I have a fairly decent laptop which I use for my work stuff -- which is quite demanding in terms of tools etc that I use. It have 4GB of RAM and dual-core CPU.

However, Krita is very slow on this laptop. My question is what hardware config do I need if I want to get decent speed and response from Krita for image manipulation. I am not using Krita for drawing or painting. I want Krita to handle my RAW photos and allow manipulations a la Photoshop or GIMP.

Btw, GIMP works acceptably fast on my machine but I want the effects mask feature of Krita

Hi Ken,

Your system sounds pretty similar to what I actually use to develop Krita on. Which version of Krita are you using? We made a huge jump in performance from 2.2 to 2.3. However, that mostly goes for painting, not photo manipulation which isn't really the target use of Krita.

Thanks boudewijn, I guess my requirement is sort of moot now if Krita's aim is not photo manipulation. Surprisingly, the filters and effects/layers provided are better than GIMP.

If Krita could focus on image manipulation too, it would make a great alternative to GIMP (which feel out of place on my KDE desktop, for sure!)

Cheers.

Well... We noticed that trying to do everything at once was a recipe for never getting anything done really well so we focused on area that's not very well served yet. Personally, I do my own raw import and basic manipulation in Digikam, and then export a 16 bit tiff to Krita if I want to use photo elements in my drawings. Or rather, that's what I would do if I would have time for painting next to coding on Krita .

Thanks. I do basic editing in Digikam too. However, for multiple effects, a full-blown layers software comes handy.

I have also found, btw, that opening a RAW file directly with Krita (from Dolphin, for example) crashes Krita. I haven't tried using TIFF as an alternative to RAW but will do so.

Actually, Krita is good at photo manipulation... its just that it is very slow at applying the effects and the progress bar blinks at 0% forever

I am using Krita 2.3.1 ....