> Linux Reviews > News and headlines > 2004 News archive > September >
Krita Preview Available, KOffice gets ready for image manipulation! Developers aim at making a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other image programs like Photoshop and Gimp should feel right at home.
LinuxReviews.orgKrita will be the paint program included in KOffice. View Bart Coppens preview videos to get impressed, or download the preview release source code and try it yourself today!
Krita, previously known as Krayon and KimageShop, is still in pre-alpha state, but is ready to be initially previewed by eager users. The first preview release is now available for download.
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Krita was born in 1999 and huge efforts lie beneath the hood of this first preview, released after five years of heavy development.
Krita developer Bart Coppens has made two very interesting video showing Krita in action:
| krita.mpeg (his first video, the second is better) |
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| Alt 1: krita.mpeg (5,5 MB) |
| Alt 2: krita.mpeg (5,5 MB) |
| Alt 3: krita.mpeg (5,5 MB) |
| krita2.mpeg (second video, very good!) |
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| Alt 1: krita2.mpeg (4,9 MB) |
| Alt 2: krita2.mpeg (4,9 MB) |
| Alt 3: krita2.mpeg (4,9 MB) |
The video shows how Krita can be used in various ways. Take a look at some of it's new features, like the great font support shown in krita2.mpeg:
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Another very interesting features demonstrated is the ability to paint using filters, shown about 1 minute into krita2:
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Bart Coppens used xvidcap to create the videos.
Krita already has these features, and more will come:
- painting with Gimp brushes or image filters
- gradients & patterns
- excellent tablet support
- world-class image scaling
- Layers: Adding, removing, reordering and merging of layers.
- Supports loading of Gimp brushes, pipe brushes, gradients and patterns.
Developers stress this is a test-release, not meant for production use. Experienced users are welcome to try it out and write detailed bug reports if/when found.
Krita depends on KOffice CVS. You should use the CVS version of KOffice together with Krita, installing Krita will cause problems with installations of old versions of KOffice.
Packages for SuSE and a few other selected Linux distributions will be available soon.
Krita developers hope to make it a part of KOffice 1.4, scheduled to be released spring 2005.
Current Krita developer team:
- Boudewijn Rempt (maintainer, stuff that doesn't work)
- Sven Langkamp (GUI, especially the dockers & the color wheel)
- Cyrille Berger (Filters, tools, core stuff)
- Adrian Page (Painting, tablet support, gradients, core stuff, fixes all over the place)
- Clarence Dang (zoom, shape tools)
- Dirk Schoenberger (code cleanups, tool shortcuts)
- Bart Coppens (Fills, previews, text tool)
- Michael Thaler (Scaling, rotating)
- Casper Boemann (core stuff)
- Daniel Molkentin (Packaging this release)
Other people who have played an important role in giving us Krita:
- John Califf
- Patrick Julien
- Michael Koch
- Matthias Elter
- Andrew Richards
- Carsten Pfeiffer
- Toshitaka Fujioka
Fun Facts about Krita
"Kritameanschalkorcrayonin Swedish.ritameansto draw.
Learn more:
- First Krita Preview Release (dot.kde.org)
- Krita development (koffice.org)
- More screenshots (koffice.org)
- Slashdot debate
Download:
A fully functional stable Krita is still years ahead. Good fully-functional image manipulation programs available for Linux today:
> Linux Reviews > News and headlines > 2004 News archive > September >
Krita Preview Available, KOffice gets ready for image manipulation! Developers aim at making a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other image programs like Photoshop and Gimp should feel right at home.