I recently watched this review on youtube about Krita:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jap56Gdi9m4&t=538
and found myself laughing because I agreed with every one of her points!

I started on Photoshop way back in the early 2000s in college, then switched to Paint Tool SAI around 2007 and stayed on it ever since. Over the years, I got grumpy with Windows and tried Linux a number of times, believing that maybe Krita had gotten better and more streamlined. But it never really changed. It's UI remains confusing and cluttered. Simple things like layer clipping left me very confused, whereas in SAI or Photoshop I picked it up very quickly. The main problem is that you guys aren't trying to create an easily accessible art program where an artist can quickly and easily do what they need to do. Instead, it's like...they just threw away all the quick and common ways of doing simple operations and tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch.

Please re-think this program and it's interface. It's got potential, but it really needs to be more streamlined and easy to use.

@tubwoo ; the problem with your feedback and her video is you both expect Krita to be a clone of something you already know because you both can't adapt to learn something new. You are welcome to contribute but your message is not the right way to start...

I am sorry, we cannot actually do much with this critique.

I recall seeing that video and dismissed it because I realised that this person isn't interested in thinking about the fact that there are other people using the program besides her. You see, the main reason that the overview docker is not open by default is because we can only show a handful of dockers, because then the window does not fit on the screens of people with small monitors.

Many things have come into place over the years due careful consideration like this. We discuss with artists how certain features should be implemented.

Sai is a program with few features, therefore it is easy to understand. If we remove all the features from Krita that are not in Sai, then Krita will be easy to understand too. Thing is though, there are people who use those features, so we don't want to remove them.

Finally, Photoshop is not intuitive. I have met more people who find the program confusing. What is however true is that many programs mimmick it. But, just because it is in photoshop does not mean it is a good idea. It does horrible things with blending modes in CMYK or higher bitdepths, for example. Clipping masks, similarly, are a photoshop concept. Because Japanese programmers are very traditional, they aped the feature without thinking twice. We are an open source project with few resources. Alpha inheritance, while requiring a little bit more thought are more powerful and much less buggy to maintain. We could put in resources into clipping masks, but that would provide a whole lot of bugs and less time to work on other things while we're maintaining this.

If you have more detailed critique, one that actually goes into the workflow, and not just linking to a youtube video and telling us that we should actually make the exact same interface as photoshop, we would be glad to hear it.

TheraHedwig:
Alright. I'll use my painting workflow.

Usually, I paint a base color on it's own layer
then clip another layer to it,
adjust it's blending mode
pick a color and start painting

The steps to clip a layer in SAI are:
create a new layer by clicking the new layer button on the layer pallet
click the "clipping group button" on the layer pallet
Done

In Krita...let's see...
create a new layer...
right-click layer
select group
select "quick clipping group"
but this does not create a clipping mask from the layer you have seleted 0_0
Instead, it's some sort of hierarchy with a blank "mask layer" inside
I tried fiddling with layer alpha....no clue how that supposed to work

SAI: 2 steps
Krita: I have no idea how many steps...
I know an easier concept exists for just clipping a bunch of pixels on layers to another bunch of pixels because I use it every day.

I get that Photoshop does some things badly, that's why I moved to SAI for so many years and continue to use it.

In her critique, she actually brought up a good point about the toolbox: there's too many things there.
SAI V2 has 10 main tools above it's brushes pallet:
rectangular selection
lasso
magic wand
shape layer
text
move
zoom
rotate
pan
eye dropper

Then there are the brushes and immediately below that you have the settings for whatever brush you select. It's very quick to find.

In Krita there are 33 main tools!!!!
On one hand, yay functions. On the other hand...oh my god that's a lot look over all at once. Can't some of these be grouped into a popout menu or hidden somehow? For example, all the shape tools could be in the own menu "shape tools" and pops open once you click it. Transform as a tool is very odd. I usually hit CTRL+T to do that. It's more of an operation than an actual tool you'd use to constantly manipulate an image, like a brush or the lasso tool.

I never said Krita had to look like photoshop. I just said that Krita needs to be more streamlined in doing things. It's a 2d art program and there's only so many things you can do to flat pixels. I heard this quote once about UI design: "A good interface gets out of the way". With Krita, nearly every bell and whistle is on the main UI, right in your face all the time. When I use it, I have to hunt through a lot of options I don't want to see while trying to find what I want. This is true not only for the tools menu, but the menu bar up top, the layers pallet with it's 12 different types of layers, as well as others.

