The contract signed, Arjen Hiemstra and I have started good and well on Krita Sketch, the touch-enabled version of Krita. We're developing mostly on Windows, for Windows. All our code is in the krita-sketch-rempt branch in the projects.kde.org/calligra git repository. Arjen created a mockup for the touch gui, and this week the real work begins: coding on the QML gui, the new canvas, the multi-touch interaction system, the psd import/export. The works!

There is one skill badly missing in our team, though, and that is graphics design. We, that is KO GmbH, is looking for a graphics designer to work with us to create the look of Krita Sketch. That's icons, welcome page, buttons, everything that's needed to make Krita Sketch look right. This is QML, so we're hardly bound to any platform standards. This is the goal:

Krita Sketch is going to be the touch paint application for people who want to really create, not a gimmick like Microsoft's FreshPaint. It has to have a cool, inviting, understated, professional, productive, smooth look and feel. There will be lots of stuff happening, since we will allow people to work with layers, filters, selections, transform tool and so on.

If you want to work with us on this, please mail an application with your ideas, some examples of previous work, your rate and so on to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Experience with QML would be a good thing, but is not an absolute necessity. It's a freelance job. Working remotely is no problem at all, though a modicum of timezone compatibility with CEST would be nice.

(In other news, Sven Langkamp is an absolute big fixing hero, while I've found time to fix some rather bad bugs in our color management, thanks to the work of Elle Stone, who figured out some discrepancies in the results of Krita and other applications. That work will soon be merged to master, in time for the Krita 2.6 release, as well as work done on the OpenColorIO integration.)

We have a guest at krita.org today. Dread Knight from Freezing Moon is a regular visitor to the irc channels of several free paint application projects. He has been working on a really cool game project for quite some time now, called Ancient Beast. I wanted to give him a chance to his promising project to you!

Greetings! I’m Dread Knight from FreezingMoon.org and I would like to tell you a bit about the project we’re working on for quite a while now:


Ancient Beast is a free open source browser based player-vs-player, turn-based strategy game project. To put it in other words, card games meet battle chess, with creatures! The gameplay is rather similar to Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but focused only on the combat aspect: match based, playable 1vs1 or 2vs2 on pretty much any device when it will be ready.


Earlier combat mock-up

The game takes places several hundred years in the future, when humans, empowered by advanced 3d rep-rap printers, are able to play God, by having the power to create beasts as they please within a matter of seconds, in order to fight each other for survival or pure entertainment.


Ancient Beast is an open project and the reason I'm writing here is to invite you all to become involved in the project! There are plenty of ways you can have fun doing stuff for the project!

We’re planning on about 50 collectible creatures that players will be able to summon during matches. That means really coud use extra hands from artists who want to help coloring creature line-arts, redrawing some of the creatures in different poses, making sketches for new combat layouts, creating new items -- and even completely new creatures! Also all creatures that make it into the game need to be modeled (using blender), textured, rigged and animated.

For this kind of stuff we’re using Wuala. You can sign up using this referral link and then join our Wuala group. (Wuala is kinda like dropbox, but way better!)

Some examples of project artwork where Krita was used:

Sarcophag by Katarzyna Zalecka and Ramon Miranda (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Vulcan by Katarzyna Zalecka and David Revoy  (CC-BY-SA 3.0)


Another sarcophag by Katarzyna Zalecka and Ramon Miranda (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

And here are some blender samples of what finished creatures look like

Swampler by Katarzyna Zalecka and Jeepster  (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Vulcan by Katarzyna Zalecka and Roberto Roch (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

So you see, plenty of scope for showing off with high-quality artwork done with open source software! But I could also use an extra hand with coding (HTML5/canvas/javascript/php), since it’s no secret that I’m not an excellent coder and that I struggle with even the most basic things... And since this game will be web-based, that means doing proper work on the actual gameplay is a bit out of my reach right now, and I have to rely on other people who don’t have much free time. The game is highly integrated into the website since it’s a web game; you can find the code in our github repository.

