Krita features

[cesarcrusius at earthlink.net]

Hi there,

I've read the Krita pages and couldn't find this discussion, so even risking making a fool of myself, here it goes:

I use Gimp for image editing, and I'm serious about it. As many people, I would like to have a KDE counterpart to it, but I understand that getting a new program to the Gimp level is not a trivial task. The only shot at becoming as good as (and better) than Gimp is to atract more developers and attention.

A good way to do both is to provide mission-critical functionality that is missing in Gimp. Two things are recurring themes for the last few years in Gimp mailing lists:

* Lack of color management support. This one is a pet peeve of people who are serious about image manipulation, who send their images for large format printers, etc etc.

* Lack of 16 bit mode support. This is also a bad one. Messing around with curves, contrast, and so on while in 8 bit mode is a tricky proposition, and is one of the reasons why scanners dump 16 bit info. The difference is noticeable, I have 13x19 prints made by applying the same curves to 16 and 8 bit black and white images and there is no quesion about which is better.

So here's where I'm getting at: even if you could no nothing else with Krita but (a) deal with color management, and (b) apply curves to 16 bit images, you would still get people using Krita on a regular basis as the first step in image maniulation. I do (b) quite often in filmgimp before getting back to Gimp for things like Unsharpen Mask and others. By having (a) and (b) you would attract a lot of users and generate much more interest than if you were just some sort of 'Gimp look-alike' by making the point that you're serious about image manipulation. That should also bring developers in.

Again, I may be just making a fool of myself, this may not be your goals at all, but I'd sure like them to be :)

Cheers,

- Cesar