jae

only second hand because i am a gnu image manipulation program person for my drawing, but other friends who draw have been jumping ship to it from clip studio paint which was the gold standard for a while and have been giving it positive reviews

hey look i can't take this away from anyone who actually uses it and likes it but as A Certified Knower Of These Things: Krita kinda sucks. It's very functional as a "I need to edit a thing quick" but it's basically useless for painting professionally, it's missing a ton of key things for properly editing photography, and it's clunky in a way that unless you're using it for quick bursts you are sorta constantly fighting against the software.

Affinity Photo is a much better replacement but it isn't free and they might also be doing AI shit? And the way Photo handles layers (it doesn't, it thinks of layers as groups the way Illustrator/Designer does) is heinous.

edit: i probably need to qualify that im a "uses clip studio + photoshop for about 6-12 hours per day every day since photoshop 7" user so idk. i'm speaking purely from a "i literally need this for work" perspective

It's my program of choice for 2D art; I've heard it runs inefficiently compared to other software and aspects of it (like the text editor) are clunky as hell, but it's not a GUI nightmare the way the other one you mentioned is

i did all of the backgrounds for my freshman animated short on it so i think it Works

it's actually good. it is like, genuinely nice to use, i first properly picked up using it coming from paint.net after i got my drawing tablet and i haven't looked back since. i'd tried the GNU Image Manipulation Program occasionally while i was still shifting from ms paint to paint.net and very briefly looking into it a few fimes after only to continually find it completely impenetrable, how does anyone use it

Gimp (a GNU program) is actually one I use often for simple editing of scanned inked stuff. Krita is kinda not great, but that is for what I do perhaps not your use-case. If you are familiar with Ado-pay Illustrator you will probably catch on real quick. I tested it out when getting ready to start my comic and found it nearly useless for what I'm doing. I'm simply using Gimp to edit my scans, throwing transparent PNG into Clip Studio, and editing and formatting in Clip because it is a raster that I'm making and Clip does that really well.

GIMP is the only program (including fucking Paint) that doesn't work with my drawing tablet right. How'd they do that

its like halfway to a gimp situation imo. in its favor, it doesnt have as big of a gap between what people say vs reality as gimp does. but just as a natural consequence of being free, lots of people have a high opinion of it that holds absolutely nothing against the opinion of someone who owns photoshop. like yeah, its better than gimp or paint.net, but that is an abysmally low bar.

it can illustrate and edit photos, but worse than csp or ps, and can animate, but worse than toon boom, flash/aa, or tvpaint. it tends to crash far more than anything else ive used besides opentoonz. its not great. but not the worst

i really like krita, i moved to clip studio paint a while ago, and there's stuff i miss from krita all the time. but that kind of context of what replaced it in my kit betrays it definitely being a program for specifically drawing in, more than it is for image editing

i like it a lot, but it is pretty complex. then again, all image editors are, i suppose

i think it will be less alien than gnump, assuming someone is primarily famililar with photoshop, too

edit re below: the text tool is in the process of being replaced with one that doesn't suck, but it is not done yet. so yeah be aware of that for now

i find krita easier to use that gimp (e.g. my profile pic was done with krita and a couple hours of zoning out to music), but it's still kinda rough and a bit quirky. less so than gimp tho ime. (but also: i am only a very casual user -- occasional vector sketches and occasional texture making for hobby stuff)

completely fine for most people's needs, extremely annoying for very specific things in ways every software diverges from what most people are used to.

krita is much better than gnu image manipulation programme but a massive step down from affinity/clip studio/sai etc and i only use it if i have absolutely no other choice. it is mostly functional but not polished or pleasant about it at all

I think krita's main audience is animators, so I guess it depends on what you want to do with it. I remember GIMP being better with pre-existing image pieces, but I'm not an artist-artist, I just use them to make posters and fliers.

I tried Krita and the main takeaway I had is if you use Photoshop for editing photos instead of illustrating, as far as I can tell Krita does not seem relevant to that use case at all. It is a natural-media illustration program. It seemed very nice for that purpose, speaking as a person who doesn't know enough about natural-media illustration programs to judge, but it didn't seem to be… you know, anything other than a natural media illustration program.

from when i used it, it's a very good and capable art program. krita takes a liiittle bit of getting used to, but only about as much as photoshop, and not nearly as much as gimp which i have literally never been able to figure out.

it's much better at certain things over other things (i mainly used it for painting, hated the vector implementation), but it is really not a bad choice. CSP is easily better imo, but krita is still unbelievably more usable than paint.net / gimp, and can absolutely put out quality work comparable to paid programs with only a little bit of elbow grease.

haven't used it in a while, but that's my general impression from when i used it regularly.

