Re:Krita in 2018 and 2019
by keerthiko on Thursday December 27, 2018 @08:01AM
(#18769192)
Yes, I am familiar with those. I primarily use Gimp for 2D art with flexible import/export options, and long lamented the lack of a comparable open source/budget competitor since it's markedly less good compared to Photoshop, and Inkscape is very specialized in vector graphics. I'll be spending some with Krita this weekend to see if my excitement is warranted, but seems like there's a vibrant community using this for a while.
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If you're on Mac or Windows, Affinity Photo is a pretty good Photoshop alternative for 50 USD. Iirc there's wording about paying for major version upgrades (eg 1.x to 2.0), but for Affinity Designer (their Illustrator equivalent) they've been on v1.x for over 4 years now.
If you don't want to use GIMP/Krita/Photoshop, Pixelmator (Pro) is a good, cheap image manipulator program for Mac. IIRC it costs 30 EUR. I haven't used it much nor for advanced stuff but I find it intuitive, easy, and a fair price.
For what it's worth, I'm in the same boat as you. I've been Linux-only on the desktop since 2003, have a five-digit Slashdot ID, and read reddit and Hacker News daily for a decade.
Yet I had _literally_ never heard of Krita until last year; I was trying to figure out how to edit an image for work using my work-provided MacBook Pro and my boss said "I always use Krita."
Something something XKCD 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/
I'm in similar situation, and I have been doing digital painting since the 90s. I found out about Krita about a year and a half ago. Maybe I had heard about it before and forgot or ignored it. It is definitely a formidable alternative to Photoshop for painters and some may find it better at certain tasks and workflows.
I haven't used Blender in a long time, but from what I've seen they've progressed by leaps and bounds too, and many prefer artists prefer it to the commercial alternatives. Solid evidence that open source software can rival or exceed commercial projects for the things that require user friendly UXs.