I left Photoshop about a month ago, and for the most part, I didn’t miss it. I take most of my photos on my phone and do 60% of the editing there. If I need more, there’s Apple’s default Photos app, which is pretty good for quick adjustments and tweaks. This combination alone already covers 95% of my former use case in Photoshop.

One particular area of interest I’ve had is AI-driven image creation and manipulation. Photoshop comes with a pretty handy AI generation tool: for me, it was very useful for quickly and easily removing unwanted objects, or for adding details that could add a bit of flavor. When I wanted to create full-blown AI-generated images, I turned to an excellent Stable Diffusion frontend: Invoke. But when Adobe snatched it away, it felt a bit personal, so I left it behind.

When I left Invoke, I had a gap to fill for image generation. Stable Diffusion has other frontends; the most popular and robust is probably ComfyUI, but I never felt at home there. I’m a visual person, and even when I create an image or an illustration, I like to grab my tablet and work on it, adjust it, and change it to my taste. Invoke was very basic and crude in its drawing, but I still used its interface when needed.

Meanwhile, I also used Krita to adjust some of my image generations. It’s an excellent painting program, built to use with a tablet and a stylus, complete with basic and functional filters and wrapping tools. I didn’t use it often, but I was happy that it was there. When I left Invoke, I wondered whether Krita had a way to work with Stable Diffusion. It made sense: if you draw something or work on a drawing, Stable Diffusion is an excellent tool to have.

Turns out, it exists. It doesn’t seem like it, but this plug-in is powerful and robust enough to stand on its own. Indeed, if you follow the basic instructions, it creates a functional local ComfyUI installation inside the Krita folder, complete with an option to download models that would generate images that would cost you good money elsewhere.

The UI is hard to get used to. It looks like it was made by a bunch of programmers who aren’t getting paid (because that’s exactly what it is). Still, after a few weeks with it, I’m learning I should have learned to use Krita, ComfyUI, and this plug-in long ago, rather than turning to Invoke in the first place.

As it turns out, Krita is already plenty powerful, beyond what I suspected. With its plugins, what you can do with it is… nuts. For example, you can create a whole animation, with a timeline and keyframes, right in the program. It comes with photo tools that let you edit RAW files and adjust brightness, levels, contrast, and exposure, plus additional filters I only saw in Photoshop before (with the option to download and install more). And now, as it turns out, it takes the head-scratching out of ComfyUI and allows you to create full-blown photos. And like Photoshop, if you do use this, you have the right tools to select areas, work with masks, warp and manipulate images with those creations. All the power I’ve had with Photoshop, but now I am free to find and download whatever models I want to use with it.

For free.

Krita is blowing my mind. It’s made by KDE - the same folks who made the Plasma desktop I switched to not long ago. I’m not sure how exactly they do this, but between complicated tools like Krita, Plasma, Kdenlive (a video editor that answers all my needs), and other utilities like their torrent downloader, code editor, and screenshot editor, they are doing a lot of things right.