14 DAY TRIAL // Krita is considered to be a digital painting application, but it's best described as a raster graphics editor. No matter what you call it, the Paris 8 University has decided to drop Adobe's Photoshop and to adopt Krita instead.
More and more open source applications are replacing proprietary ones. Until now, we mostly got to see stuff like LibreOffice replacing Microsoft Office, or Linux operating systems replacing Windows, so it's nice to see that other applications are reaching the kind of professional finish that they need to fight on the same playfield with the ones provided by companies that charge money for the same kind of features.
The open source applications have been improving constantly in the past couple of years and numerous entities, like universities for example, are beginning to see the advantages of free software. Not only are they cheaper to operate than the other ones, but they can also actually be much better.
Moving from Photoshop to Krita is not easy, but it's not that hard either
First of all, Krita is not a Photoshop clone. They are very different applications and that can be easily observed. The department that got rid of Photoshop is called Art and Technology of Image, so that means the two applications have some overlapping functionalities.
"The ATI (Art and Technology of Image) department at University Paris 8 is switching to Krita this year. This department has the double aim to train students both to use graphic software (2D, 3D, VFX, and Compositing) and to code their own (Python, C#, C++). Until recently the classes used only Adobe Photoshop, but because of inadequate support from the company the department decided to replace that," is noted on the official Krita website.
As you can imagine, the switch wasn't done over night and it took some time for the students to adapt to the new application. As I said before, this is not a clone, so basically they had to re-learn some of the stuff they needed.
You can try Krita right now by downloading it from Softpedia.