Call for contributors for Fixture [ Qt5 based raster graphics editor ]

Jaroslaw Staniek staniek at kde.org
Fri Sep 21 15:40:01 BST 2018


On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 at 16:23, Scott Petrovic <scottpetrovic at gmail.com>
wrote:

> One thing that helps Krita is it has focus on who they are helping (people
> that can draw and paint). Photoshop caters to a lot of different industries
> - which is why it has 1,000 features built into it (which is both good and
> bad). When you get feedback from people, they oftentimes don't tell you
> important information about who they are. Are they graphic designers, web
> designers, photographers, 3d texture artists, animators, or maybe beginners
> just trying to get into basic image editing like cropping. You need to find
> out who you are trying to help. Graphic designers don't normally do
> painting and illustrations, and web designers don't usually do animation.
> This is why pretty much everyone only uses 2-3% of all the features in
> Photoshop. The rest of the features are just useless to them and are UI
> clutter.
>
> Trying to do a 1:1 copy of Photoshop isn't a good direction. That program
> has had 30 years to add a giant amount of features that have turned it into
> the powerful/bloated software that it has become. As a UI/UX person, I
> would focus on finding the people you want to help, learn about them, and
> give them a product that they are excited about.
>

This. And Kuntal, from controversial angle, how would Fixture help
re-sellers? They would ignore with you from the day one I bet, then they
will fight. I see this all the time with, say, Blender. The time you
Fixture team releases 1.0 all specialized apps will be available via
service only (compare Fusion 360).

As long as this is not a playground, starting new project is not much
different in FOSS than in closed source. You do not want to target the
strongest players and most crowded markets. Target audience, raster
professionals do not seek for a change for price reasons since Photoshop is
really cheap for them, nor they seek anything else to get freedom. Just
like good dentists do not seek for replacement materials you can easily
make with talc and cyanoacrylic and be happy ;) I do not say there are no
exceptions, I am thinking about top digital graphics individuals. You need
community of these users this yearm, not in 10 years or else your project
will evolve to /dev/null. And last: where are you going to be and what to
do in 10 years because it's how long it takes for specialized software to
evolve to usable stage.

Practical thing is, I'd like to gently hear from the Krita community if
they accept properly done "Photoshop" mode for Krita, perhaps at the build
time and if possible go there. Krita has dozens of structures and GUI items
you need but you do not want to re-implement them in coming years... This
can be done right but has costs too for Krita so cost-benefit math needs to
be done first.


>
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 7:10 AM Kuntal Majumder <zee at hellozee.me> wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>>
>>  ---- On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 16:28:41 +0530 Boudewijn Rempt <
>> boud at valdyas.org> wrote ----
>>  > Using QGraphicsItems for layers is not an approach that's going to
>> work out.
>>  > It will not perform, it will not allow you to go beyond 8 bits sRGB
>> and it
>>  > will take too much memory.
>>  >
>>  > If you insist on starting from scratch, and I understand the
>> temptation, you
>>  > should:
>>  >
>>  > * consider color management: you cannot do anything useful unless you
>>  > understand color management. Check out littlecms and
>> https://poynton.ca/
>>  > ColorFAQ.html.
>>  >
>>  > * develop a structure for storing (including swapping), modifying and
>>  > retrieving raster data. QGraphicsView actually is a tile engine, but
>> you're
>>  > not using it that way. Its level of maintenance in Qt is also low.
>>  >
>>  > * develop a system for undo/redo -- Krita uses Qt's system for that,
>> but if
>>  > you want to clone photoshop, you should consider using their system.
>> There's a
>>  > presentation from an Adobe engineer at a C++ conference in Moscow that
>> should
>>  > help you form an idea. But basically, every modification results in a
>> shallow
>>  > clone of the document. You will need this to clone photoshop's history
>> brush.
>>  > Google for it, I cannot find the presentation right now.
>>  >
>>  > Then you can start on implementing a real canvas and a tool system.
>>
>> Thanks for the pointers, at least I won't be clueless like before.
>>
>>  > I only remember you from https://phabricator.kde.org/T8198#132594 --
>> did you
>>  > post a patch for review and did I miss that?
>>
>> This is the one you reviewed https://phabricator.kde.org/D10202
>>
>> Thanks
>> Kuntal M
>>
>>
>>

-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

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