A lot of time development is used for adding new (and great, for sure) features when there is still work for the very basics things. For me what coud be improved in Krita are the brushes. Not the brushes themselves but the way you see them and the way you customize them.
When you start Krita for the first time, you see plenty of brushes, some of them are great, some are fun, but you can pass a lot of time
- to try all the default brushes
- remove the brushes you'll never use - allmost all of them -
- figure out how you can create new brushes
- search for good brushes on the internet
- figure out how you can import photoshop brushes, or Krita brushes
All these steps are hours.

Current UI



Why editing, managing brushes would be only for "advanced users" ? Brushes are the most important thing on Krita, it's a painting program ! The UI of Photoshop concerning brushes is not a good example. But Krita can do better instead of having the Photoshop system in an even more complicated way!

We can do better to simplify all this.
Here are some proposals. Yet to improve but just searching for simplification, clarity and productivity. And to all that in a visual way.


why is the brushes and brushes management splitted into 3 different locations inside Krita ? we could have one panel, to see at the same time
- example of the brush you picked and easy modification of the size. all the others parameters are hidden into a triangle you can expand.
- several set of brushes... when you download a pack of brushes on the internet, it creates a new set.



Expanded edition menu, still very clear because there is only the main parameters here. you can edit the others but only after expanding them. So you can understand quite fast how to edit a brush.



Compact brush panel, because clarity is the key. why even 25 brushes when you use 5 during 99% of your time. Of course the icons can be bigger.

So what do you think ?
If one of the ideas above is not 100% clear tell me! Of course it's ideas to discuss, not a complete system keys in hand. I hope changes in the UI is still possible.

Krita is for advanced users. We always expose the complete feature set.

There is a reason why there are three different places (actually there are at least four). Several years back we had just one at the top with settings. When presets where introduced it got split into two panels one for the setting and one for the quick access to the presets. The docker on the right was introduce because lots of users wanted to have the presets as a docker. The setting are well received so I don't see much reason to change them massivly now especially now that many users are used to them and all the documentation is done.

Ideally you should set most of the presets and then rarely access the setting again.

We had an example rendering of the brush, but that's by definition never accurate so that was removed and instead the scratchpad was added.

I forgot: You can make a custom preset set very easy. You can make you custom brushes and tag them, so the default set is hidden. The tab based systems don't work very well with many categories.

One might argue about the number of default presets, but other application like e.g. Painter have several times more of them.

As well, we'll have a resource bundle system next release. We're ironing out the bugs, but it should take care of huge amount of brushes.

On top of that, pop-up palette, that's where the specialised set of brushes go. They now draw from tags too!

I dunno, I can appreciate having a small docker with simple settings such as size, opacity, flow, angle, etc. But we've always been wondering which ones need to be picked, as the different brush-engines have widely different needs.
I don't think it's wise to hide away all the settings though, and I am kinda attached to the ability for the artist to make their own little icon.

Ok, I can understand it's difficult to change too many things.
But no mistake, when I talk about simplicity and clarity, I don't mean "novice users". Simplicity is great for professional users because they don't have much time to learn the program and test all the possibilities. When I show Krita to graphic artists they spent 5 minutes to test it... then often go back to Photoshop because they don't have time to learn a new app... the time available to learn a soft when you have a full-time job, deadlines and quotas is in minutes, not in days. Making simple is not losing what we have, it's just organize it better.

But ok, even if we stay with the same structure, there is lot of things we can do to make all more clear.
- reduce the number of brushes and keep only the essential brushes (maybe put all the fancy brushes in different sets? like in photoshop)...
- have clear icons
- make the main parameters more visible in the brush customisation
- improving the menus for more logic