…with a lot of progress to report. Most importantly, Graphite is no longer a toy/tech demo, it’s actually pretty useful for ordinary vector art! Certainly with some limitations in places we haven’t built tooling yet, but also with some unique specialties from the node-based procedural vector workflow. So if you didn’t try it out before, maybe give it another go now that it has matured so much in 2024.
That said, please take a few minutes to read a recap of where we went as a project in 2024, and where the development is headed in 2025. News on the desktop app (slightly delayed, but should be ready within a couple of months) is included together with plans for procedural improvements, raster editing, and more throughout the coming year.
Please share your feedback and creations in the editor!
I’ll end with a few screenshots of today’s editor:
It doesn’t look ready yet, but I do have a question, do you look into Krita and Pixellator (what was the name again(?)) into inspiration for non-destructive editing? Krita could be argued to have one of the most advanced non-destructive pipeline despite it’s lacking in filters. Clone layers, and the other fancy things there.
Pixelmator, I think, is the app you’re referring to. I’ve never used it so I couldn’t comment, but I don’t believe it has a node graph which means its approach to nondestructive editing will inherently be limited. Krita also is not nondestructive and doesn’t use a node graph. I am not aware of any possible way to implement the full power of a nondestrucive workflow without nodes, so our design has been fully focused on investigating the best way to represent those concepts within the framing of traditional layer-based, tool-based, WYSIWYG editing workflows. I believe the design is quite good, but there is still some work to do before it’s fully implemented as envisioned. Until then, users may need to understand some of the complexities like how nodes work and how data flows through the graph. That is what’s necessary to build an app like Graphite: a fully programmatic generative art toolbox that happens to have a user interface which looks and feels like a traditional 2D creative graphics suite. When we get to supporting digital painting, it will offer actually nondestructive editing— that means you’ll be able to zoom infintiely into your artwork without it pixelating, edit the paths and styles of all strokes after you’ve drawn them, and apply effects like blur to your layers while still being able to modify the contents. Hopefully that answers your question with a few more insights into the product design.
There’s file layers, transform masks, filter layers, clone layers, transparency masks (you can add multiple of them once), etc. A layer can be a file layer, and you can assign transform masks to it, and it’ll update if you change it. Like Smart Objects. Clone layers allows you to create copies of images and change them without destroying the original copy, very useful for game content creation. Filter masks also allows you to preserve content as well as other things there. Internally, the C++ code of Krita use a concept of node, but it’s not the same thing.
Oh yeah, sorry, I should have worded that differently by saying it’s not “fully nondestructive”. I’m familiar with the Photoshop equivalents of what you described (I’m glad Krita has those too!) and I normally call Photoshop a “destructive editor with certain nondestructive features” like adjustment layers and smart objects. But they end up hitting into limitations pretty quickly. My design for Graphite arose from frustrations with the limitations of Photoshop’s nondestructive features not going nearly far enough. The real power comes from reusing data in multiple locations by branching and recombining data flows.
We’re one quarter behind on these articles, but stay tuned for the next quarterly report that will announce animation support (which you can use, right now, in the editor! Just add an “Animation Time” or “Real Time” node and wire it up in the node graph, then hit the play button).
Scroll through the GIFs of each new feature in the release notes:
