Going the wrong way?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Friday 17 February 2006 19:13, m0ns00n wrote:
> Hey!
>
> I really like many of Kritas features, but have you guys stopped and
> thought for a moment that persuing PhotoShop and Paintshop Pro as the ideal
> paint program is a bit premature? 

Well, if you read what I've been writing in the past three years in my blog,
you'd have a pretty good answer to that question :-)

(http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/krita)

> There are other examples which in my 
> opinion are much better as paint apps:
>
>  * TVPaint / Aura
>  * DPaint / GRFX2 / Brilliance (the roots of many paint apps)
>  * Painter
>  * Mirage

Of these, the only one I've used is Painter, _if_ you mean Corel Painter. The 
single best example of an intuitive paint application is Dab (or one of its 
varieties -- Impasto, for instance). Corel Painter is fun, but a little too 
complicated and it spends a lot of time faking effects. Applications worth 
looking at that you've missed are Art Rage (lots of fun, very cool) and Deep 
Paint.

> Also, making gfx is hard when one has to use a huge interface with several
> mouse click just to change tool and settings. I use lighten/darken alot and
> I don't see why I need to use a dark and light color as
> foreground/background to get an effect. Isn't the opacity setting enough to
> set the emphasis? 

I'm not sure: you need to carefull explain to me you process, preferably with 
before and after images (and maybe in-between images, too) of what you're 
trying to do and to achieve. I'm a linguist, not an artist, so please be 
explicit.

I've had a lot of help from artists like Mr. Youp (pity we didn't manage to 
stabilize the key feature he suggested -- probably for 1.6 or 2.0) and  
Lauri Järvenpää. Also from people working with photos, which is quite another 
thing, but also supported by Krita, like David Schroeder, most recently. 

> And I use alot of pixel techniques. Why can't I use a 1x1 
> pixel brush with guassian blur? 

Probably because you need context to do a blur, and our convolution code 
doesn't take the context from beyond the edge of the brush. So you need a 3x3 
brush to effectively blur using the gaussian blur filter -- the middle pixel 
in the 3x3 is the one that'll get blurred.

> That's been possible with ancient paint 
> apps for ever, but new apps seemingly can't do it (photoshop, gimp...).
> And where's animation support? It's so basic to implement, just like
> layers, only horizontally. Onionskin wouldn't be harder than layer
> transparancy. Think outside Gimp and PSD! =)

Well, I haven't got the least bit of personal interest in animation -- not 
that I think it's not worthwile, but it's just not what I've got an itch for.
My personal itch is twofold: paint static art, in particular using simulated 
natural media, and to fix my holiday snaps.

Some time ago we had a Polish guy who wanted to do a yuv colorspace and 
support for animation, but he disappeared without showing us any code. I 
haven't got a clue what onion skin is, and unlike the RAW guys, nobody has 
stepped up to patiently tutor me on the matter.

I don't expect code from everyone who expects their preferred feature in their 
preferred interface from us: expertise and testing is incredibly valuable, 
too.

> One of the reasons many people hate and loathe Gimp is the huge interface
> that gets in your way, you should think a bit about this when making the
> interface of Krita ;-)

It's a perennial problem, aggravated by the limitations of the current set of 
GUI toolkits and translation requirements. Adobe has it easy. They can open a 
can of interns and tell them to build a custom small-sized widget set for the 
palettes and then anoter can of interns to translate & fix the layout of 
those palettes after translation. By comparison Qt (and GTK) are woefully 
inadequate, but we'll have to live with it. About 250 pixels of screen-width 
will be taken by palettes, I'm afraid.

Unless we manage to do an interface like Dab's. That would be utterly cool, 
but also: always full-screen.

> Other than that, I am having great hopes about this project. Finally
> something that at least aims to be more than an image processor!

Ha, aims aint't the problem. Nor ideas. Implementation, testing and releasing, 
that's the sweaty work :-).

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
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