Krita Desktop is a free an open source painting application. Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital 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.
Krita has a user-friendly interface. 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.
In addition to painting, Krita comes with vector, filter, group, and file layers. Combine, order, and flatten layers to help your artwork stay organized. There are also three different views on how to see the layers.
Krita supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR, allowing you to incorporate Krita into your existing color management pipeline.
Open PSD files that even Photoshop cannot open. Load and save to PSD when you need to take your artwork across different programs.
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.
Krita 3.3.0 changelog:
- Alvin Wong has implemented support for the Windows 8 event API, which means that Krita now supports the n-trig pen in the Surface line of laptops (and similar laptops from Dell, HP and Acer) natively. This is still very new, so you have to enable this in the tablet settings.
- Refactored Krita’s hardware-accelerated display functionality to optionally use Angle on Windows instead of native OpenGL. That means that many problems with Intel display chips and broken driver versions are worked around because Krita now can use Direct3D indirectly.
There are more changes in this release, of course:
- Some visual glitches when using hi-dpi screens are fixed (remember: on Windows and Linux, you need to enable this in the settings dialog).
- If you create a new image from clipboard, the image will have a title
- Favorite blending modes and favorite brush presets are now loaded correctly on startup
GMIC
- the plugin has been updated to the latest version for Windows and Linux.
- the configuration for setting the path to the plugin has been removed. Krita looks for the plugin in the folder where the krita executable is, and optionally inside a folder with a name that starts with ‘gmic’ next to the krita executable.
- there are several fixes for handling layers and communication between Krita and the plugin
Some websites save jpeg images with a .png extension: that used to confuse Krita, but Krita now first looks inside the file to see what kind of file it really is.
PNG
- 16 and 32 bit floating point images are now converted to 16 bit integer when saving the images as PNG.
- It’s now possible to save the alpha channel to PNG images even if there are no (semi-) transparent pixels in the image
- When hardware accelerated display is disabled, the color picker mode of the brush tool showed a broken cursor; this has been fixed.
- The Reference Images docker now only starts loading images when it is visible, instead on Krita startup. Note: the reference images docker uses Qt’s imageio plugins to load images. If you are running on Linux, remove all Deepin desktop components. Deepin comes with severely broken qimageio plugins that will crash any Qt application that tries to display images.
- File layers now correctly reload on change again
Add several new commandline options:
- –nosplash to start Krita without showing the splash screen
- –canvasonly to start Krita in canvas-only mode
- –fullscreen to start Krita full-screen
- –workspace Workspace to start Krita with the given workspace
Selections
- The Select All action now first clears the selection before selecting the entire image
- It is now possible to extend selections outside the canvas boundary
Other changes
- Performance improvements: in several places superfluous reads from the settings were eliminated, which makes generating a layer thumbnail faster and improves painting if display acceleration is turned off.
- The smart number input boxes now use the current locale to follow desktop settings for numbers
- The system information dialog for bug reports is improved
macOS/OSX specific changes
- Bernhard Liebl has improved the tablet/stylus accuracy. The problem with circles having straight line segments is much improved, though it’s not perfect yet.
- On macOS/OSX systems with and AMD gpu, support for hardware accelerated display is disabled because saving to PNG and JPG hangs Krita otherwise.
Download: Krita 3.3.0 (32-bit) | Portable | ~100.0 MB (Open Source)
Download: Krita 3.3.0 (64-bit) | Portable
Download: Krita Windows App Store (commercial software)
View: Krita Home Page