Krita
Krita is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation. It 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. It is written in C++ using Qt and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Name
The project's current name "Krita" has multi-cultural references. In Swedish, krita means "crayon" and rita means "to draw". In the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, the name "krita" is used in a context where it can be translated into "perfect".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.Change of direction happened to the project in 2009, with a new goal of becoming a 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 commercially supported version for movie and VFX studios. Kickstarter campaigns have been used to crowdfund Krita's development since 2014.
| Time | Version | Raised | Kickstarter Campaign | Stable release |
| July 2014 | 2.9.x | €19,955 | Faster Development, better PSD support, layers, masks, brush, resource manager, display, etc. | February 2015 |
| May 2015 | 3.0.x | €30,520 | Better performance, animation support, layer, workflow, transform, filter, brush, etc. | May 2016 |
| May 2016 | 4.0.x | €38,579 | Better text tools and vector art capability, python scripting support, etc. | March 2018 |
artwork by David Revoy, drawn in Krita
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 featuresUser 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 blindly accessed by combining keyboard modifiers with pen/mouse buttons and gestures:
| Command | Input |
| Brush size +/- | Shift + Pen drag |
| Pick colour | Ctrl + Pen tap |
| Pan | Pen button + Pen move |
| Zoom | Ctrl + Pen button + Pen move |
| Rotate | Shift + Pen button + Pen move |
Pop-up Palette is Krita's right click HUD. It enables instant access to the following functions:
| Brush | Colour | View |
| 10 loaded brush presets | Colour ring selector | Zoom |
| Load other preset groups | FG/BG colour display | Rotate |
| Brush size, opacity, flow, spacing, angle | Recent colour | Mirror |
| Canvas-only | ||
| Reset view |
Painting tools
Krita's core digital painting tools include:| Brush | Drawing assistants | Selection tools | Transformation tools |
| Graphics tablet support | Adjustable interference intensity | Rectangle | Free position |
| 9 different brush engines | Infinite and parallel straight rulers | Ellipse | Rotate |
| Modelled after real tools | Splines | Freehand | Scale |
| Highly adjustable | Ellipses | Polygon | Shear |
| Remembers settings for each physical pen | Perspective | Outline | Perspective |
| Pen stabilizer | Vanishing point | Fill | Wrap |
| Multibrush painting support | Fish-eye point | Color | Cage |
| Opacity | Liquify |
Animation tools
Krita's animation tools are designed for frame-by-frame raster animation. They have the following features:| Interface | Import | Export |
| Similar interface to Adobe Flash | Batch import of frames | Render with FFmpeg |
| Timeline controls | Output to individual frames | |
| Realtime animation playback controls | Output to GIF, AVI, MP4, etc. | |
| Onion-skin display |
Vector tools
Krita uses vector tools for non-destructive editing of the following objects:- Path
- Selection
- Text
- Vector art
- Fill and gradient
Layers and masks
Krita's layer and mask features include:| Layer management | Mask applies to | Non-destructive layers | Non-destructive masks |
| Multiple-level layer groups | Raster layers | Clone layers | Transparency masks |
| Select multiple layers | Vector layers | Filter layers | Filter masks |
| Drag-and-drop layers | Layer groups | Fill layers | Colourise masks |
| Layer highlighting | Non-destructive layers | File layers | Transform masks |
| Local selection masks |
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
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.
- Assign and convert between colour spaces
- Realtime colour proofing, including colour-blind mode
- Colour model supported: RGBA, Grey, CMYKA, Law, YCbCr, XYZ
- Colour depth supported: 8-bit integer, 16-bit integer, 16-bit floating point, 32-bit floating point
Filters
Filters included in a default installation: levels, colour adjustment curves, brightness/contrast curve, desaturate, invert, auto contrast, HSV adjustment, pixelise, raindrops, oil paint, gaussian blur, motion blur, blur, lens blur, colour to alpha, color transfer, minimise channel, maximise channel, top/left/bottom/right edge detection, sobel, sharpen, mean removal, unsharp mask, gaussian noise removal, wavelet noise reducer, emboss horizontal only/in all directions//vertical only/with variable depth/horizontal and vertical, small tiles, round corners, phong bumpmap.
File formats supported
Krita's native document format is Krita Document. It can also save to many other file formats including PSD.| File formats | |
| Save to | Krita Document, OpenRaster document, PSD image, PPM, PGM, PBM, PNG, GIF, JPEG-2000, JPEG, Windows BMP, XBM, XPM, TIFF, EXR, PDF, Gimp image, WebP, SCML, ICO, TGA, CSV, QML |
| Import only | ODG draw, Krita Flipbook, Adobe DNG, Camera RAW, PDF, SVG, XML, XCF |
| Export only |
Mascot
Krita's mascot is Kiki the Cyber Squirrel, a robotic, anthropomorphic squirrel character created by Tyson Tan. The community collectively decided the mascot to be a squirrel. The first version of Kiki was posted to the KDE forum in 2012 and was used in Krita version 2.6's introduction booklet. Kiki has been used as Krita's startup splash screen since Krita version 2.8. So far, each new version of Krita has come with a new version of Kiki. Kiki has been used for Krita's merchandise shop items and Krita's Steam project artworks.Sprint events
Krita sprints are events during which Krita developers and artists get together for a few days, exchange ideas and do programming face-to-face, in order to speedup development and improve relationships between members.| Year | Date | Place |
| 2005 | / | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2010 | 26 February to 7 March | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2011 | 20 to 22 May | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| 2014 | 16 to 18 May | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2016 | 23 to 24 January | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2016 | 26 to 28 August | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2018 | 17 to 21 May | Deventer, Netherlands |
| 2019 | 5 to 9 August | Deventer, Netherlands |
Variations
- Krita Gemini, optimised for tablets and touch interaction.
- Krita Studio, commercially supported version for movie and VFX studios.