With my work, portrait & products photographer, i need a rock solid layered retouch software, not a photoshop which crash too often… I have dead-ends to respect. Capture1 is an exception in the win10 world. Now with the new great modules, filmic, contrast equalizer, color balance, raw b&w point, etc & your video courses, Dt is better. I often use 2, 3, 4 layers filled with 60mpx/16bits images… The waveletdecompose filter in Gimp decompose the image in numbers of layers you can choose. And you work on each layer with all the tools proposed in Gimp. Also you can check quickly the result. Smoothed brush in Gimp is not a problem, you can set a lot of parameters & build your own brush , also the dynamic effect when you use a tablet. It’s a little bit tricky but with experience, it’s a pleasure. But i wait & look at Krita and your innovations, i’m curious +++.
Krita already has the bare essential for retouching amd photo restoration(the latter is painting). Wavelet decompose already exist inside Krita. Path tools while they are vector can be mimicked by vector layers, and you can save selections as a mask in Krita. Krita has some big advantages over GIMP like fully incorporated nde editing in forms of clone layers, adjustment layer and masks, file layers. Some photo editors do see these and how Krita can be a essential tool. Photoflow do exist, and has those benefits.
My bad! I found the wavelet decompose… Not at the place as i espected & not as described in the manual! Nde editing with clone layers, etc exist in Gimp 2.10 too. I don’t find similar select tools like foreground select & intelligent scissors or luminosity mask setup, but i know Krita not as i know Gimp 2.10. When i speak about nde editing, the future of Gimp is different. The difference between the 2 free software became thin, it’s more a matter of taste & future development. Roadmap - GIMP Developer Wiki… Roadmap | Krita. Gimp stay quicker than Krita on heavy pictures & retouch, thanks to OpenCl. Two little trick make the difference for me, the full screen mode (the normalised F11 key & different aspect between the 2 modes) & when you use the mouse + a tablet, i have two different tools assigned to the mouse versus the pen. Also the brush parameters, dynamics, etc has more granularity.
Clone layers are essentially linked layers that always is a copy of another layer be it group layer, paint layer, file layer, another clone layer. It isn’t just a linked layer that has been duplicated. The benefits are real with adjustment masks/layers and folder. Luminosity mask in Krita is a little bit more complicated, but you can have nondestructive version of that pat david tutorial, I could pm you a tutorial on that. Magnetic selection tool do exist in Krita 4.3, and it is better than Photoshop. Foreground extraction is actually planned on kde phabricator on krita.
I had less work these last weekend & i was alone, so i tried to use Krita instead of Gimp (i don’t use Photoshop anymore & will never do i) & the photography manipulation template as a part of my workflow, in a professional & effortless way. First, cieLAB is not a good working color space choice. A template… It’s tricky & time consuming, in a professional workflow. I repeat it, Krita is an excellent software… To sketch, draw, paint & animate, not to retouch, it will never not be. The Krita’s history say it, you say it & the roadmap tell nothing else. The brush flow’s granularity is similar for the softwares, with a different approach. The Gimp’s evolution is now great, for retouching photography, internal’s workflow in linear color mode, Opencl, useful filters, MyPaint brushes, regular updates & a dream roadmap. You need to “repaint” your photography, the 2 are suitable. But if you have to spend more time to retouch your image than to light & shot it, in studio, you have a problem with the lighting. You need to rethink & master the light. Too much retouch/lighting repaint, kill the photographic aspect of the image. In 3D creation aiming to manufactured’s product representation, after photographic rendering, the lighting & retouch are entrusted to experienced photographers or photographic’s retouch specialised teams, to give a photographic touch, and it’s not an easy work.
Being useful for sketching, drawing, and painting is actually a feature of generic editors like Photoshop or Affinity Photo. A lot of people use these software for painting with great success, and in some cases, even better than painting-dedicated softwares. There’s no evidence for the second part given it subjectivity and how the future isn’t always predictable. Some people like the OP of this thread used Krita for retouching with success. I also have retouched photos with Krita with success as well.
Of all of these, the only real argument is useful filters. Updates happens in both software, there are people that do want better selection tools, and some filters can be covered via g’mic for Krita, some of us like myself do plan to work on these (I’m working on the process of making mean filter to have guided selection tools for Krita). Opencl may or may not work, in my case, the last time I tried GIMP, it was far too slow, and I don’t desire to report the bug solely because I lost faith in GIMP for the absence of NDE and 8-bit restriction for years. Krita also support linear mode, so that’s not a real argument, and Krita has better color space support than GIMP now.
In other words, the “pure” photography part is what impact the end result mostly? That’s common knowledge for many people including myself, I just don’t know why to bring this up.
We are out of the goal of this discussion… I think, in respect of Aurlien’s aim, to start a discussion, in a new post
You should use whatever tool works for you. We all should.
It really comes down to who is going to write the darktable code. They have the decision making power.
The awesome thing about darktable being free software is that you can make the same module for gimp or what ever piece of software you want.
The words of the wise man
Does this solve you problem? Any suggestions?
Merged 
The next Krita version will have a command line option to to open a file as a file-layer. This is at least a small step in the right direction.
Nice ! I’m looking forward to wire darktable’s filmic to an OCIO transform, so Krita and darktable can share the display transform (without applying it on the actual pixel).
I believe, after this step, the image operations will be ready to start considering the workflow inlining.
Live edit with full darktable + Krita workflow :
Always nice to see someone doing their thing and in this case I learned a few things as well.
Thanks for recording and uploading!
EDIT: Just remembered: You didn’t explain why you moved the local contrast module before filmic.
I’m assuming it has to do with disabling filmic before the export to krita, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Can you elaborate on that?
yes, exactly, it’s just because we disable filmic before going into Krita, so letting anything after filmic would change the look in an unpredictable way.
Laser lashes. 
I’ve never used Krita before, so I’m looking forward to playing with it, in combination with Darktable.
I’m assuming that the Krita integration with Darktable hasn’t been released yet?
I’m assuming that the Krita integration with Darktable hasn’t been released yet?
It hasn’t been implemented jet.
It’s not even fully designed. I need to understand Krita’s pipeline better.