FosdemKritaTalk

very rough notes

Krita

Swedish for Chalk.

Good tablet support, lets you vary how dark or how large your painting is with pressure. Good colourspace support, Grey, RGB, CMYK, L*a*b, coming soon is Watercolours which includes paper texture and dampness.

Profiles for different monitors. Different monitors display the same colours differently. Profiles can minimise that differece. Can load and save profiles in PNG and JPEG files. Uses a library called littleCMS for profiles.

The layer box was quite old, slow and not many features. Was completely rewritten but supported a lot of features that Krita did not support internally such as group boxes, so changed Krita to support them. Nice tooltips on layers with larger preview. Support drag and drop.

Can include part layer for KParts, can include a chart from KChart or text from KWord. Problem is that Qt 3 has some issues with transparency, Qt 4 will be much faster. e.g. Karbon doesn't let you use a transparent background.

Grouplayers are used internally to cache layers which makes Krita faster.

Another cool new thing they have it adjustment layers. If you apply a filter it destroys the layer so adjustment layers means Krita will add a layer that is filtered without adjusting the original layer.

In Krita almost everything is a plugin. This is very nice for developers as no need to learn the core of the application for a lot of features. Means you don't have to compile the entire Krita just to change a feature. Tools, paint, filters, view extensions like histogram, colourspaces (except alpha as used for selection) and file import output is all done with plugins.

Scripting is another cool feature. Still experimental. API not stable. Python and Ruby suupported now, plans for KJSEmbed Javascript. Library is Kross, shared with Kexi. Very slow though, interpreted language and extensive on input/output. Lets you see effect of an operation without having to compile a new plugin.

Shows a python example to desaturate a program, only about 20 lines, iterates over a layer and does some maths.

You can develop plugins of Krita outside Krita itself. CyrilleB has plugins in development that were too late for this Krita so now added in KDE's SVN outside Krita.

Krita next version probably 1.6, focus on new plugins not core changes. Would like to do Krita 2.0 but needs to wait for KDE 4.

Show demo of Krita 1.5 alpha. User interface cleaned up since 1.4. You can now make your own brushes and palette files. Brushes/Palettes still use Gimp format which is quite limited but they have not had time to make a better one. Drop down box for different types of brush, small to save space. New feature is a grid so you can more precicely see where you need to draw straight lines. Rulers default to off instead of on to save space. Image is now centres compared to 1.4. We now have OpenGL support which renders the image a lot faster than Qt/X. Shows how Krita does selection, different from other programmes there's no marching ants a selection is just a mask. Shows exposure plugin, opens photo and reduces exposure, only part of the photo now shows same as if the photo was taken with slower exposure, then shows over exposure. Show script manager. Shows histogram, possible to zoom in to view a part of the histogram in detail. Shows painting a selection. Space bar switches to pan tool. When zoomed in and painting off the edge of the view Krita will scroll with the mouse, much misse feature in previous releases. When locked filter now stops you actually painting. Eye dropper picks up the colour from a pixel but can also pick up the average colours from a circle several pixels wide.