a full bledge office one. (as for OOo Draw it does not come close to compare to Krita, might be comparable to Karbon, though)