And now you can even support the project financially! I’ve created a donation page where you can do one time donations or even subscribe and you can get credited/linked for doing so. By donating, you’ll get rewarded with game coins and beta keys, while allowing us to commission coders and artists, reward current contributors and better market the project. It would mean a lot if some of the people reading this would decide to donate since I’m working on this project full time for several years now, so a bit of money goes a long way for the project.

For now we’re focusing on a 2d version with 3d prerendered models, but hopefully in 2 years from now we’ll also release a 3d version playable from the browser as well and maybe in 4 years, Augmented Reality version using Google Glasses, so you would just grab creatures and move them around with your hand. Or just hang around on your living room couch along with 3 other mates, playing Ancient Beast together on your smartTV (just connect a cheap ARM linux device) and have fun while using smart-phones as controllers.

You can find our IRC channel on Freenode server, #AncientBeast channel, or you can just join using the chat page of our official website:  www.AncientBeast.com. I’m around there most of the day along with fans and other contributors, so drop by and poke me if you want to talk about the project or even get briefed with a task in case you wish to contribute.

Let’s work together and make this game really awesome and worldwide known!

A milestone in development: this weekend, Cyrille Berger created a branch for Krita 2.5. And that means that 2.5 is around the corner already -- and we've barely recovered from the excitement of the 2.4 release! Still, plenty to be excited about in Krita 2.5.

Krita 2.5 will bring:

• the first version of textured brushes,
• the composition docker,
• the dulling mode in the color smudge brush,
• improved openraster compatility,
• more 32 bit floating point (HDR) colorspaces through lcms2 (and more blending modes and filters for 32 bit float rgba),
• improvements to the transform tool (use alt or meta to enable perspective transform!),
• updated paintop presets, with more presets for the hairy brush,
• support for selecting units in the rulers,
• shortcuts can now be set for tools and will be remembered after closing krita,
• brush rotation now is absolute to the canvas rotation,
• pdf import at high resolution is improved,
• visual improvements in rendering the image both in the normal and in the opengl canvas,
• assistants are saved in .kra files,
• on saving jpeg images with transparent parts, you get to chose which color will be used by default,
• all file filter dialogs remember their settings,
• the collapsed state of layers is saved to .kra,
• the full-screen setting is back and much improved (tab is the shortcut),
• improvements to the recovering of autosave files,
• lots and lots of usability and polish improvements thanks to the reporting by Antoine and Tom Hall,
• improved performance all around
• and much, much more...

Under heavy bug fixing development right now is a new interaction frameworks. Sounds abstract, I know, but it will make a huge difference: interactions like color picking, zooming, panning, rotating, brush resizing will now be uniformly available no matter which tool is selected, whether it's a vector tool or a paint tool. Cool work, done by Arjen Hiemstra and sponsored by KO GmbH.

Time to select a new splash screen!

You will be able to upgrade to 2.5 beta1 using the usual experimental repositories of your distribution. More news when I've got more detailed instructions.

Krita has supported color management since 2004. In fact, there's no way around color management in Krita -- no switch to turn it off, it's the cornerstone of how Krita works with images. But, as Kai-Uwe Behrmann explains, there are several ways of approaching color management. For print, ICC is the way to go. That's what Krita has always focussed on, and that's why professional artists can use Krita in a workflow that includes sending CMYK tiff files to publishers. Krita depends heavily on LittleCMS: in fact, we don't just use LCMS for classic color management tasks, but also for things like the curve adjustment filter.

But Krita has also supported, since 2005, working on openEXR images, which are mainly used in the film studio world. Now, the movie world has a different approach to color management than the print world. For instance, there is a big difference between the way colors look when projected onto a screen compared to a monitor, and there need to be ways of compensating for that.

In the film production world, the preferred library to provide color management is OpenColorIO, ocio for short. In the past two weeks I integrated ocio into the Krita display pipeline. It's still completely optional, but when present will make it possible to select source and display profiles for any image in 16 or 32 bits floating point RGB colorspaces. This works fastest with the OpenGL canvas, but should also work fine with the ordinary canvas.