Krita has:
Paint Layer
Group Layer
Clone Layer
Vector Layer
Filter Layer
Fill Layer
File Layer
Transparency Mask
Filter Mask
Colorize Mask
Transform Mask
Local Selection

SAI v2 has:
pixel layer
vector layer
folder layer
text layer

Paint Layer, okay
Group Layer sounds like a folder
Clone layer... uh...that's usually done by dragging a layer onto the new layer button in SAI, does it really need it's own menu item there?
Vector layer, okay, simple enough
Filter layer, hmm....I guess that's like an adjustment layer in photoshop
Fill layer is kind of superfluous isn't it? Why not just let the user make a new layer and fill with color themselves? Like with the paint bucket tool?
File layer seems rather silly. Why not just have Krita place the image as a new layer when you drag it over?
Transparency mask is odd, it creates a sub-layer instead of a mask directly across from the layer's thumbnail. Shouldn't it just be "layer mask" as a button on the layer pallet? I don't imagine it as a type of layer, so it feels odd being in the new layer menu.
Filter Mask, Alright, it's like an adjustment layer in Photoshop.
Colorize Mask, not sure what this does from playing around with it.
Transform Mask, hmm....it's like a transform history. Kind of odd to have in a new layer menu. Wouldn't it be better as it's own tab in the layer pallet?
Local Selection, another history type thing. What about having it as it's own pallet that appears when you press a icon button on the layer itself? Then it could appear and show you the selections you set up for that layer. This is one thing I rather like.

I uh...

Like, okay, I get that alpha inheritance is difficult to quickly set up if you do not understand what it does.

But you're dismissing all the non-destructive workflow features because you've never used a non-destructive workflow.

Clone layers are not layer duplicates. They are layers that function as a clone of the layer you had selected beforehand. That is, if you draw on the original, the clone get updated automatically. File layers are like clone layers, but then for external files. They update automatically when the file updates.

Transform masks are non-destructive transforms. They need to be in the layer stack because they can apply to all layers in a group or just a single layer.

In photoshop the smart object layer system is like some bizaro combo of file layers and transform masks. In Krita transform masks can be applied to any layer.

Transparency masks are masks much like the way how transform and filter masks are because you can have multiple per layer. We've had feedback people really liked that.

Fill layers also have a pattern option. The framework is intended to be extended so it has all sorts of computer generated patterns, but we have no gotten to it yet. Local selection is about storing the selection in the layer stack. The colorize mask is a feature to greatly reduce the time on filling in flats.

The toolbox is something our project maintainer is pretty adamant about that he does not want pop-ups there for a variety of usability concerns.

Krita is intended to be a high end painting program, in which people can do some really complicated things. I am now understanding that you are completely unfamiliar with these high end workflows and therefore are not able to place these features. I am not sure we can do anything about this, as introductory guides would go into the manual(and there are, in the user manual), which the lady in the video seems to think is the worst sin ever to be commited by any end user. I do not think however that removing things is the answer.

@ tubwoo

Thank you for posting your workflow.

In case you haven't read the krita manual about the alpha inheritance concept, let me take this opportunity to describe it to you.

Alpha inheritance button (the button with alpha icon besides the layer name) makes the selected layers pixel confined to the pixels of the layer below it. you can add as many alpha inherited layers as you want it will confine it's pixel to the last layer. no when you have a layer outside of group, the last layer is the background layer where the entire document is opaque. so in order to clip you need group in krita. Quick clipping group (ctrl shift g) gives you a new group with a layer with alpha inheritance on which you can then directly paint on to have your pixels clipped to the selected layer. If i count it it is just two steps :

1) Select the layer inside which i want to add pixels (the layer which will be base of the clipping)
2) press ctrl shift g done - in the new layer I can paint and have this clipped.

I understand that in your workflow you have two layers ready and then do the clipping thing.

Now all that said. From your post it seems you haven't tried krita and all it feature at all, it is like saying i have tried Microsoft paint and when i try photoshop i find all the buttons unnecessary since i don't know what they are and they were not there in Microsoft paint. and i demand photoshop devs to make it like microsoft saying that it is an overhaul.

Sorry but to compare two things you must have a sound understanding of how both things work and for that you need to open your mind and try krita the way it is meant to be not in a way you want it to be, in this case you want it to behave exactly like SAI.

