My first proper post here and I apologise for it not being art. Been super busy with work and private matters over NYE and I’m still trying to catch up with life. Being a father of two this actually is a neverending story, but I’m confident I’ll contribute in other forms soon.
So… up until now I’ve been saving my work as psd-files, since I was worried about losing compatibility, but since I’m now fully commited to Krita I’ve just dared to use the native kra-format and noticed how much smaller the file gets. Like, dramatically smaller! I’d say great, but I’m wondering if there’s any downside, or anything I’m missing on Adobe’s side. Maybe they just like to clutter their files?
Will using .kra also improve the performance while working on the painting? I guess I know the answer, but since I’m already asking regarding file use and it’s advantages I’m making sure.
Sorry if this was brought up already, I’d be surprised if not, but I couldn’t find anything via the search function. Thanks for any info on this!
Note that KRA file are just zip files
And when layers are saved inside, they’re saved using an internal format: only tiles (64x64pixles size) containing data are stored.
if you have a 10000x10000 document with only one pixel set on it, then only need to save a 64x64pixel tile data (itself LZW compressed)
No, no better performances
Only when using KRA file you ensure to get a fully compatible file with Krita: some Krita properties (fill layers & guides for example) doesn’t exists in photoshop
If you use KRZ file format, size will be even more smaller (but you won’t get high quality preview anymore for file)
Interesting! Thanks a lot for the super fast and informative reply. Totally makes sense, also regarding preserving Krita-based properties. Guess I just didn’t advance so far into the rabbit hole yet, to notice the lacking support with other formats.
Sidenote: Regarding PSD format when I used to use photoshop and me and my colleague wanted to save space when sending files etc we saved the psd files hiding all the layers. We used to put everything in a toplevel group and hide it and then save it. This would of course remove preview which was not available anyway at that time. But it saved considerable size. Then we moved on to tiff with lzma compression and it too when saved way less when we hid all the layers. You can see that krz does something similar by removing the preview
