My random thoughts about image editing needs and Krita

[furryball]

On Thursday 09 June 2005 09:41, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> No? Are you sure -- I've tried it and it did work. Keep in mind that Krita
> doesn't use the old-fashioned marching ants way of indicating a selection,
> but a mask, and doesn't yet the modern darker ridge along the edges of the
> mask (because I cannot figure out how to do that fast enough), so you might
> not see the mask if you start with a white image, a white mask and a
> selection.

I used the transparent background filled with some random spots and stuff. I 
tried the rectangle selection (for instance) and marked the area as usual 
with the mouse. Sometimes it works and masks, sometimes not. It beats me. 
I'll try it again later or something.

> High end features take a lot of work and can only be implemented on strong
> foundations. Krita's foundations are strong enough -- things like 16-bit

That's great!

> it and who has expressed a desire to code. Do you personally need cmyk, by
> the way? If so, you're drafted as a domain consultant :-).

I don't need personally cmyk, since I'm not doing anything serious. Never got 
the time or need sofar. :)

> In principle yes. Although the monitor profile isn't saved: there is an
> image profile, a monitor calibration profile, a printer calibration profile
> and a scanner calibration profile. These work together (always excepting
> bugs & unimplemented features like out-of-gamut-warning) in the same way as
> Photoshop.

In principle yes? Sounds a bit hard for me to be able to create in image with 
proper colors and be able to see it properly elsewhere... A bit more 
for-dummies approach would perhaps be nice.

> No -- I had never expected people to interchange images in pdf format, much
> less that they would want to edit a pdf in a raster image editor. Don't

That's what the local print shops at least want. It's better than all the 
customers sending all kinds of silly .docs and stuff that renders differently 
on different versions of the applications or might not even work at all. With 
some luck the applications used for that have even embed the color profiles 
for the dummy users without them even noticing it. It's not quite important a 
feature for an all-around image editing application I agree but..

> they use tiffs with embedded profiles for that? Anyway, our printing is
> very weak at the moment, and not likely to improve very soon because it's a
> difficult job and I don't have the expertise and time for it. Importing is

Perhaps some day someone will pick that up :)

> done through ImageMagick, and if ImageMagick cannot read pdf's as images
> (which it can't), Krita cannot either. Unless someone writes a pdf->krita
> koffice filter, then it will work. If you have have one of these pdf's with
> images, could you send me one? Then I have something to experiment with.

Any .pdf with images should be suitable for that, there are millions on the 
internet.. To think of it, many pdf viewers understand the elemtnts like text 
and render it as such on the widgets. Meaning they don't "generate bitmap" of 
the pdf. But xpdf seems stupid, at least I can't recall it having any text 
selection and text searching tools. With some luck it could be a ready 
example on howto convert a pdf to bitmap page by page. (However it's an 
ancient application)

> That's on the todo list. Macro's, too, by the way. But it may be hard to
> get it to function fast enough.

That's what I thought. I must have been a great challenge to the Photoshop 
team to make it scale up on larger images and such. They use afaik 
extensively all kinds of caching&tiling tricks there to distinguish the 
viewable from the real and all sorts of black magic. It isn't super fast but 
it's usable even on an "ordinary" computer.

> plugins. All tools, all colorspaces, all filters and many bits of user
> interface are plugins. But the API is not fixed and there's no way for a

Sounds powerful enough for insane amounts of tasks.

> Well, we've got lots of work to do before we can start adding more
> filters...

I think I understood a few of the reasons. The biggest flaw the Gimp project 
has is that they nudge with all kinds of small things and polish and tweak 
insanely - yet the basics are so early 90s that it makes you want to cry. 
First the foundation, then the rest. Not vice versa.

> There's no non-used space. If you move your layer to the left, it'll grow
> to the right and won't get chopped off on the left. This works the same as
> Photoshop.

Where is the layer's limits then.. Takes a while to get used to the gui there 
it seems, at least for me.

> You can take a look at the current TODO at:
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/koffice/krita/TODO?rev=423084&view=markup

I'll keep the stuff in mind in case I'll get some serious time (which I 
however doubt).