TheraHedwig :

Alright, clone and file layers behave as instances, like symbols in flash. That's easy to grasp. And the transform sounds like a good feature. I don't believe you need to 'get rid' of these features. But I do think that they could be presented to the user in a better way. Being indented directly underneath the layer, each thing with it's own renamable name seems like overkill in a way. What about having it be just a simple thumbnail to the right of the layer's thumbnail? It's name could appear in a tooltip when hover over it. And maybe you could use different colors or designs around the border of that thumbnail to indicate what it is. Like a selection could have a dotted border. Transform's border could look like a transform box's handles. Filter could have a wide filter looking thing on top of it. Or maybe each one of those could be a button that unfolds only those things for that layer. Selection's icon would unfold to show all the selections associated with that layer. At the moment, seeing how you can stack up all those different types of things under the layer, I imagine that becoming very mixed and cluttered.

I really wish your project maintainer would reconsider the toolbox layout. The more things you add, the more cluttered it will become unless you start to hide some parts. What about making single-click sections that rollup or unroll when you click them once? It's great to have all those features in a program, sure. But I don't want to stare at them constantly and have to ignore 80% of it to get my work done. What about a customizable tool pallet? At least let users have it their way sometimes. Otherwise, isn't this a lot like how Apple treats it's customers? (yes i know Krita is free) Still, being able to customize the interface is a huge thing for an artist.


kamathraghavendra:
Hmm....I tried ctrl+shift+g on two selected layers which already had blobs painted on them. These two layers became 4 things: a clipping group, a "mask layer", then my two original layers. I would think that the "mask" layer would actually mask other layers, but instead that's the only layer that's actually masked....which is confusing x__x. The other two layers under the mask layer I can paint where ever I want. The there's an icon on the "layer group" which is confusing because it looks exactly like a normal layer aside from it's text - which you can change to anything you want and forget it's original meaning. Even though I can hit that keycombo for less steps, it's still unintuitive to me. The layer pallet is one major area that you do not want to clutter up and over complicate.

SAI is very popular for a reason - it's easy to use for the novice and expert alike. I could go through Krita and learn all of it's in's and out's about how it works, but that wouldn't change that fact that it has an unnecessarily steep learning curve, and no this is not a good thing. I don't want to fight with an interface, I just want to paint and get things done quickly. If the interface could be changed to not have 'everything in your face at all times' and make operations quicker / more intuitive, it would be a great program. But I guess every app has it's own type of user in mind.

Sai is not really very popular in general; it's popular with a very peculiar and particular subset of amateur artists. But that's not to the point.

To the point is this: Krita is open source. You think we're taking Krita in the wrong direction. We know you are wrong. You should clone Krita's repository, remove everything you think is superfluous, reorganize the toolbox to your liking and release the result under another name (the Krita name is trademarked).

And then you can either prove us wrong, or you'll discover we're right.

For what it is worth, the Linux version of Krita does have icons next to layer-thumbnails and the menu entries, but Windows users tell us they think icons are ugly and bad ui, so we removed them from the windows version.

I don't think you are wrong to feel this way, I just don't think it is possible to have a program that can be used by other people to do their jobs(like, make video game graphics or comic pages) and have a simple ui.

Sai is not really very popular in general; it's popular with a very peculiar and particular subset of amateur artists. But that's not to the point.

To the point is this: Krita is open source. You think we're taking Krita in the wrong direction. We know you are wrong. You should clone Krita's repository, remove everything you think is superfluous, reorganize the toolbox to your liking and release the result under another name (the Krita name is trademarked).

And then you can either prove us wrong, or you'll discover we're right.

Geez....touche'

I've actually thought about doing that, but I'm not really that big of a programmer yet. Might be a fun project to get into some day though. But by all means continue Krita as is. I was rather critical of Krita because it's not something I've built and worked on for years; I've only been a casual user of it. I just think it can be done better is all.

Hi tubwoo

you did the wrong thing again. you selected two layers and did the combo.

the alpha inheritance works this way
group layer -
|- Layer content to be clipped (check the alpha icon)
|- base layer that will have the opaque area in which the upper layer that has to be clipped

It is this simple. but i think you are adamant in not understanding it. be it that way.

What you did is selected the upper layer and bottom layer and made them both base layer. I think you didn't even bother to read the documentation that i linked above

Thanks for this discussion.

TheraHedwig :

I haven't seen the linux version lately, but the icons sound useful at least.

