u/the-techromancer

This has been a big passion project of mine and I'm psyched to unveil it. I've been making digital art for 10 years, moving from GIMP to Photoshop to Krita, but never feeling at home. So I decided to make my dream editor. I hope it'll be useful to you as well!

Darkly is free and open source, and currently in beta. You can try it at darkly.art . Let me know which features you want to see!

Demo: https://demo.darkly.art/

GitHub: https://github.com/darkly-art/darkly

After making digital art for 10 years, and trying GIMP, Krita, and Photoshop, I wanted to make my dream editor.

Everything including the compositor and node-based brush engine is from scratch. Many features still need to be added, but the core functionality is there - layers, masks, brush engine, hotkeys, settings, etc.

When I started I knew nothing about GPU programming, shaders, or compositing. The compositor especially was really challenging, since the first thing I learned, is that AI is not capable of writing an efficient compositor without significant help (oh the horror, I have to actually **understand my software??**). There are lots of pitfalls, which I've kept a tally of for posterity.

However by far the hardest part was the brush stroke stabilizer. I wanted to have that smooth, addicting Procreate-like feel to the brushes, and since I couldn't find any open source project that had done it, it took a lot of trial and error to get right. Ultimately, since a large portion of the stroke has to be re-rendered every frame, I ended up having to write much of it in WGSL.

I haven't announced this on socials yet, so you guys are the first to to see it. Hope it's useful to someone!