[SunShiranui]

For those who are more interested in digital painting rather than image editing, I found Krita impressive in its capabilities and progress: https://krita.org

I'm just an hobbyist, but I like having FOSS alternatives to Photoshop.

[rebuilder]

I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc.

That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking of an open-source project in this space to get involved in, here's a very successful one that could use a hand!

[boudewijnrempt]

Understaffed is an understatement. We have been able to fund one full-time developer, Dmitry, for the fourth year now. I am the maintainer, and I'm currently working full-time on Krita because I got burned out on my paid job, but that's not really funded. There are a few other people who help answering questions and triaging bug reports and things -- and that is it.

We try to keep up on tumblr, reddit, twitter, facebook, the forums, email, irc, phone calls even! We love our users, we love what our users are doing (see https://krita.org/en/item/made-with-krita-2016-the-krita-art...), but it sometimes gets very hard to deal with some people :-( I want to help them, but I cannot fix Ugee's drivers, and I want to help, but I also need to find time to code...

There are just too few people helping out; too few people who remember that Krita is an open source project, that it's really easy to start hacking on it, and that it's really easy to start helping out with helping others and doing bug triaging.

We might have done too good a job already: there are a lot of people who think that there's a big company with scores of employees and a professional help desk behind Krita. While it's me, Dmitry and a few others carrying the load.

[rebuilder]

Thanks for all the hard work! I use Krita because it's simply the best tool I've found for painting - that's a big accomplishment.

Now that you mention it, I think your successful kickstarters left me with the impression you had funding and therefore workforce to a much greater degree than is actually the case. Is another fundraiser coming up? I didn't participate before, as I only found out about them after the fact...

[boudewijnrempt]

A kickstarter brings in about 30k to 40k euros, before kickstarter takes its part. That wouldn't be enough to hire a receptionist for Adobe, but it's almost enough to pay for a single Krita developer, Dmitry. We've given him a raise this year, since it's the fourth year we've got him full-time!

Then sales of dvd's and so on, donations, and sometimes special, bigger donations, also bring in money, and I'm currently living from that income, together with my wife, since it turns that trying to combine a paying freelance gig for four days a week and doing krita for five, six days a week isn't sustainable.

So I'm looking to make supporting me working full-time on Krita sustainable as well; fortunately our three daughters have left the house, so it's just me and my wife who need to live on the income.

That makes for two people working full-time on Krita (one of them the project lead, which eats into coding time): then there are two volunteers who help with kickstarter and communication, a volunteer webmaster/UX designer, a volunteer bug triager, three or so summer of code students doing a 3-month project, and now and then a flurry of volunteers who want to hack on the codebase.

But developer-wise, it's about one and a half person shouldering most of the burden at the moment, as a quick look at the github mirror stats shows: https://github.com/KDE/krita/graphs/contributors

For this year's fund raiser (not sure if it'll be a kickstarter again), the theme is going to be "Stability, stability, stability!" -- we've added so much stuff in the past years, while still fixing about 1200 bugs a year, that it's time to take a breath and clear out the bugzilla backlog, and do some serious polishing.

But first, svg/vector tools, text tool and python scripting need to be done!

[edgarvaldes]

Krita is an amazing piece of software, and always evolving. Kudos to the whole team.

[prokoudine]

> That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users.

Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)

[rebuilder]

No, I haven't seen those. I meant their own forums. It sounds like they've been getting a lot of crap somewhere, and their patience seems to have been worn pretty thin.

[Keyframe]

Krita is awesome. Not only for painting, but for 2D animation as well. It does have issues, but it's definitely above and beyond usable.