October 2003... I had just gotten my first graphics tablet, a small Wacom Graphire, because I needed to draw a map for the novel I was working on, a map of a battlefield. It seemed a good idea, back then, to do that digitally, for ease of adding and removing layers and so on. However, I wasn't too happy with the way GIMP worked back then, not realizing it was because I wasn't familiar with digital painting at all, not because GIMP's workflow was bad or something like that.
So I started looking for alternatives, and I came across Krita. Krita had gotten its start in 1998, when Matthias Ettrich held a presentation at the 1998 Linux Kongress, which was reported by Michael Wiedman. One of the things he wanted to demo was the ease with which it was possible to hack a Qt gui around an existing application, and the application he choose to demo it with was GIMP (back then it was still called The Gimp, I think). About 1100 lines of code hacked together one evening before the congress started that integrated GIMP into KDE by giving it a KDE compliant user interface: toolbars, statusbar, menubar and made it use the KDE standard dialogs. His goal was to show that there was no reason for any duplication of effort, if a complex application like GIMP can be integrated into KDE with so little effort. KDE was two years old by then and Gnome had just started and the mood was incendiary, so the patch, named kimp, caused a something of a flamefest which left a sour taste in everybody's mouth.
Not satisfied with this situation, people within the KDE project decided to start their own image editor application (although there was some dissension). At that time, there was an application in KOffice called KImage which had been started by Michael Koch, who came up with the name KImageShop, so this can be seen as the earliest forerunner of Krita, was originally written in Qt 1.x, but had been ported to Qt 2.0 in March 1999. The codebase would later be ported to Qt3 and to Qt4!
At the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Koch. Involved were also Matthias Elter and Daniel Duley (mosfet). Their plans were certainly ambitious! The basic idea back then was to make KImageShop a GUI shell around ImageMagick. (And indeed, until 2004 ImageMagick was a core dependency of Krita.) It was going to be a corba-based application with out-of-process filter plugins, compatible with GIMP plugins, which are also out-of-process, though of course not corba-based. Multiple colorspace support was planned from the outset, though it took until the Krita 1.5 release in 2006 for the project to achieve that goal. (www.koffice.org went through a reorganization in 2009, killing all old content, so this is a link to the svn version of the original announcement.) Some things planned back then still haven't been realized, such as export support for GIMP's xcf file format. Even distributed and multi threaded image filter application was already mentioned!
After an initial spurt of development, the mailing list soon became quiet. The main reason seems to have been that Matthias Elter, Carsten Pfeiffer and the other authors were busy getting KDE 2.0 ready and done. KImageShop started to bitrot and it became hard to compile.
In October 2000, John Califf became the new maintainer. He started with an enormous enthusiasm and energy and quickly make KimageShop at least compilable. During his tenure, KImageShop was renamed to Krayon, a name half-jokingly thought up by Sean Pecor. As he (and others) expected, the new name would give problems, but it seemed stick around after Bart Syszka liked it too. During this short period, TheKompany.com, led by Shawn Gordon, was active as well -- they had hired someone to work full-time on KImageShop / Krayon. But John Califf's 54th and last commit was February 12th, 2001, and nothing much happened after that for over a year.
In June 2002, Patrick Julien appeared on the scene. By then, Krayon had been disabled from compilation for legal reasons: a German lawyer thought "Krayon" too close to the name of a German website (crayon.de) which used to sell a series of graphics cd's. Crayon.de seems to have become a "lizensberater" since then, and von Gravenreuth is no more.
But back then, the first thing that had to be done was to find a new name. The discussion was long, and in the end Krita was chosen. Looking back, it seems to have been an excellent choice. We never had any legal problems since (touch wood!), and after a few years patience, the krita.org domain became available as well!
New maintainer Patrick Julien embarked upon a refactoring of Krita following the Gang of Four's Design Patterns lead.
And that was more or less the state when I started looking for something to draw maps with, using my little Graphire... The project had stagnated again by then, after the promising refactoring had basically set down the broad architectural lines Krita is still based on.
I didn't know C++ back then, but neither was I a novice programmer. I'd been earning the daily bread for me and my family for about ten years, first as an Oracle PL/SQL developer, then Visual Basic, then Java. I had written and gotten published a book on Python and Qt, so I knew Qt as well. I had no experience with graphics, though...
