@wolthera has just merged the text engine development code which she was working on since last year. The text engine is completely rewritten and now Krita will be able to utilize more advanced text features and it will be able to have on-canvas text editing. @wolthera reports that your comments in the Text Tool Thread are proving quite useful. Read more about the roadmap and features and add your comments in this thread by @wolthera. She has already started working on text in shape features. Here is a little sneak peek
A new version of the advanced colour selector called wide gamut colour selector is now merged and it will eventually be replacing the advanced colour selector.
@dkazakov brush engine porting to Lager is done. With the effort of all the developers all brush engines now use the Lager library. This will make it easy to maintain and also break away the brush editor GUI etc. Please help us test it before release. You can read the details here.
@SirPigeonz is working on a new blending mode which can give more realistic blending when using watercolor brushes. You can take a look at this thread for details.
PSD/photoshop compatibility
Exciting development news - @wolthera has managed to get saving/loading text and vector masks to PSD. Now text won’t be rasterized when opening a PSD file.
@Deif_Lou is noting down all the observations that they got by exploring the Photoshop layer style, clipping mask etc. You can read the wiki here
Google Summer of Code
As a part of preliminary research for google summer of code program @Srirupa_Datta has made a thread on KA to gather feedback and insights from artists.
Discussion is going on to hand over ownership of Krita-artists.org to KDE e.V. or the Krita Foundation for better funding.
A new shortcut plugin is garnering lots of positive attention. Shortcut Composer by @wojtryb allows Krita users to create complex, custom keyboard shortcuts using pie menus, cursor trackers, and temporary keys.
Our monthly Art contest got a record number of entries. All the artworks were beautiful and the winner for the month of February was @Elixiah.
Krita artists create work in every style imaginable. Enjoy these samples selected from those featured recently in the KA gallery. By the way, did you know you can nominate artwork to receive the featured tag? Read how to do it.
How to use transparency masks to improve watercolor in Krita by Steve Elliott
Real-time watercolor painting tutorial using Krita’s standard watercolor brushes and @RamonM’s smart watercolor canvas. Demonstrates the use of masking layers to give complete control and emulate watercolor painting found in Rebelle.
The text tool project mentioned at the top of this month’s ‘zine can use your help in two ways:
Test the new merged content by downloading one of the nightlies
Provide your expectations for the tool by adding a comment in the Text Tool Thread.
Bundle Manager Selection - Your input requested
@amyspark is working on improvements to the Resource Manager when selecting resources. Please see the thread and participate in the conversation. Bundle Manager Selection UX Changes
[Color Selectors] Add a Wide Gamut Color Selector docker, intended to eventually replace the Advanced Color Selector. It adds support for HSL, HSI, and HSY’ color models in addition to HSV, and comes with new options such as a dynamic hue ring. [merge request, Mathias Wein]
Development build regression fixes (for bugs not present in Release builds):
Various regressions and fixes to building Krita and its dependencies which resulted in the Nightly builds occasionally being broken over the last few weeks. [various commits by Amy spark and Ivan Yossi]
I’m not sure if calling it “Issue 01” is a good idea - I know you guys probably meant it as like an “edition” (in newspapers etc.), but in the context Krita it might be confused with a “problem”… maybe just “Krita Monthly Update - February 2023” or “Edition 01” would be good? I’m not a native English speaker though.
Other than that, yeah, it’s pretty great. I like that it contains pictures both of art and of the features being worked on.
We (krita promo team) decided to extend the interval of the updates to one month so that we can consolidate all the ongoing work during that month because a week was really a short time. We are open to any suggestion and critique to improve this format. We will add more pictures and videos in future.
Yeah we got that feedback earlier too, it was a bit disappointing to hear but we understood that if people are thinking like that may be we need to tweak the language or the format. Honestly it was still a bit of work to attend the meeting every week and to try to simplify the language. Also a week is a very short period to have any exciting news. Hence to give ourselves a breathing room and not to make the update basically a copy of meeting document we thought making it monthly is good idea.
