Thankfully Krita is now usable on my Surface Pro 3 (great work boudewijn). I also know that Krita is a work in progress. While I am still a fledgling in learning the program I would like to know where you think it fits in the drawing community.

Photoshop - I own CS6 for doing my photography work, but as a general art program is fails on so many levels. With the advent of its subscription pricing I am also looking forward to fully replacing it.

Manga Studio - This is my go-to program for drawing comic like art work. I have found the inking to be second to none and just blows photoshop away. The fact that any brush can be a vector line (including airbursh) is amazing. As well as you can partially erase a vector line with out distorting it are amazing. Adding flats without crossing the line is just icing on the cake. All that said I think the CMYK export seems funny. Though I have not done enough experimenting to give hard data.
Also I wish Manga Studio 5 had the new Layer Styles that Krita will soon have.

Sketchbook Pro - it a fun program for fast rough drawing, but I seems to lack the teeth to do serious projects,

ArtRage - I do not own this but it looks interesting. the price is not outrageous, and looks to be best for natural media work. Anyone use this? Comments?

Corel Painter - I do not own this, but it looks similar to ArtRage, but much more expensive. Seems over priced when you look at ArtRage. Thoughts?


That said where does Krita fit in best? From my brief exposure it looks like the natural media vs the comic art?
We all know any art program is only as good as the artist. But would like to know your opinion on where the strong and weak points of Krita so I can best use its strengths.


Finally how good is Krita CYMK for pro printing?

Thanks for any input as I try to lean Krita. And please this is NOT a post to spake flame wars, but one to discuss art tools in a civil manor.

To go from last to first --- Krita's cmyk support should be top-notch. If you find something lacking, please do report it.

As for what Krita is for -- we've got our official vision:

"Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modeled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response."

Which, perhaps is a bit out of date. Basically, what we want to achieve is an application that gives unparalelled productivity and pleasure when creating new images. So that includes sketching, inking (we spent a lot of effort on that this past six months), coloring (including g'mic integration), but also using existing images as a base for new art (for matte painting, backgrounds and so on: hence all the work on the transform tool). Texturing -- so the wraparound mode.

Years ago we tried to make the most physically accurate real-world tool simulations possible, which is Painter-like, but that actually turns out to run right into "unparalelled productivity", so, no... The brushes we have are meant to be productive, useful, geared to achieving a definite visual goal instead of mimicking a real-world equivalent.

In short, you got an image in your head, Krita should be the fastest, best, easiest, most fun way to get it in someone else's eyeballs.

(As for comics: text balloons is still a big todo!)

boudewijn wrote:(As for comics: text balloons is still a big todo!)

You guys and gals are awesome.

@boudewijn

Super Reply.
Thank you!

Just wanted to relate Boudewijn's reply back to the digital art programs in the original post.

In my experience, Krita's "niche" is closest to Manga Studio, also known as Clip Studio Paint. Both programs focus on creation of original artwork from scratch with focus on efficiency and the overall user experience. Manga Studio is also my current go-to program, but because it is commercial software and it aims to be reliable, its development is slow and lurching. Another drawback is that the development is done in Japan, so very little communication is possible. As soon as Krita's reliability improves (2.9 release, I expect) I expect to fully transition to Krita. I think CSP does have quite a number of great features that Krita might want to adopt or react to as part of its longer-horizon vision.

Diverging in two directions from there point are Sketchbook on the one hand and Painter/Artrage on the other. Sketchbook's focus is, as you mentioned, speed above all else. It's all about the interface, including efficient menus, dockers, and implementing a few tools extremely well. The entire documentation (which is picture-heavy!) is only a 76 page pdf. The big downside is that the program is not very customizable. It also doesn't provide much support for coloring, conspicuously lacking advanced layer control. Painter and Artrage, by contrast, are commercial programs dedicated to replicating the look and feel of traditional media. Although Artrage is very popular because of its excellent UI, both are fundamentally niche products, and also lack rich customization. Many useful advantages of digital art (filters, customizable brush engine, layers once again) force against the core philosophy of these programs.

