Momentum
Thomas was kind enough to say that Krita is promising and I'm sure I agree with him... If only I could find a way to start working on Krita full-time... Anyway, not a day has passed since the Hackathon ended or something interesting has been committed in Krita. Herewith a quiver of screen-shots showing off our latest features:
Curves widget
Casper's main endeavor in these days has been working on a curves widget. In principle he started porting the widget from Digikam, but Krita is a far more complex application -- what with 16 bit/channel or 32 bits float/channel support, CMYK, RGB, gray-scale, all integrated with littlecms so users know that the colours they see on screen match the colours they saw when snapping their shot and will be the colors they see when they frame their print. So, we now can, in most cases, use littlecms to actually do the brightness and contrast curve applications. And that's very fast and very good.
Filters gallery
Cyrille has been working on a dialog that gives you a thumbnail of all filters applied on the current layer: the filters gallery. While still in need of some UI polish, this is already amazingly snappy:
More screen real estate through popups
One problem that all paint applications have to solve time and again is that you ideally want everything at hand so you don't have to open dialogs, find windows hiding under your image or hunt through menus for that particular brush you need. Come to think of it -- if you paint with real paint on a real table, with a real sheet of paper, you've got exactly the same problem.
I'm working on a way to harness Qt's popup power to solve this problem for brushes, patterns and gradients -- eliminating five tabs from the toolbox in one go.
There are couple of problems I haven't solved. The popup doesn't popup relative to the toolbar button (even though I ask it to) and the button doesn't indicate yet that you can press it. On opening a dialog or another popup from the popup selector widget, the popup closes. This makes editing gradients a time-consuming business. And I haven't managed to make the popup resizable.
OpenEXR
And... We've got openEXR support now. This is an image format for really high dynamic ranges, with a float per channel. You can load the scanline-based openexr images and play with the exposure slider to see the result. This is Adrian Page's hard work.
Exposure = 1.9 stops.
Exposure = 6.6 stops.