Episode: 307
Title: HPR0307: Krita
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0307/hpr0307.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:57:59

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Welcome back to Public Radio. My name is Clot 2 and today I'll be talking about Gimp
and Krita. Everyone's heard of Gimp. Gimp is the not-so-drop-in replacement. For
Adobe Photoshop and runs on Linux and Windows and MacOS 10 and is essentially a
pretty good replacement for a robust image editor for Linux. Now there are a
couple of different complaints with Gimp and number one is that the
interface is not Photoshoppy enough. It uses a couple of different windows to
get the job done and that throws a lot of people off and there's things are
placed in different areas and some tools look different than their Photoshop
equivalents and some things act a little bit differently etc etc. Big deal right?
I mean as long as you can get the job done who cares? If the concern is
converting people to Linux and they won't do it because they need Photoshop and
they simply can't do it because of Photoshop. Chances are these people aren't
going to ever convert to Linux anyway because they're not the type who want to
learn anything new. They want to learn Photoshop CS1 and never have to upgrade and
never have to learn anything different. Much less change the operating system
under which all of it runs. So I'm not that concerned over that style of
argument but I mean there are certain things and everyone uses Photoshop for
different things in a different way and things like that. So there are certain
things in Gimp that you just don't have that you might need in Photoshop and
someone had emailed me a little while ago with a really interesting question about
kind of distorting an image and making it appear that it is wrapped around
for instance a cylindrical object or that it's curved in some way and it's kind
of a tool that exists in Photoshop for which apparently no equivalent exists in
Gimp. So is Krita the answer? No. Krita is a cute based application so it would
be it would fall solidly under the KDE world. It is in fact part of the K
office suite. So Krita attempts to be another Gimp rather than being based on the
GGK tool set tool kit whatever it is based on cute. I believe that the
current version is still cute three only I don't believe they've gone over to
cute four. I could be wrong about that but it's a good little application and
there are certain things about it that are more photoshoppy and certain things
about it that are basically on par with Gimp in terms of whether someone's
going to have to think twice about doing something whereas they would not have
to think about it at all if they if they were coming from Photoshop. So I guess
the bottom one is that there's no drop-in replacement for Photoshop now and
there probably will never be a drop-in replacement for Photoshop because
people who want to have Photoshop want to have Photoshop and that's fine that's
just something that everyone in this world is probably going to just kind of have
to accept at some point but as for using Krita it is definitely worth trying
out and what I did was being an avid user of Gimp and formerly certified
Photoshop user and instructor I you know I know quite a bit about about the Adobe
side of things and so I and since then I've pretty much adapted it completely
to Gimp but but I'm always interested in seeing what kind of alternatives are
out there and one thing that you'll notice about Krita and the way that you
install Krita at least on the systems that I'm using lately is Krita-K
Office or maybe it's K Office-Kita I think it might be K Office-Kita so you
know either a young install K Office-Kita or aptitude install K Office-Kita
should get you Krita on your system and be aware that if your system shows
that you do have K Office you don't necessarily have all the components so
it's probably worth installing K Office-Kita specifically so one thing you'll
notice about Krita is that it comes in there are three different presets there's
gray scale there's RGB and yes there is CMYK so if one of your big problems with
Linux is that there is no image editor that will really deal with CMYK your
complaints are over you have a solution it is Krita yes it can do CMYK and it
can do it quite well so you start with it from the preset and then you you go
into Krita and the next thing you'll notice is that the layout is a lot more
Photoshoppy you've got your toolbar your you know kind of dual column tool
bar on the left side of the screen you've got your property inspector across the
top which will give you added options for each different tool that you have
and then you've got your pallets down the right side of the screen and the
pallets are detachable it's not quite as flexible as Photoshop I mean you can't
take for instance the color swatches the color picture lets you do you know
from HSV to RGB gray and then just to individual pallets those are each their
own little tab within the main colors palette you can't take those tabs and
just drop them down and put them next to for instance layers so it's not that
amount of flexibility but there is the flexibility of being able to take the
colors palette out of that right hand the side and placing it you know
somewhere else on your screen or just closing it entirely whatever you want to
do just depending on your use for the for the different pallets and you know
