I’ve been using inkscape for 14 years. I’m not dissapointed. Time to make a donation again!
Just a heads up as of a few hours ago the windows installer is broken.
Love Inkscape, using it for 15+ years.
I sure hope they fixed the bug from the last version where it would crash if you had a drawing tablet plugged in while opening the app. That has been a huge nuisance for the last few months.
Inkscape is a blast! I do some (simple) icons and the features are amazing. As for the new version 1.4:
- The new Filter Gallery is really nice, but usually I don’t use filters anyway.
- The Swatches Dialog makes my life easier too, but for whatever reason I don’t get the color names. It only shows the color codes s
#669900. Anyone know where to set this? - Unified Font Browser is also now up to standards and makes it a breeze to play around with fonts. No longer do I need to explicitly apply, just left click from the list will automatically update the canvas text.
- Shape Builder is really a cool functionality and I always love to use it. It saves so much time when needed, or can lead to unexpected cool effects. Now it works with raster images, to cut parts out. But they can’t be edited or Trace Bitmap unfortunately. The article talks about Release Clip and unlink clone, but I don’t know how to unlink clone. Hopefully this can be worked on to make it more seemless and easy. Shape Builder in general is OP (over powered).
- Dash Icon set is nice, I’m trying it out currently. Each icon is clear.
The filter preview feature seems really nice!
Honestly, Inkscape is at the very least almost as good as Illustrator - call me deluded but I find more intuitive in many cases.
Now if only GIMP could actually have some money pumped into it and a sane UI… 😒
gimp isn’t being held back by money, they have over a million in bitcoin just sitting there from an old donation that grew in value. In over a decade, no one has figured out how to pay the taxes on it if they start using it to fund developers.
I read on reddit a long time ago that a UI designer tried to help improve gimp, but the devs were hostile to it (i may be remembering that wrong though). Considering how long its been with no UI improvements, I don’t think gimp will ever revamp its UI. Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.
Unfortunately, Krita’s main dev has long covid and in the last year they haven’t been working much…
That’s extremely sad to hear, I hope he recovers someday :(
Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.
As someone who doesn’t really do photo editing, one thing I never quite understood is what’s missing for that to be viable right now.
For reference, the one time I had to edit a photo a few years ago, I just used Krita to move/remove a few objects and do some basic color grading. It didn’t feel like there was anything missing.
Granted, I never used software like Photoshop either.
There’s a few areas where it’s lacking, the text tool being one of them, and it also can’t export to PDF for professional book cover printing. But I’m not a professional photo editer either, and almost exclusively use Krita for editing anyway, since it’s so my h easier to use.
I see. So it’s less about editing the pictures themself, and more about what they’ll be used for.
And yeah, Krita is main image editing and drawing tool as well, helped out by Inkscape for vector graphics and Aseprite for pixel art.
I think the missing link is viable raw photo management and color space transforms. Photoshop is just built well for that. But in terms of drawing Krita blows Potatoshop out of the water
I recently did raster graphics editing in inkscape instead of GIMP, simply because GIMP is often pretty unusable. Worked out really fine!
I think I may have contracted some kind of brain worm, because the other day I needed to do some photo manipulation and couldn’t get krita to do what I wanted, but I went into gimp and just knocked it out. I’ve hated gimp for years, but I guess I’ve used it enough that I’ve figured out how it works… and now I don’t hate it anymore…
I think I may need help.
Oh, but I always use it in single window mode ever since that came out. The multiple windows floating panel thing drove me nuts!
Yes GIMP works too, kinda.
But stuff like writing text fields and moving them around is just horrible. The text doesnt behave as expected at all, formatting is always lost, moving instead grabs something random from the background
That works really fine in Inkscape
I use Krita for raster, but Inkscape is the best for vector
And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).
I find that I’ll do the bare minimum in GIMP (like that one healing extension), and then I’ll copy what I have over to Inkscape to do the rest.
Woo! ALWAYS a good day to see InkScape getting some updates! I suck at it but I sure do appreciate it. :D