We still need help and volunteers for this as we are just few people who write this. So more hands will make it more easy. So please join us or send us any suggestions of occasional help. For example you can suggest anything that we missed to include perhaps a new exciting plugin, a new brush set or a new tutorial etc.
I read the kimageshop digest mail and it was practically a copy/paste
It’s not a complaint because I think a lot of people are not subscribed to the mailing list, but it was like reading the same thing twice
Writing a monthly overview is a good synthesis of what can happen in a month, also the kimageshop document often contains pretty similar information from week to week
I know and if it was possible… Just not enough time
Currently I was even not able to write a plugin line of code from months, and except my sausage rock quickly drawn in a couple of hours, wasn’t able to draw anything
Also you might saw my activity here is not at its highest level
When I’ll get more time again I’ll try to be more active and provide more help but I can’t engage to anything when I know I won’t have the time to participate
Well yeah we were reporting the weekly meeting and we can’t make something up and report what was not said in the meeting right? But I can assure you we didn’t always copy paste we did try to simplify the language as much as we can. But at the core it was the same message I agree.
At one point It also made me think, why should we do this, people can just follow the mailing list if they want. Why should I say the same thing that is in the mailing list, our efforts are wasted practically and it is funny and foolish to write the same thing again wasting hours on Monday, when I can spend that same time trying to do my work and working on my projects that are in deadline.
No I did not mean to ask you specifically, I asked the community in general for help. So do not worry. This is not targeted to specifically to you.
But people tell me that we need to advertise more that we need help (As if people do not know and it is not obvious that free software project is understaffed and requires volunteers) so we did try to advertise at the end of each weekly meeting that we need help, and the ways you can help krita. Nobody stepped up. Even the people who ranted and complained about this “gap in communication” are no where to be seen now. I know I might sound like a broken record to some that I am always telling we don;t have people etc etc. So it is what it is may be this monthly format would not be just a copy paste since we will not cover the meeting but the work done and upcoming changes.
In the end none of the people in the promo team are social media managers or paid to do what they do now so we have what we have if there some suggestions we can implement them. But we can’t promise some marketing wonder.
In future I would suggest having this in the main krita blog rather than here on the forum as it would be in the welcome screen too and people can follow it more.
Wow @sooz this is amazing! I’m already looking forward to the next edition!
Such a great way to bring together what is going on in development as well as in the community
Looking good, I like the new format as well. If you would like to, I could help proof reading, but other than that I won’t be able to contribute right now.
Thanks for the compliment @Konstrukto. The team put a lot of work into this edition.
I’m afraid I don’t have any further info on that feature. I followed the link to the merge request but the write up didn’t give me anything further to add.
Basically, we have the advanced color selector, it has a problem: its gamut is limited to sRGB, which is a bit of a pity with Krita having full color management.
During a GSoC, I made a replacement for the Advanced color selector that can select wide gamut values. Problem: it was slow, so we only implemented it in the ‘select a color’ dialog.
@Lynx3d has been spending the last few years reworking my old code to make it actually usable. He then created a new docker to put it in: The wide gamut docker, and implemented a good chunk of the missing features that I never implemented.
We want to replace the advanced color selector with the wide color selector, because they largely have the same feature set, but it needs testers, which is why the code was merged. You can try it out with one of the nightly builds
Curiosity about this docker actually made me install the latest unstable nightly.
I have been playing with it shortly and what I immediately like about it is that it kind of combines the functionality of the advanced color selector and the artistic color selector.
Ideally it would be nice to have these two dockers integrated into one (maybe a stretch, but just imagine also being able to set a gamut mask in this docker’s settings instead of having a separate docker for it).
I also really like how the ring makes saturation and value choices less intuitive, although that does take some getting used to.
So far I haven’t ran into issues, except that I noticed that I need to load a file for the color wheel to appear.
I do have a request which would make a general color selector even more appealing to me:
I don’t know how much of a hassle it would be to include, but I work on different computers so would really benefit from color history being included in the save file.
I snuck in quite some requests, I know, but I do see this as an opportunity to reduce docker cluttering, above all I’m very pleased with this one so far!
may be this monthly format would not be just a copy paste since we will not cover the meeting but the work done and upcoming changes.