In October 2003 it was not possible to paint with Krita: all tools except for the layer move tool had been disabled. The paint tool was the first thing I worked on, and I was very proud when I had a tool that could place squares on the canvas -- and the size of the squares was sensitive to the tablet pressure!
And then the ball started rolling again... In 2004, I Patrick Julien handed over maintainership. Many of the people who are still working on Krita were already around by then, and by September 2004 we were ready for the first preview release of Krita! The backend had been rewritten once more (and that would happen at least two, three times again), we had working tools, plugins, filters, color models, wacom support... Get the (apparently incomplete) source code!
Then 2005 arrived, and we were driving ourselves really hard to make the KOffice 1.4 release. Originally planned for the first quarter of 2005, it actually got delayed until June. We had a great feature list (for a brand-new application):
- Layers (without fixed boundaries).
- A familiar set of tools -- brushes, selection tools and shape tools.
- Painting with filters.
- An extensible system for the addition of new color and paint models.
- Support for pressure sensitive tablets.
- The ability to read most graphics file formats, including gimp and photoshop files.
- Exporting to many graphics file formats (but not gimp or photoshop)
- A complete colour management system based on lcms.
- A useful set of filters (implemented as plugins, so the set of filters is extensible) including a CImg based image restoration plugin.
- The ability to use Gimp palettes, brushes, patterns and gradients
Real artists ship, and we had shipped! Champagne was being served, and then compilers were fired up again, because after 1.4, a 1.5 has to follow. We had a sprint at my place in Deventer. That was also around the time I discovered IRC... 24/7 presence is taking its toll these days.
A bit less than a year later, we were still hard at it, and Krita had gained adjustment layers, scripting, 16 bit/channel support, CMYK, an OpenGL canvas... And we released it with KOffice 1.5 in April.
In 2006, we were old hands at hacking and releasing and hacking and releasing. But things were changing. Google's Summer of Code program arrived, and we had our first students working on Krita and KOffice. We released 1.6, and Krita 1.6 was really a very nice, stable image editor. The first professional users started taking a look at Krita, but still found it wanting. And the long-awaited port to Qt4 got started. Oh... And Krita got the Akademy Award for Best Application!
But that really was the beginning of a time of troubles. Looking back, I'm surprised we never gave up. I had to give up, personally, for a bit of time, when I got burned out, not really because of the hacking and porting, because that was still fun, but tensions in the KOffice community got steadily worse, something that would end with the KOffice/Calligra community split in 2010.
And another problem was that we simply couldn't figure out how regain stability. The KDE 4 platform was unstable, Qt4 wasn't exactly as good as it should have been -- and we made KOffice go through a huge redesign, where much of what we had learned in Krita about canvases, tools, plugins and more was placed in the core of Calligra, in the flake library. in retrospect, we ported too quickly, and we changed too much, and we got stuck.
So, 2007 and 2008 went past, without a release. It took three years to get to the Krita 2.0 release in May 2009, and that while that release was a huge milestone, it was also completely unusable. None of the KOffice applications had anything like the stability or plain usefulness of the 1.6 release. Looking back, it's a wonder the project didn't die. Of course, we still had fun coding, there were Google Summer of Code students, there were Libre Graphics Meetings (the first I attended was the 2007 in Montreal, also the first time I crossed the Atlantic!).
But it was clear that something had to be done. And in December 2009, we all had enough. We had released Krita 2.1 in November, and while we felt we'd made progress and proudly claimed "This release marks the beginning of the user-readiness of the 2.x series of Krita.", it wasn't really. We did have our own website, now, though! And the all-new KDE web forums!
It was during a KOffice sprint in the Trolltech offices in Oslo, that Lukáš Tvrdý, a former Summer of Code student, presented his idea: he would have several months between finishing his thesis (about Krita brush engines!) and his graduation, and instead of seeking a job hacking up websites, he would like to try and work full-time on Krita, to get rid of all the pesky bugs, performance issues, all the papercuts, sock-wrinkles and plain-out filthy bugginess. But he needed money to buy bread and pay for his apartment... So the first Krita sponsored development drive was born. Crowd-sourcing avant-la-lettre, it brought in enough to keep Lukáš well-fed and happy hacking.
This really made a huge difference. We got in touch with David Revoy, the French artist who was back then working on Sintel for the Blender Foundation. His timelapse showing how he worked with Gimp and Mypaint on concept art really gave us a kick in the pants -- he should have been using Krita!