Photoshop is Photoshop. It hardly even competes with the other software here, and it isn't trying to. Adobe could drop a million dollars to completely overhaul Photoshop's brush engine without blinking. However they choose not to, because Photoshop is not designed for drawing, it is designed for image editing and photo manipulation.

Hey Mike A.,
I was surprised at your answer. though it may be a lack of knowledge of Krita, Artrage, and Corel Painter.

Manga Studio has inking that I have found no program to even come close to. And while its vector is very different and not as powerful as as Adobe Illustrator I not only like Manga Studio's vector for comics better but believe in a few cases it is more powerful.

That said, I thought Kirta's coloring could be better than Manga Studio, and more in line with Artrage Corel Painter. Maybe you could enlighten me since I have not used all the programs. And still a noob with Krita.

My original post here was inspired by an interest in buying Artrage. Corel was way over priced and reviews seem to say its bruises run slow (I don not know if the brushes are or not, but it seem to be a general consensus. True?). Though after looking in to Artrage I wonder if it is as full featured as it appears, and Krita would be a better choice for coloring. Especially since it has great CYMK for print.

Hey Rob,

Personally, I began with Photoshop, coming across, Corel Painter, Artrage, Krita and mypaint. I've a very limited knowledge of sketchbook Pro, I used it a long time back, and my memories are still good. I haven't used manga studio, only heard about it. But I've used Artrage, Painter and photoshop extensively so I believe I can help in that regards.

Talking of Photoshop, you can't go wrong with that. It will do what you wish, reliably. May not be suited best for painting, but you won't complain about it. Used it, liked it nothing more to say. Its costly, no doubt.

Corel Painter, as I believe is more of an accompanying software alongside photoshop, and is used as such by many artists. Painter is there to welcome the artists hailing from traditional art backgrounds, dealing with actual pigments and mediums like oils, acrylics, watercolors, dry media, and such. If you don't have a solid understanding of handling different mediums, then bothering about amount of paint and solvent, and the natural color mixing, will only be an obstacle in your way to realizing your final picture, if that's what you're after. For an artist with no traditional background, a more straightforward phostoshop style painting engine would be better. And so is the case with Artrage. If natural media is your thing, I would suggest trying Artrage first, before laying hands on the huge encyclopedia of brushes that is Painter. Artrage is a beautiful program, no doubt and its natural media emulation is really good, specially the oils, they are the best I've seen yet in any program. They've the finest UI you'll see in any painting applications and some of the very unique ways of doing things, like stencils, rulers etc. Of course, there will be limitations, especially when it comes to photo manipulation. So, Artrage is an accompanying program, to be used aside the likes of Photoshop and GIMP for editing. And with that price tag, you can't go wrong with Artrage, you'll receive every penny in the form of a good and reliable little program.

Talking about Krita, which I now personally use for everything except heavy photo manipulation, for that I use GIMP, Krita's brush engine is the most versatile engine among all of the above. It ranges from brushes with synthetic quality of photoshop brushes to the brushes that sport organic nature of natural media, combining the best of both worlds. As compared to Krita, photoshop brushes seem to lack an organic feel, and Painter just seems like an overkill, based on my personal needs, that is concept works, art and design. And its open development means you can be much more than a regular user. I accompany krita with mypaint and Gimp, both are pretty good for what they are meant for. So, I use krita for all my drawings and paintings, though I use mypaint too as a brainstorming program, for early concept studies. For your question on where krita stands in, it depends on a lot of things like the platform that you are on, like windows mac or linux. I've used krita in windows and linux, and after switching to linux, I never went back. The performance different was way way significant, though it was quite a while back. And as compared to photoshop in windows, I'm having a great painting performance with krita on linux, with same piece of hardware. As far as printing and CMYK painting is concerned, I'm not quite knowledgeable.

I hope that had something for your curiosity.