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Author Topic: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]  (Read 7062 times)

Mesa

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Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« on: February 06, 2014, 09:50:11 am »


(doesn't look good outside the dark background that nobody uses outside the DF sections)
Alright, as someone who's soon to be in a possession of a drawing tablet, I needed to switch to something that works nicely with tablets (unfortunately Gimp and Paint.NET are not very feasible for that) and a friend of mine (who's a professional artist) recommended me to use Krita.

And boy is it not awesome.
I'll let the features page speak for me.
Quote
Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters, is available for Linux and Windows and here you can find all the features that Krita has for you.

Interface and workspace:
Krita has a user-friendly interface. In Settings you can choose the color theme, which toolbars and dockers you want to use and edit the keyboard shortcuts. You can save a given set of dockers as a workspace and switch between them.


File Formats Supported:

Saves to:
.kra, OpenRaster document, PSD image, PPM, PGM, PBM, PNG, JPEG-2000, JPEG, BMP Windows, XBM, TIFF, EXR, PDF.

Import:
.kra, EXR, OpenRaster document, PSD image, Gimp image, PPM, PGM, PBM, PNG, JPEG-2000, PDF, ODG draw, BMP Windows, XPM, GIF, XBM, Krita Flipbook, Adobe DNG negative and Camera RAW.



Painting:
Krita has pixel, smudge, duplicate, filter, hairy, hatching, texture, chalk, color smudge, curve, deform, dyna, experiment (Alchemy), grid, particle, sketch and spray brushes.

Brush settings can be saved as presets and shared. Also, there is a full set of blending modes available when painting

and support for creating seamless textures to Krita (Image offset tool).

Canvas:
The canvas can be easily rotated and mirrored. The OpenGL canvas supports high-bit depth monitors. There is a large set of options available to create a no-distractions canvas-only painting mode.
 
Tools:
Krita has raster graphics and vector tools.

Vector tools: path, selection, text, artistic text, calligraphy, fill and gradient.

Raster tools: freehand, line, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, polyline, star, path, dynamic movement, multihand, crop, move, transform and warp, measure, fill, gradient, color picker, assistants, perspective grid, grid, select rectangle, select ellipse, freehand selection, select polygon, select outline, fill select, select similar colors, path select, zoom and pan.
 
Dockers:
Dockers or palettes are basic gui building blocks. Krita has the following dockers availables: preset selector, layer management, channel management, various color selectors, tool options, shape selector, composition docker, undo history, pattern selector, task sets, scripts and various dockers for working with vector objects.

Filters:
Filters can be used directly on a layer, or as filter masks or layers. The effect of a filter is previewed on the image itself. New filters can be written in the OpenShiva language.

Krita has the following filters: levels, color adjustment curves, brightness/contrast curve, desaturate, invert, auto contrast, HSV adjustment, pixelize, raindrops, oil paint, gaussian blur, motion blur, blur, lens blur, color to alpha, color transfer, minimize channel, maximize 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, rotative blur, zigzag, mosaic, ray, wave expansion, seamlesser, planes, central absorption, mirror impose, random noise, anti bullify, tunel2, caleidoscope, slices, sphere, stereographic projection, contraction, sectorize, sea, lens correction, roundify, hipno, tunnel, bullify, random pick, droste, ripples.

 
Layers:
Krita has raster layers, vector layers, filter layers, programmatically generated layers, group layers and file-backed layers. Layers can have transparency, filter and local selection masks. Layers can be dragged and dropped within Krita, between instances of Krita or as images to and from other applications.
Vector layers support text, vector shapes and filters on vector shapes.

The layers can be rotated, scaled, converted, sheared, and you can mirror all layers in an image.

 
Generators:
Generators create pixels and can be used in generator layers. Krita has the following generators: checkerboard, concentric circles, disco, fractal explorer, metaball, moire, perlin noise, plasma, radial gradient, singleball, sun ray and supernova.

Generators are written in the OpenShiva language, which makes easier extending the set of available generators.

 
Color management, Color models and Channel depths:
Krita supports the following color models for creating and editing images:
RGBA, Gray, CMYKA, Law, YCbCr, XYZ in 8 bits integer, 16 bits integer, 16 bits floating point, 32 bits floating point.
Krita always uses color management. On Linux, if the monitor is correctly setup with colord or oyranos (gui settings applications available for GNOME and KDE), the display calibration will be used automatically.

If none of those got you hooked up in any way, shape or form - it's also free, and even without that it beats a lot of other drawing programs out there.
Seriously, GET IT. I suck as much as I do but even I can have a ton of fun already with all those brushes and whatnot. It's amazing!
Or maybe everyone else is using it already and I'm the last person to realize that...

