So I was randomly watching a video and he suddenly started speaking and illustrating the advantages of file format accessibility with import and exports as much as the integration with other softwares for projects that don’t relay on just one application.
My thought is that open source needs to by pass this hurdle to really overcome the paid programs because are already many open source projects that can replace for real but not practically.
With krita I think the easiest step to achieve this is to make instructions to how properly create a kra interpreter /reader so other developers can implement it on other projects. This especific case was brought to my attention when I started following the project “Inoichi2D”. This type of project use psd file formats as the communication format which is bad but even badder considering they are open source and not connection to other open source art applications due not having information on how to the read files.
In this video you can see how a user ponders the workflow and having inter communication as a factor for decision. Truth be told some choices are bad but the reasons around valid just the same.
Well yeah PSD sucks for this, as it was not designed as interchange format. And trying to use KRA files instead isn’t going to make it better. You’d have to reimplement half of Krita to fully reproduce its contents, which is not feasible.
What you really want is a proper interchange format that defines a limited feature set a wider range of applications can actually implement, or at least some baseline of its specification. And there even is one, it’s called OpenRaster. But the interest has been…modest.
That COVID prevented most physical meetings in the last years hasn’t helped its development and adoption either.
At least on the Krita side there hasn’t been much activity regarding OpenRaster after LGM 2020 got turned into an improvised online meeting.
And with MyPaint being a dormant project, the most prominent use case is slowly fading.
Unfortunately the documentation of Inochi Creator doesn’t seem to go further than initial setup, but assuming all it needs from PSD is layer images (8 or 16 bit), the layer hierarchy and maybe blending modes, then yes, ORA would be the better choice.
Exchanging that in a way that can be easily implemented with existing standard libraries (Zip, XML, PNG to my knowledge) was its goal.
If you’re going to interpret krita specific stuff like filter/generator layers and masks etc. then of course you’d have to think about reading KRA files.
But it may still be much easier to create an export plugin for Krita that saves stuff directly the way the target application understands instead of making that app understand KRA. Things like layer data are more or less just dumps of krita internal data structures, like pixel tiles of our paint devices whose layout in turn depends on internal layout of color spaces etc. and I doubt you want to replicate all that.
Of course full documentation of KRA would be nice, but you know, limited resources, this one is stuck in pipeline for a while now:
One benefit afforded by Adobe to the PSD format is that they are able to use it as both a project file format as well as an exchange format. That’s a luxury the open source community doesn’t have.
Adobe offers a very large catalogue of software and Photoshop is the de-facto image editor within that ecosystem. Adobe is able to ensure that all of their software offers support for .psd files as needed. So between Adobe software it’s relatively seamless to work on a single fully-featured PSD file and then use it in as an image in other software.
So from this perspective it’s less to do with being able to collaborate on an image between GIMP, Krita, PS, CSP and/or SAI. It is about software from other disciplines like video editors, 3D software, game engine, etc., being able to at least extract the mergedimage.png directly from a .kra file to be used as an image or texture.
Currently their perception is that open raster is very new and unstable because of version number. They seem more inclined to invest in KRA despite the difficulty.
But they don’t need complex iccs or anything just the folder structure and layer information. Masks are reconnected inside the program because masks are non linear there so they are imported like a normal layer.