whether you want to see it all the time or not so that's that's handy and I think
again I think people will appreciate sort of the the the ability to customize
their environment a little bit more I think than on the game either way the
layout is still a lot more Photoshop like than the game I would say now
across the top the the property inspector depending on what tool you've you've
selected your options will will change there and there are some really cool
options like if you've just got your basic free hand drawing tool you can
make this with your property inspector you can make it an airbrush you can make
it any racer a pixel brush a pixel pencil or a smudge brush now that's kind
of standard but then if you go down to like one of the vector shapes it might not
be a vector shape I mean it starts out as a vector I guess but I it might bit
map it right right after I think it does yeah bit maps it after you draw it but
either way so if you've got like a rectangle you could actually make that any
racer so you could literally have an eraser tool that is completely you know
rectangular or or around around shape or an airbrush texture whatever so
there's a lot of flexibility there which is kind of cool and it's got all the
typical it does kind of straddle the is it an image editor or is it a paint
program and it straddles that really actually quite well got a lot of the
typical image editing tools such as your clone stamp and your paint brushes and
your airbrushes and things like that color pickers gradients but then it's also
got an entirely new brush engine that is modeling itself off of programs like
Corel painter or you know the Sumi e brush set things like that so you've got
a lot of cool pressure sensitive and really kind of like freehand
illustrator geared tools that are certainly beyond my knowledge of how to use
them but you know it is neat to know that they're available to you and if
you're into the whole artistic kind of being able to draw thing then this
might be something you'll want to look at because at least the samples that
they have online look really interesting and really impressive whether or
not I would be able to generate any of that myself I highly highly doubt but
they are there the tools are available and it's pretty pretty impressive the
keyboard shortcuts are not anymore like Photoshop then then then GIMP are they're
completely different completely their own shortcuts can you change them
actually not that I can tell not in Creta yet you can and GIMP if you want to
spend the time you could go through and change all your keyboard shortcuts to
something more equivalent to their Photoshop counterparts on Creta I don't see
that as an option anywhere so that could be an issue if you're really trying to
emulate Photoshop opening up.psd files in both GIMP and Creta that was an
interesting test that I tried unfortunately GIMP or not unfortunately but the
fact is that GIMP kind of performed better on this test-avended Creta there
were certain things in Creta you know I would have certain layers masked in an
interesting way or blended in some way that for some reason Creta would not
would not be able to emulate and I'm not really sure why and then I'd open up
the same.psd file in GIMP and it would appear exactly as it would have on
Photoshop so that was an interesting test and I'm not quite sure who what what
is to blame because Creta has the same kind of layer blending options that
really GIMP does or that Photoshop does so I'm not not entirely sure what what
the issue was there the layer palette in in Creta has a lot more options than
GIMP does you can do layers you can do you make it visible you can lock it you
can remove layers you can group layers you can add adjustment layers which
GIMP obviously does not have and that's been a long-time criticism of GIMP I
think so yeah that's kind of interesting the text tool in in Creta is badly
needing work just as much I mean I think GIMP is one step ahead of Creta in
the text and InkScape is is worlds away from both of them I mean the
InkScape text tool if you've ever used it is just it's a normal text tool you
can type right into the document you can make changes you can modify it do
whatever you need to do you can put it on a path you can resize it whatever
both GIMP and Creta seem to be lagging a lot on that and I guess a
purist might say well you shouldn't have to you shouldn't be generating text in
your image manipulation program anyway but I mean come on it's something that
people have expected now since Photoshop 7 so it kind of needs to be there
and it's not really where it needs to be and either GIMP or Creta as far as
I as far as I'm concerned I don't know what the logistics of stealing the
text tool from InkScape would be but I think that could be I don't know I guess
if it was easy someone would have done it already but definitely InkScape
text is the way to go but Creta does have a text tool so it is it's if you have
to have text in there you got to get it in there you know exactly what you
want to put and how you will want you want it to look then you can you can go
there the alpha the alphanus of the layers are inherent unlike in the GIMP
where you sometimes have to add an alpha channel in order to get transparency
that kind of thing doesn't that's not an issue in Creta there's not the kind
of weird defined areas of layers like there is in GIMP where if you make a new
layer it may only be five pixels by five pixels and then you have to expand the
