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MyPaint
http://mypaint.intilinux.com/
Latest Update
Version 0.7.1 was just released. Support for deformable (elliptical) brush dabs, plenty of new cool default brushes, faster image swapping and many other things under the hood. A Windows binary and installer is also available now -- finally! -- so also non-Linux users can try out the latest build!
MyPaint Review
For the last few months I have played around with an open-source paint program called MyPaint.
Pop-up colour selectors of two varieties
MyPaint is a program focused mainly on one thing -- digital painting with a tablet. While it could be used with a mouse the program is really intended for pressure sensitivity.
The program is minimalistic when it comes to user interface; the idea is to let the painter work without distractions. All the requesters and selectors are intended to pop up only temporarily when you need them (so in this way it's quite different from GIMP), the suggested workflow is to work with the pen in one hand and the other on your keyboard. Once you get used to it, and learn the few most common shortcuts (which you set directly in the menu, just like GIMP's dynamic shortcuts), it becomes a very fast way to work.
MyPaint also has an infinite canvas -- there are no borders, just paint and the program adds a growing area to be your image as you go. This is actually very refreshing, only drawback is that the colours along the edges won't be perfectly straightly cut off, so for a final result you will need to get the image into GIMP for cropping.
On this note, it should be made clear that MyPaint is not a GIMP replacement at all, rather it is explicitly intended to be used with GIMP for any photomanipulation actions (like cropping, rotating, colour adjustments, text etc) and during the process of making an image I find I move it between the two programs several times. This is also one of my favourite things about MyPaint -- it is not reinventing the wheel by redoing GIMP's many years of development all over.
Brush engine
MyPaint is built around a very flexible brush engine that in many ways is more advanced than GIMP's and in some ways is not. For example it does not support separate images as brushes (like GIMP's default green pepper), instead all individual brush parts (or dabs) are infact simple circles (or, from version 0.7 and onward, ellipses). But despite this simpler basic form the way they can be applied to the canvas are almost infinite. The brush engine has a vast (and I mean vast!) array of configuration options that can be used to reproduce an remarkable variety of realistic as well as digital and custom effects.
The brush engine is in fact so flexible that MyPaint does not have any specific "tools" at all (beyond the eraser which is simply a switch to start to paint with transparency rather than colour). Instead all tools are just specially adjusted brushes. Examples of this are as varied as smudge, blur, as well as various forms of dodge/burn and gradients.
Brush settings dialogue is extensive, to say the least.
You can create your own brushes by playing around with the hundreds of settings, but there are many default ones coming along. As far as these procedural brushes go, MyPaint is far superior to GIMP since many things that in GIMP would require making a clunky anim-brush can here be achieved by just changing a slider. MyPaint also has several brushes very hard to replicate in GIMP at all. One example is the Smudge+, which paints when you press hard and gradually becomes a smudger when you release pressure, It's very, very useful and fun to use, not to mention time saving.
Images-as-brushes, stamps and so on is still gimp's domain though.
MyPaint is also only using pressure-sensitivity of the tablet (which by all means is the most important aspect), it is not clear if there will be support for other dimensions (like angle, recently added in gimp2.7). It does make use of other aspects of your painting however, like velocity and the direction you move your pen.
My first image in mypaint. Mostly done with the "smudge+"tool.
Other features
MyPaint is progressing quite rapidly and later versions of the program (0.6+) has seen plenty of usability improvements. MyPaint now has layers and transparency as well as gives plenty of more feedback to the user in the form of brush-size indicators and other things. You can also set different background patterns and colours to your canvas.
The layer system is currently feeling quite different to GIMP, mostly because there is no layer list to keep track of where you are. For me being used to GIMP, I tend to get lost as to where I am. Fastest way to switch between layers is infact to hold down the H key and just click on the part of the image you want to work with, which works fine for simple background-foreground setups, not so well for complex layouts (or when GIMP has been used as part of the development to blend things together). This is an area under development.
The various pop-up colour selectors, and the ability to select your four previous four colours just by clicking your right mouse button is very efficient for painting; it means I don't have to move my hand to the keyboard as often.
MyPaint is the first program (that I know of) to implement the new OpenRaster file format suggested as a common format for the open-source gfx world. Since GIMP does not yet support it, conversion between the two programs have to be made via PNG which ruins layer information but has so far not been as much of an issue as one would think. Since OpenRaster basically is just an archive with the layers as PNGs, one can in principle unpack it and load the layers manually into GIMP. An actual GIMP loader would of course be preferable though.
Whereas the program is regularly released in binary form with increasing version numbers, the main development branch is easy to follow through its git repository if you know how to compile from source. Linux users especially are recommended to use this, since it's easy to set up and you will get the latest development and bug fixes right away.
Natural charcoal brush.
MyPaint is an inspirational little piece of software for me. The way it works inspires me to work in a way more similar to real painting and sketching, like if you were sitting by a real paper and doodling away. From an open-source point of view, it is also an interesting project to get involved in. The main developer is very interested and open to feedback and suggestions, going to the [MyPaint Wiki] or their IRC chat is a good way to help with ideas and code and take part in improving the program further.
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Griatch
