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by hdfbdtbcdg 2523 days ago
Don't they do different things? GIMP is for general image editing. Krita focuses on painting?
3 comments

Correct - GIMP is (largely) focused on photo editing, while Krita is (largely) focused on digital painting. Although GIMP/Photoshop definitely support a digital painting workflow with custom brushes and the like - it's just not the primary focus.
I would not say so. Gimp is (arguably) a very long evolution of an mspaint that copyied many tools and workflow from a Photoshop, Krita is an attempt to re-implement Photoshop from scratch.

I wouldn't say Krita is not suitable for general editing, because Photoshop is also dual purpose tool - it is an industry standard both for digital artists and general photo manipulation.

"Arguably" in the sense that you just decided to claim something that has no relation to reality? Like Ghostbusters 2 was "arguably" the highest grossing movie ever made in Albania by a crew of chipmunks?

Gimp starts off as an emergency last minute replacement project for two undergrads at Berkeley that does basically the same thing as Photoshop. It wasn't ever anything like Microsoft's Paint.

I am not sure why of all my entire comment you decided to lash at a single word.

My argument still stays, gimp never was and still nowhere is near the Photoshop level. Krita excels both as painting and photo tool.

You're right, the quality of Gimp is nowhere near Photoshop. Photoshop has tons of rounding errors and the results never look as good as Gimp.
Here's a concrete example, something completely absent from your "argument":

Old Photoshop from that era defaults to a single RGB layer. To turn it into an RGBA layer (e.g. for drawing objects with a transparent background) you need to rename the layer. Not very intuitive but Photoshop users learned to do it. In early Gimp 0.x releases how do you turn the initial single RGB layer into an RGBA layer? You rename it. This is not a coincidence.

In contrast in mspaint there are no layers, there is no RGBA mode.

Notice that I did never attacked you directly, but you keep making subtle personal attacks with snarky quotes and nitpicking. (Is it some kind of religious anger? Are we in a holy-war territory?).

Gimp is a classic old open source project in it's bad and good. It has a preset for toilet paper rolls, but it took it like a decade to support a single window mode, it has an option to rename a layer to switch to rgba mode but there is still no support for generic keyboard layouts from other software other than importing configs and resolving to third party tools (something that krita and most modern IDE routinely do)

Gimp is an emacs of photo editing that stuck in old conventions and never wants to really move forward, I could not use it a decade ago and still can't use nowadays.

I always say that gimp is so shit it comes with toilet paper. -GIMP user since 2008
They have different focus, but both are raster editors. They do compete with each other.