Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, and features an OpenGL-accelerated canvas, colour management support, an advanced brush engine, non-destructive layers and masks, group-based layer management, vector artwork support, and switchable customisation profiles.
Name
The project's name "Krita" is primarily inspired by the Swedish words , meaning "crayon" (or chalk), and which means "to draw". It follows the "K" prefix like everything else in the KDE suite.
History
Early development of the project can be tracked back to 1998 when Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE, showcased a Qt GUI hack for GIMP at Linux Kongress. The idea of building a Qt-based image editor was later passed to KImage, maintained by Michael Koch, as a part of KOffice suite. In 1999, Matthias Elter proposed the idea of building the software using CORBA around ImageMagick. To avoid existing trademarks on the market, the project underwent numerous name changes: KImageShop, Krayon, until it was finally settled with "Krita" in 2002. The first public version of Krita was released with KOffice 1.4 in 2004. In years between 2004 and 2009, Krita was developed as a generic image manipulation software like Photoshop and GIMP.
A change of direction happened to the project in 2009, with a new goal of becoming digital painting software like Corel Painter and SAI. Also from that point, the project began to experiment with various ways of funding its development, including Google Summer of Code and funded jobs for students. As a result, the development gained speed and resulted in better performance and stability.
The Krita Foundation was created in 2013 to provide support for Krita's development. It collaborated with Intel to create Krita Sketch as a marketing campaign and Krita Studio with KO GmbH as a commercially supported version for movie and VFX studios. Kickstarter campaigns have been used to crowdfund Krita's development since 2014.
On May 23, 2020, the beta version of Krita was released for Android and ChromeOS.
Design and features
The current version of Krita is developed with Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. It is designed primarily for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. It has the following key features:
User experience design
The most prominent feature of Krita is arguably its UX design with graphics tablet users in mind. It uses a combination of pen buttons, keyboard modifiers and an icon-based HUD to ensure frequently-used functions can be accessed by fewer clicks, without the need to search through text-based menus.
Most-used drawing commands can be accessed via touch by combining keyboard modifiers with pen/mouse buttons and gestures:
Pop-up Palette is Krita's right click HUD. It enables instant access to the following functions:
Painting tools
Krita's core digital painting tools include:
Animation tools
Krita's animation tools are designed for frame-by-frame raster animation. They have the following features:
Vector tools
Krita uses vector tools for non-destructive editing of the following objects: Path Selection Text (artistic, multiline, calligraphy) Vector art Fill and gradient
Layers and masks
Krita's layer and mask features include:
Customisation
Krita's resource manager allows each brush or texture preset to be tagged by a user and quickly searched, filtered and loaded as a group. A collection of user-made presets can be packaged as "bundles" and loaded as a whole. Krita provides many such brush set and texture bundles on its official website.
Customisable tool panels are known as Dockers in Krita. Actions include: 2 customisable toolbars Toggle display of each docker Attach any docker to any sides of main window, or detach to float free Buttons to collapse/expand each docker panel Group dockers by tabs Workspaces allow UI customizations for different workflows to be saved and loaded on demand.
Display
OpenGL accelerated canvas is used to speed up Krita's performance. It provides the following benefits: Better framerate and response time: pen actions can be reflected without delay Better-quality, fast and continuous zooming, panning, rotation, wrap-around and mirroring Requires a GPU with OpenGL 3.0 support for optimal experience. In the case of Intel HD Graphics, that means Ivy Bridge and above.