I used to use Linux Mint on my old thinkpad that had a tablet screen. Krita ran buttery smooth. I got a Surface Pro 7 Microsoft tablet that didn't have good drivers for the pen tablet on Linux so I use Windows 10 on it, and Krita runs like shit and gives me jagged edges whenever I try to draw curves. I fiddled with the settings to try to get it to work and it doesn't. I'm using Clip Studio Paint. It lets me draw a curve without it being jagged. Clip Studio Paint recently deleted all of my custom brushes that I made. I had to remake them. I was pretty upset when that happened. Krita has never done that to me.

There is no such thing as good software, just software that does what you want it to do and software that doesn't do what you want it to do. Circumstances can make the same software one or the other.

Krita is fine. It's not a GIMP situation. It works well and is pretty straightforward to use.

I've been using Krita for several years now. Previously I would use Photoshop or Sai for my drawings. It's not like Gimp's level of UX issues which I would consider to be quite considerable but it still isn't great. It's good for the power users familiar with Krita and at this point I very much rely on several niche functions and customizations that I use in all my art that other programs lack. The shortcuts are very customizable and with the pany pop-ups you can have a shortcut for you can draw in canvas-only for a good while which can feel quite nice. You also have the option of a lasso brush (not the tool) and as I understand it Clip Studio can't do that? There are a LOT of functions but they are either not easy to understand or use, or they're super slow. Krita has performance issues. Krita is also based on Gimp!

Yeah it kicks ass, the only problem is the text tool sucks but they're actively working on it

I use Krita for making art from scratch, and I use GIMP for editing or making more functional designs (e.g. printable seed packets). Krita is also great for animation imo. I've never extensively used Photoshop, but from my little experience it does seem like a decent replacement.

depends on what you use it for. i like it cause it has a LOT of fun built-in brushes, but i'm not someone who does photo editing or vector illustrations so ymmv

Last I tried it, it was pretty crashy. I then tried Pinta, and that's way less crashy, but has other jank that by sheer coincidence doesn't interfere with what I use it for.

my mom uses krita and i used it sometimes

I use it instead of Photoshop at work now. I have some very minor beeves with it but overall it works well and does what I need it to do.

I've been using Krita for a while now, and i've tested a bunch of other programs too. I think Krita it's great for what it's meant to do, Digital Painting. Want to do comics? You'll Struggle. Want to do Image Editing, no you don't.

The program has it's fauts like any other. It lags if you set you brush size too high, it crashes if you don't save often enough, it's text editor is janky af, although it's being worked on the last few updates, and it's hard to work on vectors on it to name a few.

But then again, it's for painting. The text editor will not come before the brush engines. Krita has a lot of features to help paint better, like the pop up pallet.

I've only had trouble with Krita while i was learning it. It isn't perfect, but it's the best for what i do personally.

I find that Krita is an okay tool for making digital art that is at the level of what I can do with pen and paper, but I suck at drawing. I mean, I keep trying but I'm really not that good and a vaguely talented 8-year-old could probably do better.

I did use it to make the illustrations in https://cohost.org/fizbin/post/2946381-monty-hall-revisited

I love how many of the comments are "I get along with GIMP just fine thank you".

Which is fair enough, so do I. I feel like about 40% of GIMP's issues are "it's not exactly how it works in photoshop", 30% "ok this is just a weird way to do it" and 30% "why the fuck would you do that / broken drivers". But I also use it very casually.

No useful input on the actual question I just loved how many people were talking about GIMP here. You've created a website full of GIMP users. Thank you.

it's good. I don't know if anything is fully a replacement for photoshop but it definitely does not suck

As a person who has used Krita for just a few hours over half a year ago, I don't remember it being terrible. It's definitely good enough that I'd not be rushing out to pay for something better. It's better for stuff like illustration than Photoshop, despite the fact that I usually use Photoshop for it in class, not out of choice though.

As for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), it's not great, but not so god-awful that I choke when I think about using it, and it does the simple stuff just fine.