Hi. This is my first post here. I'm been trying Krita and there are a lot of things that are really great in this app. Most importantly, the brushes. The multithreading makes things very fast, even at very large scale.

I'm actually from a drawing and painting background in the real world but never really got into digital painting that much. Nearly all my time has been spent in procedural landscape apps such as Mojoworld and TG2. This is all very complicated and I'm becoming more inclined to liking 2D because I can realise ideas fast.

My desktop computer is good power now for faster brush response. I have a Cintiq 21 inch. I'm running Archlinux and this is now a really great system for painting.

As I'm using Krita, there are a few problems to work flow coming up.

The first one is the way brushes are handled. I'm finding this quite frustrating. To create a new brush you open the brush editor. That is obviously open for the last brush you used which you can edit and save. To create a new brush you just type a new name, edit it then "Save to Preset" whenever you're ready. All well and good but then it starts to get nasty. You select a brush to edit from the horizontal thumbs at the top. I notice you can also delete brushes by clicking again. I don't like this at all. Too easy to accidentally delete. I know it's not actually deleted from the drive (it's just blacklisted) but this whole system is very messy if you are constantly creating, editing, and deleting brushes. It needs to be handled in a much better way. If you could somehow export a brush pack or something that would at least get around it but otherwise you end up messing around in the brush folder and deleting the blacklist etc. It's extremely tedious to keep all your brushes organised, at least it is if you spend a lot of time tweaking brushes which of course you can do in Krita. Also, the brush you are using is not highlighted in thumbs.

On a basic level though this app is up to pro standard for painting. I have Photoshop CS6 demo on my Windows partition at the moment. That's cool for sure and it's much better for painting than it used to but in fact the brushes aren't as smooth as Krita's. Ignoring other issues with Krita, the brushes are by far the most pleasant to use out of any app I've tried.

One thing I would love to see in Krita is the Gmic filters. That would substantially improve things.

Better transform tools would be good as well but it looks like that's ongoing in development.

There are also a few things I don't like in the UI but they minor issues at the moment. Some buggy things and things I don't understand like the palettes docker which doesn't seem to do anything. Attempting to add a colour to a palette causes an immediate crash.

I'm not using Krita latest version, just the 2.6.3 version in the Arch repo.

It looks like a good job is being done here and hopefully we can have an open source painting app which can rival Photoshop. I say Photoshop because I think the other painting apps on Windows and OSX are actually far more limited and unreliable than Photoshop for painting.

Hi! Welcome to the Krita forums! And thanks for your input!

Yes -- we need to spend more time fixing the brush management tools. Ramon Miranda and others have also complained about that. It really needs a thorough interaction design, and that's hard to come by. It's not, btw, double clicking on a preset that deletes it -- it's pressing the red delete icon overlay. There are some more subtle things that we want to fix in the brush interaction, too.

Lukas Tvrdy is working on GMic integration -- that should be more or less done for 2.8.

The transform tool has been thoroughly overhauled for 2.7, which went into beta yesterday.

Finally, the palettes... That is a very sore point. It really needs a complete rewrite. We share that with the rest of the calligra applications but it is totally broken (hangs krita) on Windows and unusable on Linux. I'm sorely tempted to just disable it for Krita 2.7. But it's on the radar, together with a host of other things .

OK. Thanks a lot for your work.

The old transformation tool is very slow and resource hungry especially if you try to do a ful perspective transformation on a large image. This is a very useful tool in any app because it allows ways to create depth and planes as well as just minor adjustments. Photoshop is practically instant with some of these tools. That's it's main plus. Gimp is completely acceptable but Krita needs to be much better here.

Another slowdown is selecting on large images.

There are other minor problems I've encountered but maybe bugs that are known about so I need to check beforehand.

Just one other point I noticed. I use EXR for render outputs from another app. It appears I can open these OK in Krita but I can't edit them. The tools don't seem to be able to work on the entire range. You can do this in Blender but obviously it would be better in Krita.

