What are you trying to do that is so uncommon that you have to build a custom tool?

It’s not so much that I have to as that I’m annoyed enough at all the paper cuts that I’m finally trying to solve them, at least for my own needs – though, there are some things that are less common (like image alignment) that would be nice to have in the same tool.

Some of the things I want in my tool:

• Easy split screen image manipulation (both linked and unlinked) with trivial pan, zoom, and rotation.
• Manual point correspondence selection for image alignment
• Mixed raster and vector layers (with primary emphasis on vector)
• Measurement of shapes that I can easily fit models to (e.g. curves, ellipses) and then manipulate as vector objects (e.g. affine transform)
• Easier polygon and bezier curve editing (the path editor in the GIMP makes me want to tear my hair out every time I have to use it and I already wrote a bezier curve editor years ago that is – while still imperfect – much closer to what I want)
• Easier management of stencils. I like being able to draw within a selection in the GIMP – it’s useful – but I keep losing my selection accidentally, can’t manipulate parts of it in ways that make sense to me, and get bad behavior at the edges of things due to issues with the way the GIMP handles anti-aliasing that are hard to notice while doing it and really, really annoying to try to fix after the fact. (This is the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.)

There’s other stuff like text manipulation that I’d like to have a better way of dealing with, but is probably not worth the effort of implementing vs just firing up the GIMP for now. (I have written a rich text editor from scratch before – ASCII only, but capable of supporting multiple fonts with colors, bold/italic, kerning, multi-line text, etc. – it really fucking sucked to implement, and I don’t particularly want to revisit it right now, but maybe someday… I know I can do it…)

For things like split screen and point correspondence, I already wrote that a couple weeks ago in a basic form for the Mew composite. (e.g. here’s a screenshot of one point correspondence on a blade of grass – zoomed out a bit so you can see the images are different) I had a pretty good idea of the numerical model needed to solve the alignment; I thought it was just translation and zooming – and I was correct. Picking a few corners at sub-pixel resolution and computing a least squares solution for scale, and x/y translation gave a perfect alignment of the image; I thought I’d have to do some clean up of the edges afterwards or get creative with blending, but no – it was spot on exact with 9 points. Trying to do that in The GIMP manually was a nightmare – and yes, I tried that first. (There are other tools that can do that already – e.g. panorama editors – but most of them either cost money or are annoying to use for other reasons; so, I wrote my own.)

For vector manipulation, it’s probably possible to get Inkscape to do a lot of what I want, but I have bounced off that program about two dozen times already.

KolourPaint is basically an MS Paint clone plus or minus a few features. It’s great for trivial editing (way simpler than the GIMP) but it doesn’t do things like layers, and as soon as I want to do anything moderately complex I either need something more powerful or I will be spending all day doing really, really, really, tedious things over and over. (I did the first pass of Sock Trek in KolourPaint and the mistake with the edge of the shadow on the planet is due to me switching over to the GIMP and being unable to get a perfect alignment of the selection. Likewise the mistake with the pink aurora/cloud on the bottom right is due to KolourPaint not handling curves well at the edges of images and me having to try to patch it up pixel by pixel after I’d finished the overall image and realizing it looked bad there. The whole piece should’ve taken ~5 minutes but it took more like 2 hours to make. For Sox Headroom, I tried to do the shadows in GIMP but fucked up with the anti-aliasing on the edges and trying to recover from that was such a pain that honestly I should’ve just started over from scratch.)

I have seen Krita before and I think I tried an old version a few years ago, but I don’t currently have it installed. It’s neat, but being a digital painting / raster program, it’s geared to doing stuff that’s different from what I want to do.

I really want something that I can do 2D vector art with.

I’d also like to see other artists also post their stuff here. This seems like a very nice community!