So today i made a thread on reddit /gamedev about krita.
It was the 1st highest rated thread for a while, and got over 500 upvotes! i hope this will help give you motivation ~



Aniway, even though there was alot of praise towards krita in that thread, there were also a few criticisms. I will give you some ideas for improvements that could be found in the comments of that thread:

1. Optional mouse-coordinates display for pixel-perfect edits.

2. There was a demand for better pixel-sprites tools. i did not see specificiation of what improvements should be made. here is a quote from the thread: "Animation of pixel art in Krita is a joy. Coming from a photoshop background the pixel tools are a little less good than photoshop, but the animation is much much better." (that person actually commented in this forum thread and explained what improvements could be made!)

3. One of the people said that using Krita made him miss Pixelmator. he did not specify the reasons why, so i looked at pixelmator by myself. here are some features pixelmator has that Krita lacks:
- Pixelmator has a selection brush that selects the area you fill with your brush stroke, and a "magnetic selection" tool that magnets itself to outlines as you draw near them. those selection tools are better than the ones found in Krita, and i think Krita would greatly benefit from having them.
- Vector and Text tools - i know those are already going to be improved in the next version of krita, though.
- Automated "repair" tools to remove objects from images.

4. There was a claim was that while some of the brush engines are great, a few of them are "gimmicky". in my personal opinion, i would say that it's true some of the brush engine could have been executed better... i even made a thread earlier about how the Dyna brush engine for example can cause Krita to crash under certain settings. However, the brush engines that are executed well such as the pixel and smudge engines are absolutely stellar.
I would to note though - please don't remove useful features because of this claim.

5. There was a claim that the Krita UI is not good for the execution of more simple tasks. in the other hand, there were also others that claimed they felt the krita UI is very intuitive once you get to know it.


Some other claims that will probably be less useful here are that some people claimed Krita was laggy for them, while others claimed it worked extremely smoothly for them.
There was also one person who couldn't get pressure sensitivity to work in Krita, but he did not tell which tablet or OS he had.

I do this to help krita to improve btw ~
And well i also wanted to expose more people to krita

Hey crazyaga,

Thanks for the post I have been following it throughout the day. Did not expect it to get this popular, but it's good to see that it has.

About your second point:

2. There was a demand for better pixel-sprites tools. i did not see specificiation of what improvements should be made. here is a quote from the thread: "Animation of pixel art in Krita is a joy. Coming from a photoshop background the pixel tools are a little less good than photoshop, but the animation is much much better."

That comment was actually made by me. I have pretty much solely used photoshop for all pixelart I did in the past, but after reinstalling Windows and starting work on Krita I switched to Krita. For completeness sake I will elaborate on what I miss in doing pixel art with krita:

• The pixel brush snapping to the pixel of the canvas it would draw on if I were to left-click.

• Nearest neighbour filtering for downscaling pixel work.

• The pixel brush being more of a first-class citizen instead of being hidden as the 30th brush in the list.

• Some general improvements to the palette docker.

• The pixel brush outline being precisely the same shape as the result when make a dab.

• The brush sometimes skips parts of a line when you draw quickly.

• Export to spritesheet.

If I have the time after my summer of code I will look into making improvements in this area. That being said, having tried pixel art animation in photoshop the experience was absolutely horrid. Their timeline docker is really really bad, so it was a breath of fresh air to see the amazing tools provided with the Krita animation update. Especially, the big timeline frames (easy to select), onion skins, hotkeys for switching frames and precise control over the playback speed.

Anyways, thanks for your post. It was great to read all the replies from people.

Hi! I also work with pixel art and I want to address some of your points:

>Nearest neighbour filtering for downscaling pixel work.
this is available if you select Box filter in the tool options docker!

>Some general improvements to the palette docker.
This! Would very much like to be able to edit colors through the palette.

>The brush sometimes skips parts of a line when you draw quickly.
This was fixed in 3.0 if i recall correctly! It only happens with the pixel1 brush before...

>Export to spritesheet.
YES to this too!

The rest I'm not too knowledgeable about! But thanks for sharing your input!

Also congrats for krita making top post on /r/gamedev!

Crazyaga, do be careful, as we saw your attempt to do the same on deviantart, where it only led to people feeling you are a fanboy.

1. Like the person in the thread said, we don't have this because our last attempt turned krita into a laggy mess.

2. This was apparantly Nimmy. As Nimmy is the poor sod fixing openGL support for OSX for us, I'll show him the DDAline algorithm in kispainter and it's problems at the sprint.

3. Pixelmator is a photoediting program. That said https://phabricator.kde.org/T556 and https://docs.krita.org/Selections#Globa ... lection.29 but the latter comes with https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343218 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343217
G'MIC has the paintout tools, but it is unlikely Krita will ever get them internally, as we're a painting program, not a photo-editing program.

4. Uhm, you are welcome to try making them less gimmicky?

5. How efficient a UI is is extremely subjective, or rather, maybe it isn't. The most efficient UIs are still command-line programs, but you can't draw with a command line program, nor are they very intuitive.

Honestly, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we don't have enough developers to fix many of these things, and often we already know about what people need. Because, you know, people do come and tell us their wishes. Right now, we more need people to help with the never-ending onslaught of tablet questions, or vague statements that Krita lags, or weird file opening issues. Or help triaging by seeing if bugs can be reproduced at all.

On the development side, we also need people to help building, people to help coordinate official releases, and people to help managing the Steam community, because we're running a little thin.

Well, you are telling me to be careful, but no harm was done
More people knowing about it will help Krita if anything.

About point 3 and "drawing selections" - in my opinion, that's a bit of an intuitive way to implement drawing selections. it would be more intuitive to find it as a tool among the selection tools.
I tried using it just now and i couldn't figure out how to make it work (i'm aware of the bug reports.)

Edit: I managed to find a work-around that makes it "work", but not properly. i converted a transparency mask into a selection mask, it still applies g'mic filters on the entire layer as if the selection mask wasn't there, so for g'mic filters this did not work. but... when i draw something, or use the normal krita filters, it acted as if it selected all the areas that were NOT selected in the selection mask, which is the opposite of what i expected it to do...

Edit 2: Oh, i now know why it worked the opposite of what i expected. white was used to determine the selected area, not black! and i can confirm the bug that says it doesn't let you keep drawing the selection mask in real time