Thoughts on using Krita for the first time in years

Develop Artists Feedback & Testing
1

Hi, new member here, but longtime follower (and donater/kickstarter!) of Krita.
I’m making another attempt at switching from CSP/Sai, Photoshop (work subscription) and a lot of Blender Grease Pencil.

This time I figured I’d keep a list of my thoughts and questions as I discover Krita, and hopefully get feedback on what have I missed, what I got wrong, what’s already being tackled… all welcome!

  • Transform masks: Love them!
    Sadly, they’re too unstable for me. Toggling them takes a few seconds, and sometimes the entire layer just remains invisible. Being able to toggle the result on and off without lag is crucial for me to analyze the effect!
  • Performance & Stability:
    Related, and possible my biggest concern, but I’m hoping there’s a solution!
    There are regular freezes, which sometimes persist and need Krita to be forcibly closed. I’m on a decently specced laptop, and other software performs well at much higher resolutions. I’m averaging five crashes an hour on 5.1, and it’s not workable. This is on Windows 10, Intel i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz
    16,0 GB RAM

Small niggles:

  • Brush selection
    Default brushes don’t show the power in the brush engines. New users needs to wade through multiple bundles to find the good stuff! A small selection of up-to-date quality brushes would be nice.
  • When dragging a layer around, the layer itself totally obscures the line that shows where it’ll be placed
  • So many colour selector dockers!

Things I couldn’t find / feature requests

  • Sticky Keys
    Switching to a selection tool only while holiding down the hotkey, and when releasing it being straight back into the brush tool
  • Fade last stroke
    I often make a textured stroke and want to tweak the opacity afterwards to see the result on canvas
  • Texture: Is is possible to have a texture global override brushes’s individually set textures, so as to match a ‘canvas’ so to speak?
  • Hotkeying dockers to pop up under the mouse. Thankfully an addon does this!
  • Brushes: increased dabs at sharp corners? When rotating it’s very obvious there are too few alpha dabs there
  • Mapping mousebuttons to other features
    Reset rotation, toggle mirroring, move up/down layers etc
  • ctrl/shift/alt etc hotkeys during tool use, to switch between different versions of a brush (example: switching to a smudge brush on shift)
  • Mapping multiple tools/actions to one hotkey, cycling through them per press
  • Being able to map tools to onpress/onrelease/ondrag as in Blender opens up a lot of central hotkeys for different uses, including on small keyboards/controllers that fit next to a big painting tablet
  • Hotkeying opacity. For instance the number keys, as in Photoshop. Increase/Decrease exists but isn’t as quick
  • pressure to opacity on the Shapes Fill brush. I’d love to be able to vary the entire shape’s fill based on an initial or median pen pressure! It’s the main tool I use to make quick concept art, with overlapping shapes on medium opacity, and to be able to vary that would be fantastic
  • Texture per stroke
  • Infinite Canvas
  • Artboards:
    Something I use constantly in Photoshop, Figma etc, and would be a great fit for Comicbook frames as well, keeping layers, assistants etc self-contained.
  • Something I know has been mentioned, but I hope me mentioning it again can confirm it’s wanted: Vector layers with freehand painting and pixel-based brushes
  • Toggle in upper Toolbar to have Smudge brush (and clone etc?) use Active layer, All layers, or All below active layer
  • Brush docker with closeable categories listed underneath eachother
  • I do wonder if I’m going crazy, but on some of the RGBA brushes (which are nice!) there are obvious artifacts of the repeated alpha stamp’s edges, which entirely ruin the effect for me. I’ve seen nobody bring this up, but it’s so obvious!
2

Five crashes an hour? What?
I had problems with a prior laptop but not since I upgraded…it was the computer, not Krita don’t think I’ve even had 5.1 lock up or crash.

3

I rarely have crash too

I can confirm that and found an easy way to reproduce performance kill with them

I have to report a bug with detailled explanation, Hope that it could be fixed…

Grum999

4

Is this a list of all the differences from CSP? Kinda sounds like it.

