Thoughts on Krita website presentation

[Valerie VK]

Hello! I've been interested in Krita for a while! I haven't had a proper
chance to use it (I still can't get my tablet to work), but I like where
it is going!

I'd just like to give a few opinions on Krita presentation: I think the
current presentation is very confusing, and it'd be nice for Krita to have
a website like Inkscape. Doing so would pay for itself, by:
- attracting more users
- attracting more developers
- attracting more donations eventually through clearer exposure

Right now, I really wonder how many people have heard of Krita in a
significant manner outside of KOffice users.

In particular, when you first see the page of Krita (which ends up looking
like an after-thought to the rest of KOffice - something that really
doesn't do it justice), I see this:

"Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is
part of KOffice since version 1.4. Krita contains both ease-of-use and fun
features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to
airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit
images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images."

Comments:
- "part of KOffice:" for one, we care about Krita here, not the rest of
KOffice. Most importantly, it makes the program look minor, since you'd
normally not expect such a good stand-alone program to be just a part of
some office application.
- "guided painting:" while it's a nice feature, I'm sure there are better
ones
- "OpenEXR HDR:" at this point the potential new user is totally confused.
Not every user stumbles across Krita just because Gimp doesn't support
enough image types. They just want a good free program to paint with.

And it took me forever to find this mailing list!

If you do set up a stand-alone website, I'd suggest an introduction more
in the lines of the following (needs to be modified, of course.
Information on Krita is so scattered that I have no idea what its
standing-out points are supposed to be either):

----------

Krita is a free painting program which seeks to offer many of the
capabilities of commercial programs such as Corel Painter, and more! Its
features include easy-to-use drawing tools, watercolor effects,
perspective grids and an advanced color mixer. It also has image layers,
group layers, adjustment layers and the innovative part layers: any
KOffice document can be embedded as a layer in Krita.

What's more, it also offers high-end image editing features such as
support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images, making
it a flexible tool for everything from photo editing to art creation. It
also has a rich set of filters and filter brushes for image enhancement,
color enhancement and artistic image reinterpretation. In 2006, it won the
2006 Akademy Award for Best Application.

Finally, Krita is a very modular application, so you can easily extend
Krita by creating new tools, paint modes, filters, dialogs, colorspaces
and import and export filters.

etc

----------

It would start by comparing it to something familiar (Painter), and by
comparing itself to such, people outright know that it's not some tiny
MSPaint look-alike.

If the website is like Inkscape, then the users would then go to the
Screenshots section, where they would see Krita 2.0 (upcoming) and see
screenshots of features such as the brand-new mixer, and others. Then they
look back and see interesting features such as the perspective grid,
filter brushes, watercolor and more. Sold! (Honestly, Inkscape's feature
screenshot system is in my opinion genius, it's what sold me. Krita's
screenshots though, look rather confusing and disorganized...)

Unfortunately, I neither know how to code, nor have any experience with
doing websites. But anyway, those are my 2 cents. 

*subliminal message*and include brush size adjustment shortcuts in
upcoming versions, please?*/subliminal message*


       
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