KRITA

Krita is a free, open source, multiplatform, professional digital painting program. It has been designed to offer all kinds of accessible tools so that conceptual art artists, matte painting and texture artists and illustrators can develop their full potential. It is a tremendously versatile application so we can also use it as a vector image editor and photo retouching tool.

This program has been developed for more than 10 years, growing rapidly in recent years, offering all kinds of common and innovative functions to help all kinds of users to make their creations, be they beginners or professionals.

The application offers us a large number of brushes and effects, which will offer us the possibility of working comfortably and efficiently with several layers. It includes support for most of the most popular and used image formats, as well as sections for palette management, retouching, cropping, and vector modification.

When you first launch Krita and create a new document, the first thing you do is to try the different brushes and check for stylus pressure support. I am happy to inform you that this application fully supports this feature, as you can see in the image above.

The application also has a lot of different brush presets to choose from. You can then change the settings of the brush by using the toolbar controls, to fit your needs. You can change things like color, size, opacity, or blending mode.

Another interesting feature, also available in Photoshop, is the ability to create shapes using paths. After you draw these, you can edit the points to change the shape of the path, and it gets updated in real time.

Of course, Krita would need to support images, because there are situations where you will need to use pre-made images for various reasons. Importing an image into Krita is as easy as dragging onto the canvas. The image is added as a new layer and you can also change the blending mode of this new layer. As a note, you can change the blending mode of any layer.

User interface

The Krita User Interface is one of its strengths as it is extremely intuitive. It has a way of working similar to that we can find in other programs such as Photoshop or Corel Painter, since we will have filters, layers, blending modes, brushes to warp and all kinds of possibilities. It is also possible to modify the keyboard shortcuts, so that we can adapt it to the tools that we use most frequently.

Pop-up palette

Krita has a powerful pop-up color palette that we can activate by right-clicking. From here, we can quickly choose any color and brush that we need. On the outside of the palette we will have the color picker that contains the colors that we have used most recently. With the Krita labeling system we can exchange the available brushes that appear on the screen, which we can configure from the Preferences section, at the top.