Fading Memories

One of the things that we were really looking forward in Qt 4.2 for Krita was Arthur. I dare say the Gimp developers are in the same situation, only they long for Cairo. Aliased temporarily lines and pseudo transparency are so nineties.

In any case, with Arthur the benefits come almost automatically. Like in this screenshot:

Embarrassingly, I first saved this screenshot as a JPG image and subsequently thought that Krita created artifacts around the anti-aliased line. Er, well, blush...

Other things are easy, too, like transparency checks that stay in place. Since the checkerboard under the image is supposed to represent something fixed like a desk, it stands to reason that the checks should stay put if you scroll the image. The performance of Qt4's Arthur in this area isn't quite as good as Krita 1.6's OpenGL implementation, but it comes close and is officially Good Enough for Me.

This week, by the way, saw a lot of work on Krita: I've started implementing the layers, masks and selections stuff, as well as a begin of the infrastructure that will make it possible to enable and disable channels of a layer for things like filtering, compositing and painting:

The day when Krita's L*a*b mode is finally going to be good enough for the tutorials in the Margulis book is coming close!

Cyrille has reinstated the YcBcr colorspaces (8 and 16 bits, naturally), Sven Langkamp has been working hard on porting our home-grown Undo/Redo system. It's not finished, but Casper Boemann is working on some stuff, too, notably the zoom system, but also an extended curve widget and a nice cross between a combobox and slider.

For once we -- that's the Krita team -- hoped to be first with a feature. After considerable discussion, we made a design for Krita 2.0 that allows users to attach any number of filters associated with a mask to a layer to have life filtering of the layer contents. I'm implementing that stuff right now (well, I'm waiting for Krita to compile, but that's immaterial). Read all about it on the wiki -- and I bet Adobe reads our wiki, too because they've got that feature, too!. Still, it has one advantage: our implementation will be familiar to Photoshop users, and that alone will surely save us from a ton of bug reports.

Of course, they didn't steal it. Their implementation will be better than ours, sure. And they will have started ages ago. But still. It rankles! It was something we thought up ourselves. Innovative-like.

OpenICC is a Freedesktop project that brings together just about everyone who is interested in color for free software applications. That's: ArgyllCMS, CinePaint, Cups, GraphicsMagick, Gimp, Gutenprint, ImageMagick, Inkscape, Krita, karbon, LittleCMS, LPROF, Scribus and Oyranos. And, of course, what's happening here has influence on applications like Digikam, UFRaw and so on.

And this year OpenICC has been selected as one of the projects that can participate in the Google Summer Of Code!

We've already got a couple of pretty cool ideas on-line, but students are free, of course, to come up with their own ideas. So... If you're a student, if you are as fascinated by color as Otto von Chriek and would like to do something that will help all free software that handles graphics -- enter your applications!

(I had intended to goof off this year... Especially since there's all kinds of heavy-duty work to be done in and around the house. But I find I can't stay out of the fun.)

I lost most of this weeks mail in a crash that obliterated my inbox. So... If you have sent me mail this week that I haven't answered yet, please resend. It's very likely gone down the drain along with a couple of hundred others.

Thanks to some great work by Emanuele Tampione and Thomas Zander, Krita can now actually embed KOffice flake shapes: our text tool is done! At the same time, I've been reworking the KOffice canvas controller class to make it possible to optimize the rendering inside Krita (and to offer an OpenGL canvas again), which means that dragging and editing shapes is really smooth. At least, on my computer. And Emanuele has made great progress with implementing QPaintEngine for Krita paint devices -- which should mean we're going to be able to create vector shapes that use Krita's brushes. And at the same time, Cyrille has been working on his dynamic brush.

Ah funny thing with shapes in Krita is that they are rendered to the document resolution, which is then displayed at a particular zoom level and screen resolution. So, if you zoom in a lot, the pixels of the text will become visible and the vector shapes will lose their smoothness. That sounds bad, but it's true to what you get: the shapes exist at the image resolution, so you can see which rendered shape pixel will be blended with which image pixel. But I suspect we'll be getting bug reports about that, thought...

In my last blog about Krita I talked about our meeting on deciding what we were going to do with selections. Remember: Krita currently has the luxury of a selection per layer, but users also need a global selection. The results are on the wiki page, and I think we're all quite happy with them. By the way, if you're interested in KOffice development -- and maybe would like to pick up some little task -- you could do worse than browse through our development wiki.

Casper Boemann has moved Krita's zoom and pan tools have to the KOffice libraries, so all KOffice applications have them now. That's a work in progress, of course, we're not done!. Oh -- and notice the latin text in the screenie? That's example text that disappears as soon as you start typing.

If you get a camera like my new Fuji, and you're a *buntu user, you may well be surprised that you can only download images from the camera if you're root. The solution is this known bug in *buntu (and assorted gaggle of duplicates). I think it should have been a showstopper bug for Edgy, but then, I've got one of these cameras.

By the way... If anyone know how to get sound working with Kubuntu on a Toshiba L30 101 laptop with a realtek 826 sound chip that identifies itself as an unknow ATI sound chip, eternal gratitude and a delicacy like a pound pack of Dutch chocolate sprinkles will be yours. I'm baffled like I haven't been baffled by a piece of hardware and Linux since 1997.

Preparatory to my voyage to Canada for the 2007 Libre Graphics Meeting in May I thought I'd treat myself to another Krita-relevant toy: a new camera. Our first digicam was a Canon Powershot A20 that we've taken more than 8000 pictures with. The second was a cute little Praktica DPix 540Z we bought in Wernigerrode. The Praktica lives in Irina's handbag and the Canon is getting a little long in the tooth. Besides, 2 megapixel images are all very well, but they're not much use for stressing Krita with, are they? And neither camera does RAW.

Enter the third digital camera we've bought, one that brings back the days of our second-hand Ricoh SLR: a Fujifilm S6500fd (the fd means "face detection", and the American model number is s600fd):

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