Of course, there are still quite a few bugs, since nobody has used the feature in anger yet -- but still: it's a big milestone!

Since the 2.4 release of Krita, there's lots going on in our community. There's more and more art done in Krita appearing, on our forum, on our deviant art group and in the blogs of happy users. Let's share the fun! Look at this delightful spring image by Canitiem.

Krita at LinuxFest NorthWest

Oscar Baechler has released the video of his presentation of Krita at LinuxFest NorthWest -- with impressive results and reception, considering he used an old beta of the Windows version of Krita! Fortunately, now there are 2.4 packages available for download for almost all distributions. Watch his awesome introduction:

In his blog, he also presents a screencapture of painting a Bob Ross landscape in Krita:

It's always great to see that Krita is capable of many different styles! Just take a look at Fernando's impasto work on our forum -- in a beautiful style, reminds me of Daumier.

Apart from the presentation, Oscar also sat down at the KDE booth and demoed Krita -- but as Jos Poortvliet shows in his blog, he had competition. Moe Jackson had never used Krita, or even a tablet, but sat down and started having fun, painting a meadow and trees:

Great work for a first-timer! Carl Symons had a bunch of DVD's to give away, and Moe got one, of course.

Also read Scott Dawdle's review of LinuxFest NorthWest. Remember -- there are still DVD's for sale -- for everyone who didn't win the main prize at the LFNW raffle!

New Brush Tutorial

Ramon Miranda, the author of most of the brush tips, patterns and other resources in Krita has just released a tutorial on creating brush presets. It's long and very much worth it:

Libre Graphics Meeting

At the Libre Graphics Meeting, the GIMP team released GIMP 2.8 -- congratulations guys! Looking at their commit rate, they certainly are having loads of fun hacking on GIMP again. But it was not all GIMP, since Animtim and Lukas Tvrdy represented Krita at LGM 2012.

See their blogs for a full account:

Animtim:

LGM 2012 : Krita Workshop report

Using Oyranos on Kubuntu 12.04

LGM 2012: a crazy week in Vienna!

Lukas:

Libre Graphics Meeting 2012

Ramon Miranda

Slides from LGM 2012 Talk. Digital Painting with open source tools

Personal LGM 2012 report

Animtim is post-processing the talk videos, by the way.

Next year, LGM will be in Madrid.

With Krita 2.4 happily released, the Krita team is working hard on what will become Krita 2.5. Krita 2.5 should be released some time in July already, but that doesn't mean that it will be a boring release! Here's a short overview to whet your appetite:

Windows

Krita on Windows is getting more and more stable. The installer you can download from the KO GmbH download page still warns you that it is extremely experimental, and that's true! I regularly build it from git master, and as any artist can confirm who uses Kubuntiac's script, that's dangerous living. But on the other hand, at first we got many reports from people who couldn't run Krita for one reason or another, and we seem to have fixed most of those problems. And then -- Oscar Baechler used a beta of Krita on Windows for his workshop at LinuxFest Northwest with few problems.

Smudging

Last week, we got a new smudging option for the colorsmudge brush: dulling. This works a bit like smudging in Mypaint currently works. In git master, we already have a few presets that use this mode! Check Animtim's blog for more information -- this screenshot is from his blog.

David Revoy also quickly produced a very painterly sketch:

Composition docker

The compositions docker allows you to save sets of layer configurations. So, if you have a complex layer structure, you might want to hide or show sets layers and switch between those configurations, say your sketch structure and your paint structure. Sven's blog has all the details! And David Revoy made a video showing why it's a really handy feature:

 Paper sizes

We used to have a set of old templates for the various color models Krita supports in various sizes. This actually isn't what the templates were intended for, so we added a selection box to the custom image window that allows you to select predefined size/dpi combinations. The templates section is thinned out a bit and need filling up again. See the how-to-create-a-template tutorial on the forum.

Textured painting

As requested by David Revoy, Krita now allows you to use a texture to modify your brush while painting. The feature isn't finished yet, but will be ready for 2.5.

