I would like to import Procreate brushes in Krita, please ![]()
Hello @Tamara1, and welcome to the forum!
Well, a simple-sounding wish at first, but it’s a tough one, because although it should be technically possible, i.e. only possible in principle, it is most likely utopian in terms of the amount of work involved.
Why is this, you may ask? A brush preset, i.e. what you call a brush, is a technical description of what a so-called “brush engine” should do with it when you move it across the canvas with your stylus in order to paint with it.
To make this possible, we have to find out how a Procreate brush preset works and then use this knowledge to develop a new brush engine for Krita and integrate it into Krita.
And here we have reached the point where such a wish is confronted with reality. In other words, you have to compare the “it would be nice to have this option” with the “who should manage this gigantic amount of work” and evaluate “is it worth it”, what does it cost?
Just to put it another way, in the hope of clarifying the size of the task: Imagine you think real honey is great and want to build a bee because you want to produce honey, but you only have the honey as a starting material to build a bee from. Everything clear?
In other words, you have to ask yourself the question “is the effort required for the realization in proportion to what you will get for it, that it is worth starting this task at all”, and I don’t see that. I will briefly describe what you have to do in purely technical terms. First you have to analyze the brushes for Procreate and find out how they work, this is called reverse engineering, where you find out how the brush engine, or even several brush engines, of Procreate work. This is necessary because Procreate will not tell us: “Here you have our program code, please rebuild Procreate’s brush engine(s) for Krita”, and tell us their trade secrets, because that’s what Procreate lives on. So that would be the first gigantic mountain of work, finding out how Procreate’s Brush Engine works by trial and error, a mostly lengthy and time-consuming back and forth, testing, testing, testing. And if we succeed in discovering these secrets of Procreate, then we can start to develop the program code for one (or even more) Procreate Brush Engine in Krita, test this program code for functionality, and build it into Krita, only to test again whether and how this program code works together with Krita, and if this is sufficiently stable, then there are public alpha and beta tests where a broad mass of users should find hidden bugs before such a feature would then eventually be available in Krita.
But here we still have the famous “core of the problem”: It may not be possible to rebuild Procreate’s brush engine, so you have produced hundreds or thousands of hours of work for nothing but the garbage can, or in other words, you have burned money that Krita doesn’t actually have, because Krita lives on donations.
If you now also consider that Krita currently only has four developers, that such a task would take an insane amount of work and therefore time and money, and that Krita already has 16 brush engines, and that there are already thousands of brushes for Krita (I, for example, have almost 10,000), then you ask yourself, is it worth jeopardizing the Krita project?
Because the work, and the money needed to pay the developers, is money that Krita will lack elsewhere. In the further development of Krita, in fixing bugs in Krita, in the conversion to the future API Qt6, which is in full swing, in the rewriting of the text tool, which has already taken three years of work and is not quite finished yet.
All in all, your wish is definitely a “nice to have”. But as long as no one is prepared to donate a few (ten) thousand euros/dollars exclusively for this, and in case of doubt to add a lot more money, should bigger problems arise than expected anyway, I see your wish as unrealistic, not as impossible, just as too expensive and risky for a project like Krita. After all, the Krita Foundation is not Adobe with an annual turnover of over 20 billion dollars; if things go very, very well, Krita will have €300,000 to possibly €400,000 at its disposal. And I’ve probably already exaggerated here, because donations for Krita are in serious decline.
So, I don’t want to hurt you, but if you are not willing and able to donate the money for the amount of work that is needed to pay the developer(s) needed to code your wish, it is unlikely to see it in the next years in Krita, if ever.
Michelist
tl;dr of michelist’s posts.
Understandable but this requires reverse engineering and re-implementing Procreate’s entire brush engine for Krita. Technically utmost difficult and probably even legally impossible. There is a reason why Krita can only import brush tips from Photoshop brushes but not their settings, it’s the same issue.
So, probably will never happen.
However, there is a work-in-progress effort to make a plugin to convert some of the settings from Procreate brushes to Krita brushes. Procreate brush import plugin prototype
I completely forgot about that one.
Thank you very much for the response.
I can only imagine the difficulty that such a task would require, and as you say, it’s just a wish.
Since Procreate is such a popular drawing program, with hundreds of brushes to its name, I thought a system similar to that used for Photoshop brushes could be implemented, as Takiro rightly points out, only the tips can be imported.
Still, I know it’s a huge task, and I’ll leave it here, just as a secondary request. It’s not something Krita lacks, nor is it something of utmost importance.
That’s great. I hope they can release the plugin soon ![]()
You can import them manually and configure the behavior, also, manually. I know that’s not you are asking for, but I think it is a good option for specific brushes you need.
You can open the Procreate brush file, and you can find easily the brush tip shape. (Renaming the .brushset file to .zip, and extract the content). Then import the brush tip image to Krita and copy manually the behavior.
As others said, It’s very difficult to import a brush automatically. Because each app has its own brush engine, with their very different names for some options, or different behaviors for the same thing. I adapted my own brushes to several drawing apps, and each app is a world, some of them a pain in the ass because they have a totally different brush engine.
It’s a great solution! Thank you ![]()