whither krita -- summary

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Thursday 24 September 2009, sven.langkamp wrote:

> Can be solved by experimental and stable branches. Instead of makeing
> experiments in trunk, you would have a seperate testing ground which allows
> to merge new experiments earlier. Ideally we could keep the stable branch
>  in releaseable state most of the time.

I think we can say that all of us agree on this; I'm wondering whether we can 
accomplish this before KDE moves to gitorious, for instance, by having our own 
gitorious repo and a designated- git-svn repo master who moves the finished 
stuff to the kde svn.

> I think Krita is somewhere in the middle. There was an very interesting
> video posted by the Durian project:
> http://durian.blender.org/news/tutorial-painting-time-lapse-by-david-revoy/
> 
> It's not only amazing art, but also very interesting from workflow point of
> view (for me as non-artist). I especially noticed how often he switches
> between from MyPaint to Gimp and back. Each time the image needs to be save
> and opened in the other app. I think switching between different
> workspaces/modes would be much better. For example we could have different
> workspaces for painting, image manipulation and vector drawings.

Wow. That man is _good_. And yes, if we manage to offer what he needs in one 
package where he doesn't need to switch, that's a killer feature in itself. 
And, provided we fix our performance issues, we can do that. We've got all the 
tools around, from alchemy's shapes to gimp's filters to the brush engines. 
With a nice slider in the top toolbar to switch between mode, we could give 
our users a really nice environment, for instance.

There are other things I learned from this video: this guy doesn't use 
palettes, he just select the right color from the triangle, a lot! mypaint has 
some very cool color selectors, but those aren't used, as far as I can see. (I 
know that I don't use them either when working in mypaint myself, I just use 
the triangle, just like I use the small color selector in Krita).

He needs high-res, and gimp paints too slow for him; he merges his layers 
often and even makes the effor to paint round things in mypaint, where he 
doesn't seem to use layers. I think that looks like a limitation judging from 
the way he paints, but I cannot be sure, he's so damn good. (Why are all the 
best artists french?)

Can we support this guy's workflow in 2.5? (After Enkithan's artist in 2.4...)

> The dockers system we currently is quite flexible and allows lots of
> customization, but it mixes too much different things in my option. The
> dockers should adapt to the task I want to do at some point. For example I
> have very often a situation where I was first editing some shape layer and
> then switch to a pixel based layer. While editing the shape layer I use the
> add shape, stroke properties and styles docker, but these are useless when
> editing pixels. So I tend to close and reopen dockers quite often.

I agree, but I go further: I tend not to do things that need other dockers at 
all, since they are too much of a bother for me. And I want our old hide-all-
dockers-and-toolbox shortcut back.

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