Theming

On Linux (on Windows there are some technical problems that we hope to be able to solve), you can now select a color theme for just Krita. We borrowed code from Digikam for that -- thanks Gilles et al! No longer do you need to make your entire desktop dark to have a dark look for Krita. As seen in the screenshot above.

Improved OpenRaster support

OpenRaster got extended thanks to the efforts from MyPaint's Andrew Chadwick, and Krita has followed suit: OpenRaster (and .kra) now saves and loads the lock status of layers as well as which layer was active.

Preview in Pattern Selector

The pattern selector got a large-size preview pane and was also turned into a docker.

And there'll be lots and lots more to look forward to!

It's that time of the year again... Even though it's a pretty cold april in Deventer, the Netherlands, we're feeling warm glow of another impending Google Summer of Code. This year four student spread over three separate and distinct continents will be cutting their teeth on Krita. Last year, Krita was one of the first projects to actually release the work of a student when we published a snapshot of what would become 2.4 half-way the summer. This year, our 2.5 release is planned for June -- so who knows what will happen?

But first let me introduce the students and their projects. There's a nice variety in experimental and directly useful

Color Managed Printing for Krita

Joe Simon, who has also worked on the Kolormanager color management kcm for KDE, will work on implementing proper color managed printing in Krita. Krita right now basically has no printing support to speak of, so this is a challenging enough task! This project happens under the umbrella of the OpenICC project.

Perspective Drawing in Krita

Shivaraman Ayjer is perhaps even more ambitious. Krita already has drawing assistants, objects you place on the canvas and that are used by the brush system to guide your lines. That makes it easy to draw lines, ellipses and so on that look freehand but are accurate. A more advanced assistant is the perspective assistant which allows you to draw lines towards a vanishing point with for instance opacity, size of saturation decreasing the closer you get to the horizon.

Shivaraman will add a mode where simple meshes from Blender can be imported, positioned and then used to draw in perspective.

Infinite Canvas/Wraparound Canvas for Textures

Shrikrishna Hollais tackling two related wishes that users have been asking for for a long time: an infinite canvas mode where you can pan the image any which way and can always continue drawing. This mode is great when sketching. Then there is the opposite: a mode where the canvas can be panned but the edges wrap around. This is ideal for creating patterns and textures.

Sandpainting Brush

Francisco Fernandesis has the most experimental project of the four: he will work on a new particle-based brush engine that will give a feel like you're painting with a stream of sand, and the sand will be re-arrangable, like ordinary color can be blurred, with his engine the particles can be moved along and mixed.

Krita 2.4 is dedicated to the memory of Jean Giraud/ Mœbius

The Krita team is proud to announce the release of Krita 2.4. Krita 2.4 is the second release of Krita that is ready for end users, and the first that is ready for professional digital artists. With many powerful brush engines and unique features as multi-hand and mirrored painting, Krita supports creating concept art, storyboards, textures, matte paintings and illustrations. Krita is already used by artists around the world.

(David Revoy, snoupfilou, Boudewijn Rempt, Enrico Guarnieri, Alexey Guranov, Timothee Giet, Ramon Miranda, Kargall Lefou, Fernando Michelotti. See the Krita Gallery forum for more artwork.)

Krita 2.4 adds new brush engines, many improvements to the existing brush engines and new productivity features like mirrored painting, plus important improvements in performance and compatibility with other applications. Ramon Miranda and Timothee Giet have assembled a brand new pack of patterns, gradients, brush tips and brush presets. Artists can exchange all these resources through the Get Hot New Stuff sharing server. Your strokes now can not just be influenced by tablet pressure, but by many more options, ranging from perspective guides to time and distance.

For an in-depth look at Krita 2.4 and more exampes of art created with Krita, you can download the About Krita 2.4 PDF. For reviewers, the Krita press kit contains the pdf plus high-res screenshots featuring artwork and new features.

Krita 2.4 is already packaged for many Linux distributions, and there is an experimental installer available for Windows as well. Check the Download page for more information.

