Moving from Photoshop to Krita
Just some random boring news. I wanted to put it in the description of my next picture but I got too much text so I extended it even more and now it's a separate post.
Well, the news is I finally moved from Photoshop to other drawing app. To Krita, to be more precise. It's not as smooth as Photoshop is, but is still the way better than PaintStorm Studio.
One year ago I tried to move to PSS and even made some pictures in it. The first picture was nice to work at (Photoshop didn't have built-in brush stabilizer that time so smooth lines were hard to draw), but the last one was a true hell because it turned out that PSS is not really good at big resolutions (just checked, it still is at current 2.30 version). For example, it takes up to 3 seconds to toggle layer visibility on â5kĂ6k resolution with many layers. The fun thing is that both Photoshop and SAI (1 and 2) do that instantly on the same .psd file. Not sure if that's PSS or just I'm that lucky. PaintStorm Studio is pretty configurable and nice overall, but sadly, those downsides forced me to leave it.
This time I'm trying to use Krita and I already love it! It has some downsides like a different approach to clipping masks (two+ layers have to be grouped) and it still misses some Photoshop's features that I'm used to (i.e. I can't undock opened documents to make floating reference images, it's hard to get used to their âReference Images Toolâ) but that's not a big deal, Krita's upsides still win.
And, first of all, the biggest upside is brushes. I totally love them, thank David for making his great brushkit official! They all also have really nice, memorable, and exhaustive icons, I don't even want to put my favorite brushes into a separate category yet :D
Besides the brushes, I really loved the âPreserve Alphaâ feature, it feels like some kind of instant clipping mask. Sadly that's a âdestructive wayâ to work on pictures (that I'm not used to) but I still love that feature so much ^o^
The âEraser Modeâ is a pretty nice thing too, it's when the selected brush âdrawsâ with transparent pixels. Frankly, I thought it can't be convenient, but it turned out it can when coloring and shading. It's still not a good idea to use the eraser mode when sketching though ^^;
And the last really great feature is âShade Selectorâ which is a part of âAdvanced Color Selectorâ docker. That thing is not really convent in configuring, but really satisfying in using! In short, it generates smooth gradient or specified count of colors that's based on the selected one. For example, if I pick, say, an orange color, it can generate a pickable gradient from dark red to light yellow (or from dark yellow to bright red, lol. So I have several selectors enabled). It can do not only that, but for me the shade selector is an amazing replacement for manually created shading color palette. At least for now.
My last picture is done in Krita, and those fluff and colors look different from what I'm used to draw (at least it feels so for me). I wasn't sure if I stay there, but I'm sure now. I hope nothing terrible will happen that would force me to leave that app. I don't say that Photoshop is awful, it's just me any my desire to try all the new things.
P.S. Wet brushes are awesome.