The software is also available as paid software, distributed on Microsoft Store, Steam, Epic Games Store, and Mac App Store. The paid version has automatic update and used to support the development of the software.
Name
The project's name "Krita" is primarily inspired by the Swedish words krita, meaning "crayon" (or chalk), and rita which means "to draw" as well as Sanskrit कृत (kṛta) which means "made"/"done".
History
The Krita team in 2014
Free web comic Pepper&Carrot artwork by David Revoy (left) is drawn in Krita. In 2022, Revoy made an interpretation of Krita's mascot, Kiki (right).
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.[7] In years between 2004 and 2009, Krita was developed as a generic image manipulation software like Photoshop and GIMP.[8]
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.[9]
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.[citation needed]
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:[15]
User experience design
Krita's right-click HUD, the Popup-palettePencil tool work
Krita's UX was designed 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:
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
Controls of one of Krita's many brush enginesKrita's stock brushes
Painting tools
Krita's core digital painting tools include:
Brushes
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 (curves)
Freehand (lasso)
Scale
Highly adjustable
Ellipses
Polygon
Shear
Remembers settings for each physical pen
Perspective
Outline
Perspective
Pen stabilizer
Vanishing point
Fill
Warp
Multibrush painting support
Fish-eye point
Color
Cage
Krita's animation workspace (4.0 version)
Animation tools
Krita's animation tools are designed for frame-by-frame raster animation. They have the following features:
Krita uses vector tools for non-destructive editing of the following objects:
Path
Selection
Text (artistic, multiline, calligraphy)
Vector art
Fill and gradient
Krita's layer and mask controls
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
Customisation
Krita's resource manager
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
Customisable Brushes and Brush Engine[16] allows advanced users to create custom scripts on brush behavior, patternlike textures, geometrically shaped brushes and simulated blending through programming, most notably via Python[17] pluggin support however, other programming languages are also supported like Lua.
Workspaces allow UI customizations for different workflows to be saved and loaded on demand.
Text quality on Krita's OpenGL canvas with non-integer zooming, rotation and mirror
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.
Krita's colour space loader
Full colour management is supported in Krita with the following capabilities:
Assign and convert between colour spaces
Realtime colour proofing, including colour-blind mode
Colour model supported: RGBA, Grey Scale, CMYKA, Law, YCbCr, XYZ
Colour depth supported: 8-bit integer, 16-bit integer, 16-bit floating point, 32-bit floating point
Filters
Krita's G'MIC filter controls
Krita has a collection of built-in filters and supports G'MIC filters. It has real-time filter preview support.
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, colour 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/(laplacian)/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 (.kra). It can also save to many other file formats including PSD.
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.