 (Krita 2.4 splash screen by Enrico Guarnieri)

With this release, we are also releasing the contents of the Comics with Krita DVD. You can watch the tutorial videos on Timothee's Youtube channel, or download the entire contents using bittorrent (or grab the torrent directly). You can also support Krita and order the physical copy!

Last week in Krita -- week 3

Week 3 finally saw a drop in the number of bugs: we're at 86 now. And apart from all the work done on the KOffice libraries -- and every improvement there is an improvement in Krita, and despite many hackers being busy with exams or papers, we managed a grand total of 130 commits, making it hard to keep up. And the 2.2 feature plan shows a marked increase in green! And we have also started on a feature plan for 2.3.

Code

Cyrille Berger fixed more bugs in our handling of metadata, especially ISO values. Following refactoring of pigmentcms, Cyrille fixed bugs in loading .kra files. Cyrille also refactored the memory management of colorspace plugins. A feature that was first implemented in 2007 and broken (by Boudewijn) in 2008 was once again reinstated: thanks to Sven's work on the brush presets, Cyrille could fix stroke recording and make it possible to edit recorded strokes, making possible, for instance, to change the brush preset used when painting the recorded stroke. The way Krita stored data for response curves, for instance for pressure sensitivity was inefficient, so Cyrille created a better, more generic way of handling this data.

Lukáš Tvrdý found the time, next to his last exam, to port a number of his brush engines to the new preset-support architecture. Additionally, he finished work on his particle brush engine, but didn't quite get round to committing it.

Boudewijn Rempt, following Dmitry's suggestions improved some caching mechanisms in our paint device code. Boudewijn changed Krita's opengl-based canvas implementation to use GL_RGBA16 whereever possible. People using one of the new wide gamut monitors (that might have up to 12 bit/channel display panels) should now be able to actually see the difference between 8 and 16 bit/channel colorspaces. Also, since OpenGL is still a tricky business, what with proprietary, closed source drivers causing no end of trouble on Linux, Boudewijn made sure that if enabling OpenGL causes a crash, Krita will revert to the Arthur canvas next time krita is started. As promised last week, there was also some inconclusive work on the psd filter and the mixer canvas, but it looks likely that by the end of week 4, mixing will once again be possible. Boudewijn fixed a bug in the OpenRaster saving code. On a related note: Jon Nordby, a MyPaint developer, managed to get OpenRaster support into Gimp's mainline!

Edward Apap started tackling the perspective transformation tool. This has bitrotted to a large extent, so the renewed attention is very welcome. This led to an interesting discusson on #krita about transformation tools: ideally, we'd have one tool, with a good interpolation strategy that can warp and deform images with much more freedom than the current two transformation tools can provide. Edward also fixed the blur filters so they work with filter layers, cleaned up the selections menu, fixed a crash in the brush preview, implement variable radius selection feathering made it possible to configure whether you want your curves antialiased or not and fixed the settings page for color management as well as a cleanup of the other settings pages. Oh, and he added aspect locking for the grid configuration.

Sven Langkamp made it possible to actually select presets. There are a few more small steps needed, but soon I will upon adventurous artists to start working on a preset sets we for our brush engines we can ship with 2.2!

Patrick Spendrin cleaned up after us and made Krita compile on Windows again.

Dmitry Kazakov posted the next version of his composition update patch: this patch fixes bugs when using filter layers. It is still experimental, so he just presented a patch for everyone to test, and a couple of problems were discovered and fixed. I expect his patch to be committed this week, after he has done his last exam.

Lukáš gets started!

That's it for last week: this week will see Lukáš' first week of working on Krita full-time, made by the more than 160 generous sponsors! We had a kick-off meeting on Sunday afternoon, and created a benchmarking structure, as noted above. The first day is over now, when I'm writing this, so I can already say that we now have benchmark tests in place for the tiles backend, the pixel access functions and a roundtrip test: loading, rendering and saving a big multilayer document. Let's see what conclusions we can draw from that -- and expect a big update by the end of the week.