Opinions on using Krita on stuff other than Digital Painting

[hellozee]

To be clear, Krita is and always will be a Digital Painting focused application. But every now and then there is a feature creeping up which can’t be directly related to Digital Painting.

A little bit of preface first, as a student I worked for my school’s art gallery, where most of work was to create catalogues and table top illustrations. Both of them mostly involved,

• Scanning hard copies of handwritten stuff, extracting the handwriting by using different selection tools
• Adding some text digitally
• Creating Layouts by combining scanned stuff (drawings by students and handwriting) and digital stuff

I always did the text and layouts in Inkscape, then do a PNG export to Krita. In Krita, it was just converting to CMYK (which is called soft-proofing which I later came to know) and do the final compositing, using blending modes with brush strokes for the final touch up.

I know that’s not the most efficient workflow in all, but that time, I was unaware of stuff like file layer. Fortunately this was half decade back, I ain’t a high school student anymore. But the reason I tried to write a Magnetic Lasso tool was due to my fascination of using it when I used to use Photoshop.

As I was scrolling through the social media, I saw a lot of people using Krita for Photography, I wonder what their workflow is, if you use Krita for something other than Digital Painting please share your workflow.

[raghukamath]

I hope reptorian was here to answer your post

[emmetpdx]

I’m really of two minds on this topic.

There are a few obvious benefits to limiting the scope of any program or project, Krita included:

• Development resources are limited and there is a real choice to be made about what to focus on. Small teams (like Krita’s) have to consciously decide whether they want to create one deep system or many shallow ones. Bigger teams (like Blender’s, for example) have the resources to juggle more plates at the same time, but even then, development almost never scales linearly. On top of that, the minute you ‘advertise’ that your program is designed to do X, you’re also creating a new set of expectations about features and functionality, making it very easy to bite off more than you can chew.

• Code and user interface complexity are another factor; the more unrelated things a program does, the more unrelated code you have to write, and the more unrelated user interface needs to both exist and be understood by users. This problem tends to be exacerbated when you retroactively add a second unrelated system to a program that was designed to do one thing. Blender, again, is a program that can do a lot of loosely related stuff, modeling, sculpting, 3d animation, 2d animation, rendering, compositing, video editing, etc.–they’ve had to spend a lot of time, effort and money to make that possible, redesigning massive amounts of user interface and rewriting/restructuring a lot of code. The end result is great, but the learning curve is undoubtedly made steeper because of it.

So those are two (pretty big) reasons why it’s a very good thing that Krita is considered to be first and foremost a tool for digital painting and illustration.

On the other hand, in fact, Krita already does quite a few things that could be considered out of scope for a digital painting and illustration program. Strictly speaking, filters are not really central to a painting workflow, nor are vectors, text, or animation. Now, don’t get me wrong, all of things are great and I’m glad Krita does them and I hope we continue to develop them–the point being that, with a very narrow concept of what “digital painting” is, it could be argued that Krita could get away with doing a lot less than it currently does.

But here’s the thing, it’s really not good to have a narrow interpretation of digital painting like the one I described above. Why? Because digital painting and illustration is actually a pretty broad medium. You could pick 100 random digital artists online and discover that each of them is making something unique, with a different workflow and using different tools than the others. There is really no good way to know about every single workflow that currently exists, and it’s even harder anticipate future workflows.

Some artists just paint on a single layer with simple brushes. Others work in gray-scale values first and colorize after. Some artists might rough in scene perspective freehand, while others use assistants to build it, and others still extract perspective from a photograph of 3D render. A designer for entertainment or products draws and paints to convey and sell a concept, while illustrators are focused mainly on conveying feelings through a beautiful image. People who are making comics want things that are fundamentally different than people who are animating, and animators have different needs than storyboard artists.

So what am I trying to say here?

• Krita is already a tool for more than just “painting” based on the features that it currently has, and there’s really nothing wrong with that at all.

• There is no clean conceptual line between “photo editing”, “image manipulation”, “illustration” and “digital painting”. It’s all part of the same thing, in my opinion, and the tools that you need are going to vary, not based on the English-language label that we give it, but based on the workflow.

If sampling, perspective extraction, photo-bashing or collage is some part of your illustration workflow, then I think it stands to reason that some of the tools that you rely on will exist more in the realm of “image manipulation” than “painting”. I’m by no means a professional illustrator, so correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t think that workflows that rely to some degree on “image manipulation” are that rare, and they’re definitely worth considering as being not too far out-of-scope.

[LithiumReflections]

Emmet’s reply is fantastic here but I just wanted to offer some insight into how I use Krita for digital photography.

To note: I initially used to process photos through GIMP. In later years I switched to using Clip Studio Paint as it was my primary art program. Now I split my time between CSP and Krita, but have shifted doing my photo processing in Krita because of the GMIC filters.

My process is roughly:

1. Process the RAW photo first through Image Data Converter. Primarily I adjust white balance, creative style, and sometimes adjust shading compensation. While IDC does have tone curve, D-Range, color, and sharpness, I prefer to do these within different software.
2. Export as a large TIFF, which I open in Krita.
3. Use GMIC filters to make basic (‘standard’) adjustments. Typically it is a combination of Boost Chromacity, Color Grading, Dynamic Range Increase, and Sharpen [unsharp mask].
4. Look for additional changes I may want to make, starting with levels and curves, and ending with manual touchups like sky darkening, soft light, vignetting, etc.