But yeah 5 crashes per hour is like 1 crash every 12 minutes. How they do that on a computer with good specs elludes me. Makes me feel confident on my decade old computer performance.

5

We do have infinite canvas though, but kind of different from mypaint infinite canvas. If you scroll far enough to one side there’s an arrow you can click to make canvas bigger. Or even crop tool with grow option.

Also try layer styles> texture overlay for the “override texture”? I hope that helps.

6

You don’t have to use them all if you don’t want to :slight_smile:

You can do that. Here, Ctrl+\ (or whatever) will call up the Rectangular Selection Tool (or whatever) as long as it’s held. It’s important to make sure that Ctrl+\ is not already in use in the Keyboard Shortcuts.

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7

What is your question? Perhaps you posted in the wrong category. Feedback should go in #develop:artists-feedback-testing . there too it is advisable to post one feedback or point per post. It is hard to discuss a long list and discussion will be very long for each of them.

8

I kinda want to know what you mean by this cause i am kinda lost.

Is this related to your request above? So instead of tags being a drop down menu you want all them in a list? The issue i see with this is when you have many brushes like my all category must be over 200 brushes so far. If tags were shown in a list i don’t think this would be practical and would have a lot of visual noise. The way tags work there would be also a lot of repetition on the brushes shown if you tag the same brush with more than one tag.

Not sure if it’s what you want but you can lock brush parameters with the lock in the brush editor and they become goal parameters that are used in all brushes the video in the krita YouTube channel on the newest pencil brushes explains how to do that.

What kind of brushes you think are missing? What problems do you see with the current selection? Maybe it’s also good to explain what type of artwork you do. Cause i see many artists saying they don’t need anything other than the default brushes so would be good to know if it’s a need due to a different type of art.

Like it was mentioned before that’s not really an issue. It’s more options to accommodate many workflows you use the one you are more comfortable with.

I am having trouble understanding this can you give a visual example. Cause i am not sure how this is supposed to work. i think this could be possible doing a stroke on a separate layer and then merging it.

You may want to check a plugin called compact brush but i agree that having these options in easy places in a native form is a good idea.

I have seen this issue when i have both rgba and rgba wet bundles enabled i had to do some edits to the brush tip but don’t remember what now when i can check i will update this

This would be nice

Humm unsure if i understood cause technically you can add these in the canvas inputs so i am confused on what you mean.

This would be nice too.

I think this is a very popular request XD and i agree

9

No, as mentioned I’ve used multiple packages, including Photoshop and Sai as well. I also used Procreate, Paintstorm, etc. I don’t know if even half my requests are even available in CSP?
To turn the question around, which bits do you think come from CSP? And further: what’s your opinion on that? What made you post this?

Thanks, I’d found that but don’t find it anywhere near as useful. Nice option though!
Sadly, it only works up to a certain point.
Software with an infinite canvas generally is at least partially vector-based, or is able to self-contain layers rather than having to increase the canvas size (which has big impacts on memory etc)
Only a minor point though, just something I miss from sketching in Grease Pencil/Mypaint. Artboards would go some way to scratching the same itch for me, as well as being immensely useful for design and comic stuff

Here’s a gif of a similar thing in a Photoshop addon: http://i.giphy.com/KiUycWGiDCHfO.gif
Tags would be problematic, yeah. I’d suggest that categories and tags would be separate things. Categories could be automatically set up by which Resource they came from for starters, and then users could customise them to their liking. That way you’d import a bunch of new brushes, and they’d automatically be in a ‘Rakurri V2’ group

You’d be able to drag brushes between categories, open or close categories…
It’s a concept I really like

I think this might actually work, yeah!

I think Procreate has a nice selection of defaults. It has clean round brushes, textured brushes, nice smudge brushes… Just a nice but small selection, which is important so people can get painting straight away

It’s confusing, and I feel like a lot of the functionality could be house in the same window. Like Pigment.O’s many options, for instance.