layer to fit the canvas that kind of thing that's not the case in Creta
Creta treats a layer the same way that Photoshop does it's a it's an
onion skin or a transparency over your entire canvas no matter what so that's
kind of nice it's actually kind of refreshing refreshing there are certain
things about Creta that strike me as a little bit undeveloped and I'm sure the
developers would agree you know I mean it's obviously a work in project of in
progress and they they they acknowledge that on their site things like the
little star tool that they have there's not really in your property inspector you
would expect there to be some kind of option for how many points there to be
there were but what happens instead is that over on the right in your palette
section a new palette appears called star and that's where the options are so
it's kind of a you know there are certain things where the property inspector
at the top manages certain aspects of things and then the palette on the right
at manages other aspects so it's not necessarily an error or a mistake or
anything it's just what I would consider an inconsistency but nevertheless the
the tools are there the the power is there so it's not that big of a deal but
it's a it's a good program it's definitely a good alternative to GIMP if you're
looking for a Photoshop like application in Linux you could also probably
hunt it down for for the Mac I know that there's a there's there's supposed to be a
Mac port at some point and there should be a Windows port as well so it it really
ought to run on any system that you that you're using whether it's your
preferred system at home or you know the one that you're forced to use at work
you you should probably be able to find Crete for for that system the current
version of Crete the SVN version notwithstanding is 1.6.3 so if you
aptitude install it or young install it that should be what you see and it's
it's been really really stable it's been really good there have been a couple
of things to get used to like the placement of certain pallets or the fact
that there is no eraser tool except that everything is an eraser if you want it
to be you know which once you figure it out it's actually pretty impressive and
kind of kind of cool because now you realize oh you can you can erase in any
shape that you want that's really neat but for a little while it throws you off
because all you want to do is erase something and you can't figure out how to do
it and that's about it Crete is it's it's definitely a promising project
something to check out something to look at if you are if you're looking for an
alternative to GIMP or Photoshop either I've either one of those you might
want to check this one out you can also go to creta dot Crete a dash plug-ins
dot org I think yes Crete a dash plug-ins dot org and they have quite a few
plug-ins that they are developing and I mean they've they've 1.6.3 includes a
certain number of plug-ins anyway like filters and things like that like you
know your typical blurs pixelize color color correction tools the color
correction tool is actually by the way aren't that I don't love the color
correction tool the color adjustment tool it's a nice it's a curve tool but
you have to define which channel you're you're doing the curve to and it just
seems a little bit overly complex to me but that's a that's a minor issue it's
not a huge thing I mean it's it's doable it's just different but they do have a
lot of different little plug-ins and you can look at the the examples on the
Crete a dash plug-ins dot org site and it'll show you what they're supposed to
do and they'll give you a download link up at the top left that you can
download the download the particular plug-ins set and there's an installation
instruction link there as well so you can try all that and be sure to try out
their brush engine as well if you're into the whole painting thing that's that's
a really cool that that's supposed to be a really powerful engine like I say
I'm not much of a hand artist myself so I don't I don't dare try out anything
having to do with brushes or pencils or pens or ink but it's it's definitely
something to look at if you're if you're looking for a more a painter style
program and to check out Crete in general you can go to k office dot org slash
Crete and that will kind of give you an update on all their little you know all
the things that they're working on all the things that they have in mind it's
all scriptable with Python and Ruby so it it's pretty cool 2.0 they have a lot
of exciting things in mind for it hopefully it will all happen they they take
inspiration from lots of different places like obviously the GIMP from the G
Sumi simulation the brush and ink simulation program something called wet
dream which is a watercolor paint simulation corral painter e-paints pixara
sketchbook lots of different software applications both proprietary and
free as well as some academic proposals and things like that so check it out
Crete it's an interesting application it's an interesting alternative to GIMP and
Photoshop and as far as I can tell it's it's really it's come a long way and
it's and they've got their eye on and going a lot further so so check it out
and yes it does the whole 16-bit and 32-bit color space as well and it does
raw and all that other good stuff so any complaints about that stuff can now be
over as well try out Crete enjoy thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by
caro.net so head on over to CARO.18 for all of those