I’m only an amateur photographer, and tend to prefer my photos more ‘true to life’ than ‘interpreted’, but I generally feel Krita has almost anything I’d need to see things the way I’d like.

[Reptorian]

Things that aren’t related to digital painting from scratch tends to be on the line of these list -

• Layout development - Seen in scrapbook, game props, GUI graphical development
• Photographic Restoration - The process of restoring a photograph can actually be perceived as an area of digital painting. It actually involves painting over details using clone tools and using blending modes, alongside with using healing tool, but it’s still mostly painting.
• Graphic Design - There is almost no painting involved in graphic design unless it’s part of the background or some other things.
• Photographic Editing - While photographic restoration falls under this, I separated it because restoration is still a lot more about painting than controls over details and colors.

I find that the areas where Krita has most potential to evolve outside of digital painting is graphic design. Krita has several different blending modes (some of those were implemented by me), non-destructive editing tools such as transform masks, layer styles, clone layers, vector layers. Every of those are essential, and smart selection tool isn’t necessarily needed in graphic design. G’MIC helps fill some gap and can even be used to automate the process of graphic design. So, for anything other than painting, graphic design would have to be the top alternative use.

And then the second viable alternative use would be photographic restoration. Color cast is a big issue, but you can point with pixelize tool, you can grab the average color and use it to remove color cast. But, anything else like fixing up details, and cloning. Krita has every that tool built-in and in G’MIC inpaint tool. You can even go beyond RGB to fix up details. My attempts at photographic restoration has always been a success with Krita, and every time I do it, it’s mainly 99% painting.

The third viable alternative use is layout design. There are special blending modes like Destination In, and Destination Atop with Layer Style, and clone layers. With the usage of clone layers, you can automate the process of making layout pictures. If any of you seen my bug report with something that has orange and green cast, that’s a example of layout design involving Krita. There is zero painting involved here, but it works.

The least viable alternative use in my opinion would be photographic editing, and anything to do with it like photo-matting. While, it can be used for photo-editing as it does have some necessary tools for it alongside with G’MIC, it’s just not there yet when it comes to filters. There’s the big thorny issue of lacking smart selection, and for photo-matting, that can be a very big issue. I still use it over GIMP for generic photo-editing as there is non-destructive editing and LAB editing. The workflow for editing pictures in Krita mostly has to do with color adjustment, and using non-destructive editing to avoid destroying information. If basic selections is enough, and if the filter is enough, then you could use it with clone layer and edit pictures similar to the way you would edit pictures in Photoflow. I would advise using Photoflow over Krita as they’re both non-destructive, and the workflow for editing picture in Krita is most similar to workflow using Photoflow.

[hellozee]

What do you mean by smart selections? I might be wrong, but apart from the new fancy “smart” foreground selection tools, Krita does have a nice array of selection tools.

I can get that the selection from the Magnetic Lasso can be a little bit fishy some times, that is because I am yet to understand the filter structure and for now reusing the Colorize Mask’s filter. And the color range selection tools is kind of lacking, though I haven’t gone through the manual of it, so I have no idea how it works.

[slightlyangrydodo]

I ocasionally use Krita to edit photos, and in those scenarios, the Smart Delete function of Photoshop is just completely OP next to all other software that I know of. By smart delete I mean deleting something out of the frame, and then Photoshop calculates the interior pixels based on outside information. Krita’s implementation is still too slow, and doesn’t produce adequate results.

However, this isn’t me shitting on Krita, like @emmetpdx says, I’m GLAD that Krita is a digital painting app to the core. That’s what matters to me the most

[Reptorian]

I was talking about foreground extraction. For cases like photo-matting and/or mixing it all out with painting like this - example, Krita doesn’t really have a very good tool for thorny selection cases. That’s especially the case with thorny things like hair mixing with background or trees. There is guided selection in G’MIC, but that is a clunky solution. Yes, color range tool is lacking at the moment and could use improvement.

[allenford]

TOUR | Blender and Krita workflow. TOUR 2019

First off, the idea of my project was to recreate the scene from Marvel’s Black Panther Wakanda scene. I know this is off-topic and not related in Krita at all, I mean originally this project was supposed to be made in Autodesk Maya alongside Photoshop since this was my main tool when creating personal artworks back then.

But all this had changed. Pardon for some technical terms here as most of my workflow is 3d related. Part of my goal was to study the Blender also, so I made my decision during the process to switch all workflows through blender, the trees by the way are from epic game free assets.
Anyway, how I end up using the Krita? Upon looking for photoshop alternatives, found these two open-source painting tool. Gimp, and Krita. Gimp without a doubt was fast and responsive, but it’s not intuitive as krita. Krita however, is buggy on some features but I found it useful, feel like I’m using photoshop.

Blender to Krita workflow 90/10%:

• Export trees from unreal as fbx
• render each tree with passes in blender for later used as hair cards
• setting up the scene in blender
• trees populated as hair cards (based on Zach Reinhardt tutorial)
• lighting and rendering via cycles render engine
• and post-processing done krita including cloud.

[betazoid]

Hi, I am a nature photographer. I use Krita for everything that I cannot do with darktable. I think it is better than GIMP. The main reason is that it works in large color spaces such as AdobeRGB or ProPhoto. I think it can do everything important that GIMP can.
This is an interesting discussion.
Regards
Anna

[sooz]

There is a channel on YT that teaches how to use Krita for photo manipulation - it’s called Photolearningism. I’ve learned some cool things about krita from him. There may be something of interest to you there, @hellozee.