Krita Foundation completed a fundraising campaign successfully raising money for making their Krita digital painting app faster than the well-known Photoshop software from Adobe.
[...] On May 4, we reported that the Krita developers decided to do another Kickstarter campaign, after last year's successful one, this time to raise €20,000 ($22,000) for making the next version of the application faster.
[...] Krita's fundraising campaign was successfully completed, raising a little over €30,000 ($34,000), which means that the developers will concentrate all of their efforts on making the open-source digital painting app much faster than Photoshop.
[...] The current version of Krita is 2.9.5 [...] Most probably, the new, improved code will be implemented in Krita 3.0, which should be out later this year.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fishybell on Monday June 15 2015, @05:57AM
I'm confused. How did raising a bit of money to spend development time optimizing for speed come to equal soon-to-be-faster-than-Photoshop? The money they raised is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount Adobe has spent and continues to spend on Photoshop development. I'm all for making it faster, but this summary is putting the cart before the horse I think. Not having used Krita (just Photoshop and Gimp) I certainly hope it wasn't a "well, at least it won't be slow anymore" fundraiser.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 15 2015, @06:23AM
Over a certain limit, more money put into the software development is a poor indicator of the success of that software success.
You know? Same undelying causes as for "nine women giving birth to a child in one month" or adding more programmers to a project will only delay it.
Fingers crossed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday June 15 2015, @12:03PM
Photoshop can take a while to load and use up a lot of memory due to plug-ins, but once it's going it's pretty fast. In fact modern versions use GPU acceleration for many operations. I'd be amazed if these guys can equal that. Perhaps for the very limited scope they are aiming for (cartoon drawing) they can produce an app that does a lot less than Photoshop and consequently loads faster and uses less memory, but I doubt it will be quicker in any other meaningful way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @01:32PM
With the crap software that multibillion dollar companies are able to produce, overcoming them shouldn't be such a huge hurdle. Awful security and awful UIs. Just throwing obscene amounts of money at the problem doesn't always make things better.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Monday June 15 2015, @02:52PM
Photoshop can take a while to load and use up a lot of memory due to plug-ins, but once it's going it's pretty fast. In fact modern versions use GPU acceleration for many operations.
Krita uses GPU acceleration as well; I believe it may be the only FOSS graphics application to actually have an opengl accelerated canvas right now. It massively improves rotation and panning, and certain tools like free transform use it as well. It's such a huge difference that I can instantly tell if I used an older, non-accelerated tool (move layer instead of moving via free transform, for example). They may be trying to add similar acceleration to more filters and tools now. I hope so, at least.
I do know there was talk about much-needed improvements with huge brushes on huge canvases. Good thing, too, because some (not all) brushes crawl at large sizes, especially on 600+ dpi files.
Even if they can't beat PS, I find that Krita is already faster than other FOSS tools like gimp, maybe even some proprietary apps, so any improvement at this point is an overall win.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday June 16 2015, @02:40AM
There are two problems here.
Photoshop is not a Digital Painting programme, it is an image manipulation programme. You can use it for painting, but that's far from the only thing you can do with it.
Also speed is just not an issue with Photoshop, I use it everyday on a fairly old, not terribly high powered PC and it runs fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @05:57AM
How do these Kickstarter projects work again? Does the money itself do the work?
I've seen people ask for help with ambitious projects, and invariably some jerks come along and say, "Why not have a Kickstarter! Crowdfunding solves everything!" Trouble is, money doesn't actually do anything. Sometimes projects don't need money but need volunteers. If absolutely no one will do any actual real work, nothing actually happens.
(Score: 3, Touché) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday June 15 2015, @12:28PM
Well, if you have money, you don't need volunteers - you can have something called "staff" instead. Volunteers are great, but they often can't give as much time as they'd like, because they have other commitments (like a job) pulling them away from the project. If the project *is* their job, then suddenly they can put a lot more into it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Monday June 15 2015, @03:04PM
With Krita, these fundraisers are used to pay for dedicated development while simultaneously allowing the community to help choose the developers' priorities by letting backers vote for the features they want most. They already have a couple developers to do the work (though more would be welcome I'm sure), but paying allows them to dedicate more time on Krita.
It's not "pay us" hot air, either. Not sure about this one, but last time, they implemented a few of the easier requests during the fundraising, so everyone got those improvements without taking away from the feature vote. They could have sat on those changes and lessened their workload but didn't.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 16 2015, @05:46AM
What particular problem are you trying to solve that necessitates a volunteer over a paid hire (which is what you can get with money)?
Please don't say quality...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @06:00AM
Devs will be so drunk off their asses pissing away the funds for, wait, what were we supposed to be working on?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @06:39AM
Give money! We make Fast! You give Money!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @04:04PM
You need one more "na na".
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by No Respect on Monday June 15 2015, @07:11AM
Never heard of this project and it sounds like a scam. From TFA, "... digital paining software". And you want to be my latex salesman. Fucking idiots will believe anything.
(Score: 5, Informative) by epl on Monday June 15 2015, @08:45AM
Ok, they made a typo and they SHOULD have found it before posting, but that doesn't automatically make this a scam. Krita has been around, in one for or another, for quite a long time. First as part of KDE's KOffice and later it was split off as its own entity entirely, with its own Foundation to manage it. First actual release I can trace back was in June of 2005, so they're not exactly fly-by-night. They're not hiding this history by the way, they have it on their homepage [krita.org], and if you don't trust them, hit up the mail archives; they're all public as far as I'm aware.
Krita started as "QT needs a better GIMP", but it has become much more than that over time. I do hope this injection of funds helps them smooth and improve, but that I refuse to speculate about. Just wanted to clear up any image some might have that this is a new piece of software, something that has just started or just a bunch of guys doing a quick money grab (they might, but their history seems to suggest a low chance of this).
(Score: 1) by axsdenied on Monday June 15 2015, @11:32AM
Just because you never heard of Krita it does not mean it a scam. Either refrain from commenting or first spend 10 seconds on Google to find out about it.
The project has been around for probably 10 years and it is part of KDE. Arguably some people say it is better than Gimp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @08:25PM
Are you one of those hipsters whose first impulse is to talk down their nose at everything despite knowing jack shit?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rich on Monday June 15 2015, @11:01AM
This thing should be more or less a continuation of what they've been doing so far. There is a small community around head honcho Boudewijn Rempt, who are mostly too tied up to put massive manpower into grunt work. So, as they get contributions, they pay a few guys (e.g. Lukas Tvrdy, Dmitry Kazakov, ...) to do work batches. Boud has been a good steward of the whole endeavor so far. I've had the pleasure of communicating with him when I ran into constantly crashing calligraphy logic. With his friendly style, he managed to get two ready-to-apply patches (one for the calligraphy crash, one very minor bezier speedup) out of me ;)
This kickstarter will likely stay on the proven route, just at a slightly bigger scale, and I'd trust Boud to get it right. Keep in mind that they had more heavyweight "clients" who wanted/paid for/got a special edition. https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/krita-gemini-twice-as-nice-on-a-2-in-1 [intel.com] Krita already is past a point, that, if you're unable to get good artwork out of it, it's your fault, and not Krita's. I see Krita well on course to gain "critical mass", and this recent kickstarter accelerated that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @06:01PM
Faster is good for their business model. The main complaint I've heard about Krita is it's speed and RAM eating. And arting with lag is pain enough to not use the program.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @11:18AM
But I do congratulate them on their major victory on succeeding so will with fundraising!