But we were honest enough to know that he could not have used Krita. So, armed with his suggestions, we went back to work. We had a goal -- "make Deevad happy with Krita", we had received the sponsorship needed for Lukáš, and we were really motivated. Krita was fun again!
We kept on releasing, though: 2.1 was released in November 2009, 2.2 in May 2010, 2.3 in December 2010 and then... The Calligra/KOffice ruckus happened. It took a long time before the first Calligra release was made, numbered 2.4. Krita 2.4 was released in April 2012.. We'd spent all of 2011 on it, and parts of 2012. It was a long release-hiatus, but it was worth it. Krita 2.4 was ready for the end-user, we felt.
At the Krita sprint in Amsterdam in 2011, David Revoy had said of Krita 2.3 that it came close, and was a nice application for amateurs, but not ready for professionals -- fun to use, but just too many rough edges, too many things that hampered workflow. Krita 2.4 fixed that. It had taken a year, since 2.3, and in fact, two and a half years since we first put "make deevad happy" as our No. 1 goal, but we'd made it. Which is not to say that we were done...
So, there's been 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 since then. Every release makes me wonder why we thought the previous release was the bee's knees -- and every release excites me, because there's so much new, so much fixed, so much polished.
Right now, we've got a Krita Foundation which owns the Krita trademark, Dmitry Kazakov will work on Krita full-time for the next four months, there's a company giving commercial support for Krita, every month the number of users increases. We've ported Krita to QML for Krita Sketch and Krita Gemini... We've got a shop full of cool swag. And my novel still isn't finished!
Looking back, I wonder -- why did I pick Krita to work on? Probably because I didn't like to start a new project, and besides -- I probably couldn't have pulled it off. I didn't know anything about graphics... And Krita was in Qt, promising, but still small and needed so much basic stuff done that I knew I could get into it. Now, in 2013, Krita is over 300k lines, excluding the Calligra libraries. Newcomers have a much tougher time of it! (But don't let that deter anyone!)
Ten years is a lot of time. In that time, I've bought and sold two houses, and am living now in the third. My daughters were at primary school back then, now they are first-year students at University. I went through three jobs, and am now working at a company I've co-founded. And I've always kept working on Krita...
Ten years is a long time! Here's to the next ten years of Krita! To an awesome community of artists and developers, to great code and lots of fun, to learning and doing, to coding and painting!
Thank you, everyone, Aaron, Adam, Adam., Adriaan, Adrian, Adrian, Albert, Alberto, Alexander, Alexander, Alexis, Alfredo, Allen, Ana, Andras, Andre, Andreas, Andres, Andrew, Andrius, Andre, Andy, Anne-Marie, Ariya, Arjen, Bar, Ben, Ben, Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin, Benoit, Bernhard, Bo, Brad, Bram, Burkhard, Camilla, Carlo, Chinkal, Christer, Christian, Christan, Christoph, Chusslove, Clarence, Cyrille, Dan, Dan, Daniel, Daniel, Danny, David, David, Dirk, Dirk, Dmitry, Edward, Elvis, Emanuele, Enrique, Fabian, Frank, Frederik, Fredrik, Fredy, Friedrich, Gary, Geoffry, Gioele, Giovannia, Gopalakrishna, Gabor, Hanna, Harald, Hasso, Helge, Helio, Hoang, Hugo, Inge, Ingo, Jaime, Jaime, Jason, Jakob, Jakub, Jan, Jaroslaw, Jens, Jessica, Johannes, John, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jose, Jure, Kai-Uwe, Kevin, Kevin, Kurt, Laurent, Lauri, Leo, Lukas, Lukas, Maciej, Malcolm, Marc, Maria, Marijn, Martin, Matthew, Matthias, Matus, Melchior, Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael, Mohtaba, Montel, Nick, Nicolas, Olivier, Patrick, Patrick, Pavel, Peter, Pierre, Pierre, Pino, Rafael, Raphael, Rex, Rob, Roopesh, Sahil, Samuel, Sander. Sascha, Sebastian, Siddharth, Silvio, Silvio, Somsubhra, Srikanth, Stefan, Stephan, Stephan, Stuart, Sune, Sven, Thiago, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thorsten, Thorsten, Tim, Timothee, Tobias, Tom, Torio, Torsten, Unai, Urs, Vera, Volker, Waldo, Werner, Wilco, Will, William, Yann, Yue, Yuri, Manu, Ismail... And everyone I've forgotten to mention!