Oh? 2.7 is already into beta? Will it finally fix this bug then: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312437

The extra line that keeps being drawn between the line and the cursor upon mouse release is making smoothing and the "draw dynamically" mode nearly unusable for drawing normal lines.

Yeah, the beta schedule has started already, but I haven't got an idea on how to fix that bug yet. I'll ask Dmitry and Lukas for input on irc.

Quick fix would be to turn off the last line painting in smoothing code for dyna brush -- in the end dyna already smooth out
the stroke. I would need more time to investigate the issue

I've been testing out Photoshop CS6 on my Windows partition. Just to see what state the app is in now. It's very good and always a benchmark to test against but one thing that could be a big boon for other apps is the fact that now you have subscribe to the cloud monthly to use Photoshop. You can't buy a full licence in one go anymore. This subsciption isn't cheap either. It seems there is a whole lot of negativity on the net towards this move by Adobe. I've seen Gimp mentioned many times as alternative.

I think a lot of people will be looking for alternatives.

I've spent some more time in Krita. I might download the development version to try that. From what I've read the transform tool is the clear advance with that.

The major league problem above all others by a long shot is the way the brush presets are handled. It actually makes Krita unusable, at least if your into tweaking around a lot creating brushes. That's real pity because obviously the brushes are a great stength. I'ts absolutely vital for that to easy to deal with. It is in Mypaint now. Even Gimp is easier to deal with.

What exactly make the preset "unusable"? So far you only mentioned the delete button in the preset strip, which is hardly a showstopper.

Krita's preset system is great for those who want to just tweak the brush settings once and leave them at that.
I've noticed that some users like Bollebib like to continuously adjust brush settings, however, and they can achieve this more easily with MyPaint's compact sliders docker. So, this is what Ryan may be referring to when he says "tweaking around."

I made a mock-up proposal for a docker where users would be able to access sliders more quickly:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318340

Common options besides size, opacity and flow would be much easier to access this way.

OK. I've found a workaround for dealing with not ending up with hundreds of brushes in the folders. You mark the brush thumb with say a small green or red mark or whatever colour coded system you decide on. Then when you inevitably end up with hundreds of brushes you don't want you can go into the brush folder delete all the ones you don't want (since they are clearly marked) then delete the blacklist file. That gets rid of all your unwanted brushes without too much hassle and you can put some in sub folders.

As for exactly how it should be in the UI. That all needs to be considered. One thing for sure is that you'd want some kind of way of separating brushes into groups. I know you have the tagging system which is useful but you want to visually just click to see certain groups.

I also think it's vital to put one good brush library in as default. Like Deevad's for example. I know that doesn't utilise all the brushes but it instantly gives new users a way to see how great the brushes are. This is always the first thing they will do. Look at Gimp. Shocking brush presets and you can create entire brush tools now. That's crazy because Gimp is actually pretty good now for creating some cool brushes even if slow and slightly cumbersome UI.

Timothee is working on an updated set of brushes for Krita 2.7, with a lot of cleanup.

As for management, we're open to all options . Erius on #krita is working real hard on improving tagging and categorizing. And we definitely need more management tools, too.

Maybe after the current high profile jobs are done: Lukas' work on integrating gmic, Dmitry's campaign to improve mask and selection handling, my work on the new opengl canvas .

The good point is the way in the brush editior you can go through brushes and edit without leaving the editor. The little red icon on the thumb to delete is pretty disasterous though. It's way too easy to accidentally delete a brush and then not even know what brush you just deleted. That gets you into major hassle.

I can see there are lots of other cool thing going on and that's great. The reason I'm saying there are problems with the way the presets for brushes are handled is exactly because we can now create multitudes of great brushes. That's now a fantastic core strength of Krita. Maybe earlier this wasn't such a big deal but it will become so. Lets say there ends up masses of brush libraries to download? This will all get very messy.