Why Krita is the new Photoshop

This past year I’ve been learning a lot of new (to me) open source programs. Sure, I had been playing with most of them, on and off, for longer than that. But last Spring when my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription came to an end, I did not renew it. This meant that when projects needed to be worked on, I had to use something else. Something non-Adobe (many of which can be found on the list of the best photo editing software or digital art software).

My choices on Linux for image creation and editing were limited to mostly GIMP (see my GIMP 3.0 review here) and Krita. With a bit of Photopea thrown in now and again. And over the last few months I have been sharing what I’ve found in a series of articles. Looking back I’ve since learned that I’ve made some mistakes, and in that short time I’ve also seen various developers fix some issues. And break some others.

And along the way, I’ve also come to realise that I’ve started to forget some of the minutia of Photoshop details that I have known for decades. Plus, today’s PS is evolving and not quite the same as it was just a year ago.

It’s been a very active and competitive market. With all players, PS, Krita and GIMP releasing upgrades in the last half year. The irony is that while PS and GIMP have released major new versions, it is Krita who only released a minor upgrade that is getting most of my attention (see why in my Photoshop vs Krita piece).

Like many, despite Krita having been around for a long time, I wasn’t aware of it until the last few years. But I am now. And I’m seriously impressed. I’ve even started to dive into the Krita forums and community. A community that is very active, and also has active developer involvement. Which is not only great, but has always been a marker of a well run project.

And what I see from these Krita developers is always a “Can Do” attitude. And a “Yes, we need to fix that, and we will” type of response.

The more I learn, the more I love

Clearly, Krita’s decision to make their interface and keyboard shortcuts mostly reflect the way we Photoshop expats work was the right decision (see the best Photoshop shortcuts here). There are 37 million Creative Cloud subscribers, which means there are 37 million PS users. Why not make a transition from PS to Krita easy, right? And they have, right out of the box.

Dive into the preferences of the latest version, 5.2.6, and we can take that even further with the menu SETTINGS > Configure Krita… select Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom of this dialog is “Shortcut Schemes” where we can select which application we want Krita to adopt the keyboard shortcuts from. Photoshop being one. But to be candid, even Krita’s default KB commands are fairly PS like.

I’ve also learned that somewhere along the line Krita did add GPU acceleration, which can be found under SETTINGS > Display > Canvas Acceleration. Clearly it needs more work, but finding it there give me great hope.

I also found a way, maybe not the best but it’s working, to correct the tiny icons on my 4k screen. Again, SETTINGS > General > Window… And then toggle the “Enable HiDPI Support”. Doing this made things too large, but that was mostly easy to fix with local adjustments.

I’m still finding my way around the LAYERS panel. In Krita we have to choose a layer type more than we do in PS, whose layers are more chameleon-like. But Krita’s way leads to more control. For example Krita’s version of Smart Objects is created by right-clicking on any image layer and select CONVERT > to File Layer… This will bring up a dialog where you choose a path to save the layer art as a file. PS does the same thing, but it does it automatically and saves that layer in an invisible temp folder.

A short list of problems

When talking about an application of this size, it's rather surprising that there are actually just a small handful of issues I’ve found. While not comprehensive, the list includes:

• HSV/HSL needs to be able to choose to work on primary colors. This would also require adding a chroma selection slider.
• The Levels interface doesn’t update the preview properly when you are adjusting individual channels. I have to hop back and forth between single and multi-channel mode in that dialog.
• Krita’s version of the Healing Tool is called the “Smart Patch Tool”. It is useless on smaller sections, providing nothing more than a blur.
• This leads us to AI, but we will discuss that further down.
• I’m not sure why Blur, Sharpen, Clone and other tools need to be in the brushes section. Forcing that I do a search/filter of the brushes each time I need to use one of them. But, this is mostly minor.
• Text handling has much room for improvement, and the devs know this.
• PSD compatibility. With it, we can start doing commercial work with Krita, and freely work in advertising and publishing circles. Without, we face significant additional hurdles.
• A new selection tool is most needed. PS’s Auto select is ideal. But something like GIMP’s Foreground selection would be fine. (See G’MIC below.)

Again, this is a very short list. A list so short that it is a true compliment to what the Krita devs have achieved already!

Let me add a correction from a previous article. Yes, GIMP has a better selection of filters, this is true. But I was wrong when I said that the additional suite of filters, almost 600 filters in all, called G’MIC, was only for use in GIMP. It was available for Krita, and as of the latest upgrade Krita 5.2.6 includes that collection in its default installation.

G’MIC also happens to include a filter called “Extract Foreground” (found under G’MIC’s “Contours” tab), which is essentially the same system that GIMP calls its Foreground Selection tool. So while not native, we could remove that list item from the above list.

Where Krita devs really messed up (tongue-in-cheek)

There is a cultural moray within the Krita community that GIMP should be for “image manipulation” (which is a term I find hysterically abstract and almost meaningless), and that Krita should just be for art creation and painting. Well, when I’m doing “image manipulation”, most of my time is spent using...drum roll please: Brushes! When I do retouching I am often...Painting!

The elitist desire to somehow separate themselves, as ARTISTES, from the lowly image manipulators is quite funny. But the Krita devs sort of went along with this in their decision, some years back, to focus development on artist tools rather than production tools.

And here is where the devs just TOTALLY MESSED UP: Krita already has almost all of the image manipulation tools it could need. In fact, I can argue that it even has more than GIMP, and gives PS a run for its money. Yes, the dev’s messed up in that they are over-achievers. And they went beyond their own mandate of “only tools for artists”. A mandate that I don’t understand, as I think tools for all 2D creatives should instead be the goal.

So when it comes to image manipulation tools, let’s run down the most obvious and see how Krita actually scores, using a wholly arbitrary 1-10 scale:

Again, these are arbitrary numbers, but based on my experience. Add an extra 14 points to GIMP if/when Resynthesizer becomes 3.0 compatible. Clearly these are not the only tools needed for image manipulation work, but it’s a good overview of some important ones.

It is no surprise that Adobe’s Photoshop comes in first. But what should surprise all of us, myself included, was the realization that Krita is miles ahead of GIMP in all but a couple of categories (see this GIMP vs Krita comparison). This belies some of my own comments in previous articles where I said you need both GIMP and Krita to compete with PS. Upon re-evaluation that seems not to be true. It seems Krita does indeed do a very good job of holding its own.

The question of AI

As a true production tool, there is no way to compete with PS without AI tools. But many of the Krita community do not want AI in Krita. It’s understandable, as AI is “stealing” artists jobs. But it is taking illustrative jobs from me as well, just as stock photography and Photoshop did before. That’s progress, and keeping it out of Krita won’t stop it.

But I get that users don’t want precious dev time spent on it. Fair enough. There are third-party AI tools for Krita that we have looked at briefly and will take a deeper dive with very soon. For its part, the ones available for GIMP are still much further from general adoption.

Stealing the crown

I think it’s high-time that the Krita leads fess up and admit that they have created a very powerful creative tool that can easily become the mainstay for a very wide range of creatives. Not just painters.

As both individuals and even entire teams move away from subscription products and look for something else, I humbly suggest that Krita may be what they are looking for. And I can imagine a day not too long from now that both schools and shops start moving over. And why not, it works.

See our list of best graphic design software here.