Whither Krita?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Joining in with with my own thoughts:

Motivation

I like sketching. There may be better artists, but I still like doing it. I 
started working on Krita instead of Gimp because Gimp didn't satisfy my 
painting urges (in 2003) and because the code looked decidedly unhackable. 
Krita was nearly ready back then, I thought, only missing an actual painting 
tool. I didn't work on MyPaint, because that application started in 2004. My 
comparison application are art rage (nice, but unusable because the paint 
never dries) and Corel Painter (nice, but not for tablet usage because of the 
gui).

I don't do much with the pictures I take with my camera, mostly cropping and 
scaling for my blog. I seldom even run unsharp mask on them, let alone color 
correct them.

The kind of interface I need actually varies with computer: on my tablet pc I 
want some art-rage-like, but usable, on a computer with a bigger screen, 
something Corel Painter like will do, though even there, I can do without the 
many of the palettes and would like an easer way to select and manage colors 
and brushes (like what Vera is now working on for Krita :-).

The advantage I see for our technology is the flexibility: our colorspaces and 
brush engines are pretty unique, and they make it worthwhile continuing with 
Krita. But I have often wondered whether making a second painting-oriented app 
on top of krita/image and pigment wouldn't be easier than trying to develop an 
all-in-one package, even with modes or profiles.)


Problems

I see the following problems with krita, apart from anything that might have 
to with vision, focus  or usability:

* performance: krita just is too slow to work with. 1.6 was slow, but not too 
slow, 2.x is way too slow. This prevents me from actually having fun painting, 
more than a lack of features of our brush engines.

* stability: we have serious stability issues. Going out on a limb, I'd say 
that most are related to integration issues with KOffice libraries, instead 
of problems in our own core code.

* being part of a suite: not a problem for me, but I keep running into people 
who tell me that they won't use Krita because it is part of KOffice. Silly of 
them, but it means we are losing out on users and potential constributors who 
are way more part of the graphics/art scene than most people in the KOffice 
community.

* fit and finish: we have lots of really cool features, but they all feel a 
bit unfinished (masks), or very unfinished (brush presets, color mixer). Which 
means not many people can really make use of them. When we move to git, I 
would like to have a main tree and a staging tree where all the new features 
land first only to be moved to main when they are really good enough.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org