Krita 5.2(krita.org) |
I didn't realize these features were exposed at all, I thought it would only be engine support. Even if it is through the code editor that makes this release a bit more exciting for text manipulation.
Also in theory I guess opens the door for plugins if 5.3 takes a while to come out? I really need to deal with my aversion to Python and just learn Krita's extension API.
Edit: also just because it's good practice to remind whenever a program like Krita does a release, https://fund.krita.org/. Krita is already a great painting app, and it's headed in an incredibly promising direction, so it's a good candidate if you're looking for projects to fund that could have a really useful impact on the industry.
Illustrator (aside from being part of Adobe's software-rental scam), has been abandoned for years. Affinity Designer is also basically static, as simple-but-important feature requests or bug reports go ignored year after year. I mean... there's no way to set a layer as non-printing, despite continual requests for it. If that's difficult to implement, then the software is hopeless anyway. You also can't enter exact sizes for multiple objects at once. Affinity seems to do the most obscure and dumb thing possible when you try to accomplish simple tasks that are well-understood in every other similar app.
Applications are simply not important to any for-profit company anymore, so we're stuck with the current state of the art, or worse, hideous regressions like those that plague Microsoft Office. Ugh, Word is a depressing shitshow now.
Any chance of seeing this feature request in future releases?
For everyone who has a hard time with the keyboard shortcuts I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiP7pXnwu6g which covers basic navigation in 1 minute.
I'm not exactly sure in what case you would want automatic panning for a standard brush, but even for the straight line tool, I feel it would just be better to allow a user to select the two points individually, without the need for dragging the mouse between the locations without letting it drop.
I wonder if auto-zoom-out would be better than auto-pan. As you approach the edge, zoom out to give you more room. Then you're not just dragging blindly against a wall and ending up who knows where.
So maybe they should take it seriously.
> but Krita's largest type of audience is cartoon-y fantasy artists. It makes sense for their demographic.
Yeah, that seems like survivor bias: the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic. I mean, that is fine if they want to keep it that way.
I am a happy user of Krita myself. I think it is a marvellous tool. However, I am not using it at work precisely because of the mascot and splash screen.
I feel Krita could be used my so many more people if they had a more neutral mascot.
https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/dockers/specific_...
Why do you need 2 hands to rotate the view, one of my hand have the pen in it ?!?
I don't know how close it actually is though.
- Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme
Truthfully, CSP is also not quite everything I would want out of vector tools, it's just closer. What I've been interested in for a while and haven't been able to replicate is drawing in multiple passes: draw a stroke's position, then its thickness, then its strength, then its velocity, all as separate steps.
CSP sort of has this; you can redraw vector strokes (or at least could last time I used it), and it was great. But I feel like it could be taken further and I feel like it's an area where there could be a lot of innovation beyond what CSP even allows. But I don't think there's consensus yet from the Krita team about what direction they would want to go, and to be fair, I'm not sure I would be able to answer that question either. I'm not sure just copying CSP would be the right move, I do want to see more actual experimentation in that space beyond just vector layers -- like ideally I'd like to be able to do multiple-pass strokes in paint layers too?
But it is a really big weakness of the app right now, I agree.
If you don't want to see it you can use --no-splash (or something like that).
Imagine working in a professional setting, and your boss asks you to see your most recent sketch on a design. You open your .kra file and that mascot pops up. Your boss sees the splash screen and asks himself "who have I just hired?".
I know the splash screen can be disabled (but only via a flag on the executable), defaults still matter. If the mascot was purely used on the website or announcements/blog posts, it really would be a different deal. Now it's packaged in such a way that it distracts from other workflow and gets in your face. Setting a flag on the executable is also finicky way of handling this preference, and it's prone to breaking after updates.
Speaking of branding and icons, the krita icon itself [1] is actually quite nice, and in my opinion seems to send the same vibes of cutesy anime much more vaguely by their choice of mostly using pink/pastel colors, but still doesn't make a statement in the same blunt way the mascot does. They could use their icon as branding on the splash screen and I would be very satisfied.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Calligra...
The Blender Grease Pencil also represents vector data in this way (per-point attributes). I find it promising and try to develop add-ons for it. But I am not familiar with Krita plug-in development and do not know how much its vector painting can be improved.
Yes, an artist community take bikeshedding advice from a community with a skew from the tech industry. That always ends well.
>the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic.
Sounds like a chicken and egg situation.
Regardless, it's a classic business question. When you become an established piece of software due to community efforts, do you try to become more mainstream at the cost of metaphorically betraying the very community that got you such visibility? History says thst it is the most profitable venture but a surefire way to become the very thing these open source initiatives strove to oppose. So it's not exactly a road I will personally champion (nor oppose per se. In some ways the founders do deserve such riches. And I'd probably take them myself on their shoes).
The only benefit here is that such a change has a chance to fork the project if there are enough unsatisfied customers. But forking can still get messy.
Not bad! And I enjoy that its default selection mode is the one I find most important in vector-art applications: select only things that are totally enclosed by the selection marquee.
Illustrator isn't even capable of selecting this way as an option, which makes it a monumentally tedious, deal-breaking PITA to use. And, of course, people have been complaining about this for decades now. Ignored by Adobe. So much for their "subscription model will allow us to do more timely bug fixes and enhancements" lie.
You're right, I'm looking at the release notes now. But it's a very weird deja vu moment. There are a couple of features listed here that I really thought were already released. I need to check what my upstream is...
But I just found Inkscape really awkward and clunky to use for any kind of illustration or free-drawing. I think Blender in some ways might have an advantage there because there are enough obvious cool features with Grease pencil (3D integration, rendering pipelines) that it provides more motivation to get past the "how the heck am I supposed to draw comfortably in this" hurdle. And it needs those motivators, Grease pencil is not comfortable to draw in without changing some settings and learning more about the general Blender interface; it's got a huge barrier to entry.
It's possible I could get Inkscape configured and comfortable to use, but I just didn't have enough reason to get over the hurdle. Or maybe it is actually too clunky to use more like a painting app; but I want to give it the benefit of the doubt since I'm less familiar with it.
Blender is like the Swiss Army knife program of my dreams.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh wait... I mean YOUR not wrong.