Possible yes, useful no. This is a tool I use all the time, it wouldn’t do to create a new layer for it every time. You could possible script it, but I foresee issues with blending modes and opacity

Will do, thanks! So are all of these options present? I haven’t looked into these deep brush engines yet to see what they’re capable of, that’ll take another full weekend of playing around :smiley:

It’s possible I’m missing it, but where would I set View>Mirror Image Horizontally? That’s just one I tried to find and couldn’t.

Thanks for all of the answers, I’ve already found a few things I missed! Hopefully the fixed Transform Layers will make everything run more smoothly for me, too.

10

Krita has those too though i know nothing about procreate but krita come with a huge selection of brushes that includes the types of brushes that you are talking of.

From your previous post seems like the problem was more the amount of brushes. Maybe showing a tag with a smaller selection of brushes would be better when you first open the program but no changes to the bundle real amount of brushes. As i really think Krita defaults are not bad at all.

I disagree i actually find pigment.o super confusing to use. with all the options it has it can be overwhelming, i think this modular approach is better for most as this way you can arrange how you want them on the screen too instead of having everything in one docker.

And of you just use one of them you don’t need to bother knowing what the others do. Like i don’t think i have ever in my life used the artistic color selector but some people prefer that to the color wheel.

Having all the options in one docker just would make things way too confusing and overwhelming with the amount of options. Having just some options per docker feels much more organized imo.

Again i don’t see this as an issue. If you find having 3 options confusing then i would suggest just using one and forgetting the others exist. That’s kinda what i do.

I am not saying it’s useful just giving you an alternative, ( you say a tool but to me it’s just a functionor option from your description) as this functionality doesn’t exist yet in krita. And like i said before i have never seen this functionality in any program i used so i guess it’s a procreate thing.

Honestly don’t know, as i mostly just use the basics, but from your description this plugin seems to fit you

Not all shortcuts are available to be set there though some are just in the keyboard shortcuts but if you mouse has multiple buttons you can map some of them to send keyboard inputs and so you can use them by clicking your mouse.

Btw i would suggest you use mirror around cursor instead of mirror view. Feels much better to me as this way i can put the mouse on the middle of the canvas and the whole drawing won’t be shifted to the side

11

Because of organizing brushes “on the fly”…
To some extent you can do this in Krita, not 100% as you write it here, but it comes very close if you see a bundle as category.
If you click on this icon in the screenshot below, then directly in Krita’s Brush Preset Docker you open a small scrollable dialog where you can activate or deactivate the individual bundles directly in the Preset Docker, as an additional means of organizing the tags that can be used there.
You just can’t move presets between the bundles, you would have to create new bundles according to your ideas, and that’s not witchcraft.

How to de／activate Bundles in Brush Preset Docker:

De／Activate_Bundles_in_Brush_Preset_Docker
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This way you can comfortably show or hide bundles very quick.

And regarding your suggestions, if there are things you really want to see in Krita, you can always try to have your desired feature integrated into Krita with a well-described feature request.
This requires a good description of the feature and its intended use, preferably an illumination of pros and cons and also how you would like to see it implemented. If this is considered useful and technically feasible, there is a chance that it will be implemented in Krita sooner or later.
Okay, mostly later rather than sooner though, as Krita only has just under ten developers currently, unless I’m mistaken and overestimating. But this is a normal way for Krita, and often more promising than dropping suggestions that could be absolutely top-notch at all corners and getting angry about their non-implementation, thinking they are being willfully ignored, some overlook the fact that dev’s don’t (can’t) read along everywhere.

Michelist

12

Photoshop, actually.

13

Ah another one i haven’t used. Good to know.

14

So, I tried this again, and I can only find Reset Rotation. As I thought, almost every command in the menus isn’t listed here, right? Or am I missing a way to add them?

15

I reread what you said and i guess you were looking for very especific shortcuts not speaking in general. So it was a misunderstanding from my part. Many actions are not in the canvas inputs.

As far as i know no way to add more there. However the way canvas inputs are it’s very hard to know what is possible there or not.

If you really want something using the mouse i suggest using autohotkey to work around some limitations.

16

Good idea, actually! I’d somewhat forgotten about Autohotkey, and what’s possible with it. I’ll take a look!