Krita, can it be a substitute for GIMP?

Hello to all ,
I am new here and to the FOSS landscape,
and trying out various FOSS imaging softwares.
Previously using only Windows and PS/LR, now planning to switch to FLOSS landscape.
and I have selected following software and going through them to find suitability for my work flow.
For DAM — Digikam
For RAW processing— Rawtherapee ,Darktable
For Pixel Editing— GIMP, Krita.
From my Initial Bird’s eye view glancing of Krita it looks like more suitable for Painting Artists than to Photographers, So I would like to know , is it worth spending time in learning Krita and can it be equivalent/substitute to GIMP and PS from a photographer point of view.?

Specifically for photography, no, I don’t think you can fully replace gimp with krita. You’d be missing tools like the healing brush, wavelet decompose, resynthisizer, a bunch of filters.

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I agree with @paperdigits. I’ve played around in Krita and although you can do some basic color edits and such, it’s really not a suitable stand in for GIMP.

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Its true that Krita is intended more for painters, but for me comming from Photoshop, the handling/workflow is better than in GImp.
It has a clone/healing tool, and with GMIC it has a resynthisizer filter.
Correct me when I am wrong. The wavelet decompose should be some sort of Split Frequency for retouching?
This should be possible to make in Krita too.

edit

Just found this on Pats blog:

“…In that case, I’d personally recommend using G’MIC
(http://gmic.eu) instead. It’s actively maintained and has a decompose
function that does the same thing as wavelet decompose.”

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Hello everyone,

Personally, for photography stuff, I would suggest to choose Gimp. In particular, to give a try to the 2.9 unstable version.

Krita is developed mostly for painters needs. For example, it is meant to work fine with Wacom Tablets.
Its GUI IMHO is nicer than Gimp 2.8.16 (at least on Windows…).
For sure, Krita has lots of features : 16 - 32 bit editing and plenty of blending modes just to name a few options. It even sports many filters. e.g. G’MIC (1.7.0 version included).

With Gimp you get a much more stable and updated version of G’MIC since David Tschumperlé (G’MIC creator) is working directly on Gimp…
Besides, the 2.9 unstable version has many powerful tools:

  • GEGL filters may be applied on the image, on the fly, to see the results of your fine-tuning;
  • Liquify filter;
  • New GUI themes available with plenty of nice new icons included;
  • etc etc [1] [2].

All in all, IMHO, it all boils down to what kind of workflow you intend to apply to your image.
For “basic editing” both softwares are extremely good… :slight_smile:

[1] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-2-9-2-released
[2] https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/log/

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I think too it comes more to a personal preference for either Krita or Gimp (or both), not who has more or special filter of some kind.
They are much too similar.

https://userbase.kde.org/Krita/Manual/Tools/Transform#Liquify

Though I think Krita has a much much faster development going on, which I is a good thing for me.

edit.
And Krita got some sort of adjustmentlayer, even for transforms. Which is a huge plus for me. :wink:

Hello to all,
Thanks everyone for giving me some feedback on the issue and helping me to take a proper route. Even I felt, after reading some reviews and articles on both the excellent software tools, that right now I need to concentrate first on GIMP to switch from PS and if time permits play with Krita and keep watching its progress in development. As many people said its workflow and UI seems very good compared to GIMP.
Thanks once again for the feed back.Feel like coming back here again and again.
BTW, any good references (sites) to learn GIMP.

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PIXLS.US - Articles :wink:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design_Suite/Tutorials

Maybe Riley Brandts Foss course is something for you.
Save 30% Off The Open Source Photography Course! till April 19th 2016
http://www.rileybrandt.com/lessons/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt6U6IJ2myOToBFeVL-EaXA

Here are some german Gimp tuts, but they are not that great.
https://www.youtube.com/user/GimpTutorialChannel/videos

Just because you mention it and I wanted to comment on the quality of some tutorials for a while I do it here: I think you are right with your assessment, but the question is why these tutorials are not that great. Answering this makes it easier to produce tutorials of reasonable quality. IMHO, the big problem with this channel is that all tutorials (and there are a lot of tutorials for gimp, darktable, rawtherapee and more on the channel, I guess several hundreds) do not explain what exactly is the reason for the steps done. He is e.g. telling that a lowpass filter with a radius of 3 and a blending mode overlay is used but he does not explain why he uses the filter, what he wants to achieve, what the tool actually does and how it works technically. With this approach, you are not becoming able to transfer the knowledge to another pictures. What, e.g., if your picture’s resolution with respect to the subject size is much larger? You will e.g. not even be able to think about adapting the radius in the right manner. Maybe someone should tell this guy, but such an email would appear overly didactic. That’s so sad, because this guy is so productive and it would be so great if his videos would be great as well, the results and techniques are not that bad but just the didactics … (Disclaimer: I do not tell I can do better ;-))

P.S.: For those who know him, I am pretty sure (guessing from his accent) that this guy is the twin brother of Calvin Hollywood :smiley:

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That is true. And not only for Gimp tutorials, Blender also.
I think its because they are autodidacts and have no “professional background” (no disrespect).

An den Hessisch babbelnden Zwillingen könnte was dran sein. :wink:

Ich hätte das eher in die Kurpfalz gesteckt, Mannheim und Umgebung …

But back to the topic:

Maybe, but on the other hand there are autodidacts that master their discipline and people who learned something and still do bad. Can it be lack of decent feedback or not listening to positive (constructive) feedback? Anyway, pixls.us is here to solve the problem :smiley:.

Just because my rant sounded extremely negative, the tutorials of mygimptutorialchannel are by far not the worst I have seen, in a general ranking I would rather say mediocre. But they show clearly that one single, fundamental problem, other, worse tutorials often suffer from a more diverse set of fundamental problems.

[quote=“chris, post:11, topic:1257”]Ich hätte das eher in die Kurpfalz gesteckt, Mannheim und Umgebung …
[/quote]
Ich kenns halt nur von Badesalz. :slight_smile:
Kann sein dass die auch ein Stückchen daneben liegen.

There is also Meet the Gimp.

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Yeah, I do like the Krita “smart patch” tool which is in the same realm.

I like a lot of things about Krita (I am using it only for photo edits). Gimp has less crashing issues, thanks to being much older. I’ve been having some crashes when trying to do color correction, but that may be due to limited memory of my machine.

Another plus relative to Krita is the fact that it runs on ARM devices and (unlike things like Davinci) isn’t limited to Intel/AMD machines.