Krita is a free and open source painting tool designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. Krita has been in development for over 10 years and has had an explosion in growth recently. It offers many common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike. In addition to painting, Krita comes with vector, filter, group, and file layers. Combine, order, and flatten layers to help your artwork stay organized. PSD Support - Open PSD files that even Photoshop cannot open. Load and save to PSD when you need to take your artwork across different programs. It supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR, allowing you to incorporate Krita into your existing color management pipeline.
An intuitive user interface that stays out of your way. The dockers and panels can be moved and customized for your specific workflow. Once you have your setup, you can save it as your own workspace. You can also create your own shortcuts for commonly used tools.
Brush Stabilizers Have a shaky hand? Add a stabilizer to your brush to smoothen it out. Krita includes 3 different ways to smooth and stabilize your brush strokes. There is even a dedicated Dynamic Brush tool where you can add drag and mass.
Pop-up Palette Quickly pick your color and brush by right-clicking on the canvas. You can also use Krita’s tagging system to swap out the available brushes that are displayed. The ring outside of the color selector contains the most recently used colors. These settings can be configured through the preferences.
Brush Engines Customize your brushes with over 9 unique brush engines. Each engine has a large amount of settings to customize your brush. Each brush engine is made to satisfy a specific need such as the Color Smudge engine, Shape engine, Particle engine, and even a filter engine. Once you are done creating your brushes, you can save them and organize them with Krita’s unique tagging system.
Wrap-around mode It is easy to create seamless textures and patterns now. Press the ‘W’ key while painting to toggle wrap-around mode. The image will make references of itself along the x and y axis. Continue painting and watch all of the references update instantly. No more clunky offsetting to see how your image repeats itself.
Resource Manager Import brush and texture packs from other artists to expand your tool set. If you create some brushes that you love, share them with the world by creating your own bundles.
Layer Masks Nondestructively work on layers with masks. You can add a layer mask for transparency, filters, or transformations. You can even add multiple masks for each layer.
OpenGL Enhanced Krita takes advantages of OpenGL for some of its operations. With OpenGL enabled, you will see increased canvas rotation and zooming speed. The canvas will also look better when zoomed out.
HDR Support Krita is the only dedicated painting application that lets you open, save, edit and author HDR and scene-deffered images. Furthermore, with OCIO and OpenEXR support, you can manipulate the view to examine HDR images, and use it in the most cutting edge workflows from the film and visual effects industries.