With the UI, I understand what you mean. But there's always a different way to do things.
Here's SAI, Kirta, and Photoshop's Layer pallet lined up right next to eachother:


Now, I'm not exactly a fan of Photoshop, but they do some things right here:
They keep the layers area clean of too many icons
One row of controls is only about filtering or showing a certain type of layer
Their "locking" icons are very clear.
The extra layer functions are accessible through clicking the little menu button on the right top corner
Accessing a layer's properties is a simple double click
You can access all parts with a stylus only

But with Krita:
Those layer functions are crammed into each layer, encroaching on the available space there.
The filter only works for labeled layers and nothing else
The extra things you can do with a layer is only accessible through a right-click on a mouse
Double click only lets you change the name of the layer.

And of course SAI could stand to do some things better, but over all is decent:
Super clean: It's very straight forward with it's functions without being cluttered
Puts everything you need up top
Only shows icons when needed: locking transparency, movement, etc with one of the buttons will show a lock icon on the layer
Double click only lets you change the name of the layer - yes it could use some more functionality
You can access all parts with a stylus only

It would be nice if double clicking the blank area of a layer opened up it's properties, while double clicking it's name allowed you to change it's name.
You could use a color background to a layer to indicate that it belongs to some alpha group or is associated with another layer (which would also have a BG of that color)
It would be great to filter layers by type - there's A LOT of types there!
Having a button to show the layer functions (like photoshop) would be nice.
Are the "move layer up" and "move layer down" buttons really that useful for people? Was this a request or something? Because you can easily do that with a mouse or stylus already

kamathraghavendra:

Ah!! Okay, I got it now. Clicking the little 'a' essentially does layer clipping. I got focused on that last part you mentioned a bit too much. I do like how you can have layers in between the others that are "clipped". That's actually quite nice and useful. Thank you

Yes, I'm quite biased with SAI and Photoshop. I think what bugged me most was the little "a" or alpha symbol. SAI takes that and spells it out, putting it outside of the layers area, where Krita compresses it and puts it into the layers area and it also functions as an indicator. With SAI, it just uses a vertical magenta colored line to the left of the layer, indenting it some. I like the function of the alpha inheritance, but maybe there's a different way to indicate it without taking up too much space in the layers area.

boudewijn:

I should address some of these:

Sai is not really very popular in general; it's popular with a very peculiar and particular subset of amateur artists. But that's not to the point.

If it's not relevant, why are you bringing it up? I didn't call Krita artists amateurs. Technically, aren't all open-source non-profit programmers "amateurs", doing it for the love of the thing instead of only for profit?

To the point is this: Krita is open source. You think we're taking Krita in the wrong direction. We know you are wrong.

Well I "know" I'm right lol! It's all a matter of opinion in the end.

You should clone Krita's repository, remove everything you think is superfluous, reorganize the toolbox to your liking and release the result under another name (the Krita name is trademarked).

I could take the time to do that, but I'd rather be busy painting instead

And then you can either prove us wrong, or you'll discover we're right.

Maybe so or maybe not. There's always another way to re-shuffle a 2d interface

@tubwoo:

boudewijn bring SAI to conversation because you mentioned it before. Please remember what you wrote, or read it again if in doubt.

And no, not all open source programmers are "amateurs", not even technically. They can be professionals that get paid to code and devote some of their free time to contribute, others might be paid to do so.

Any tool require some time investment to understand how to use it to your particular needs. I do agree in striving to always make better and the "overhaul" concept you seem to express, and while we as a community accept contributions and opinions there are ways to provide input (others have already told you some hints). Krita might seem to you confusing. Others have found it very intuitive from the very beginning. It can be made to work for many workflows, however if you make a swift critique based on a premade mental model of how the painting program should work, it does not mean the program is "bad", it just means you did not dedicated a minimum amount of time to document on the tool so you could adapt it to your workflow. Remember that a good artist always takes care of their tools.

It would be nice if double clicking the blank area of a layer opened up it's properties, while double clicking it's name allowed you to change it's name.
You could use a color background to a layer to indicate that it belongs to some alpha group or is associated with another layer (which would also have a BG of that color)
It would be great to filter layers by type - there's A LOT of types there!
Having a button to show the layer functions (like photoshop) would be nice.
Are the "move layer up" and "move layer down" buttons really that useful for people? Was this a request or something? Because you can easily do that with a mouse or stylus already

I think what we might be missing is default alternatives to access some functions for layers. Adding a function just because other program has it makes no sense, but adding a function to enhance discoverability of a tool or property is ok with me.

cheers