Still, give it a go, it won't cost you anything aside from a bit of free time (which you should have if you're into art anyway).
« Last Edit: February 06, 2014, 10:04:18 am by DarkDXZ »
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Skyrunner

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2014, 10:28:27 am »

Doesn't support svg? Terrible program must burn in hell /j


(Actually, I think no image program supports svg for obvious reasons :P)

Looking at screenshots, it looks like a nicely designed, pretty neat program. Have you used SAI tool? Can you compare the two? Where I live, most artists seem to use SAI, unless they use Photoshop.
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Svampapa

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2014, 11:40:10 am »

It's indeed pretty awesome.

Only sadface is that like many FOSS projects, it's quite Linux focused. The windows releases are rarely optimized enough to really shine, which results in somewhat erratic and sluggish behavior. At least that's been true on my attempts to use it.

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Urist McScoopbeard

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2014, 01:58:46 pm »

GIMP? Not good with tablets? I dont know what kind of gimp you're using.
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Svampapa

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #4 on: April 23, 2014, 08:26:58 am »

Just thought I'd bump this thread seeing as Krita has been updated.

Quote from: krita team
  • add support for reading PSD layer groups
  • new splash screen with recent files and links to the Krita website
  • save tags with special characters properly (bug 332708)
  • fix removing tags
  • restore native file dialogs on Windows
  • fix a bunch of memory leaks

Nothing major it seems, haven't tried it out myself yet. Plugged mem leaks sounds good though, maybe I can actually use it this time. :)

Edit: So I played around for an hour or so and wow. Smooth as silk, none of the stuttering problems I had last time and no crashes. Seems like they got it down to spec this time.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2014, 10:32:33 am by Svampapa »
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Yoink

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #5 on: April 23, 2014, 12:00:13 pm »

Might try it some day, since I haven't used my poor tablet in ages. :)
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #6 on: May 15, 2014, 02:58:30 am »

If you like sketching, like me, I'd actually recommend that you get MyPaint first and foremost. Latest 1.1.0 version for Windows here. What it lacks in digital manipulation capability, it more than makes up with realistic tools, and infinite canvas. It's perfect for creative drawing, as you're not boxing yourself into any specific size, and the various controls are very comfortable to use.

But if you really need the various filters, transforms and whatnot, you can always save your sketch/layout/unfinished work in MyPaint, and open it up in Krita - they use the same ORA format. That's what I do. ^_^
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The Fool

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #7 on: May 15, 2014, 09:41:29 am »

I've had this program sitting on my toolbar for a couple weeks now. FINALLY tried it, and I have to say I love it. The brushes are extremely customizable if you like playing with sliders, but there are enough presets that I didn't need to. The preset brushes feel a lot less sterile then PainterTool SAI, which is a big thing for me. I actually managed to finish a drawing within an hour for once on my first go with the program. XD
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jieke

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #8 on: September 11, 2019, 01:02:57 am »

A few months back I switched from macOS to Linux, so I had to find a Photoshop alternative. I started using Gimp and at first it seemed like the best option. But after a few weeks I started getting annoyed of some workflow issues and also its slowness.

That’s when I gave Krita a real chance, and I was amazed. It fulfils all my needs as a Photoshop replacement. Now I am using it on a daily basis I have yet to find a feature I miss. And compared to Gimp, it’s super fast.

It all depends on how you use Photoshop I guess, so I can’t speak for everyone. I use it a lot for my screen printing work (CMYK channel splitting, colour half-tone, …) and actually Krita’s workflow is better than Photoshop in this specific area.

I've got a XP-Pen Deco 01  Drawing Pad and after configuring the pressure curve correctly, it does the job!
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wierd

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #9 on: September 13, 2019, 10:57:55 pm »

Doesn't support svg? Terrible program must burn in hell /j


(Actually, I think no image program supports svg for obvious reasons :P)

Looking at screenshots, it looks like a nicely designed, pretty neat program. Have you used SAI tool? Can you compare the two? Where I live, most artists seem to use SAI, unless they use Photoshop.

Well, Inkscape supports .svg, and I use it for lineart images.  (It pairs very nicely with my snazzy used large format printer I picked up a month ago.) I used it along with photoshop, and waifu2x to enlarge/vectorize some spiderman coloring book pages for my nephews a few days back. (Printed 30"x40" !)   Also, CorelDraw does vectors, and would be better suited to fancy graphics.  I have seen some tutorials on how to make really nice vector images with it.

Vector data based images are really only practical if you are going to order large format prints though.

Speaking of-- If people want some large format prints, I can totally make some.  My printer is old, and has a max color resolution of 600dpi (meh), but it can do black halftone images at 1200 dpi, at up to 36" wide.  I only have banner paper (and 30" freezer paper) for it at the moment though.  Still, I can make prints on the cheap.
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scriver

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #10 on: October 03, 2019, 07:28:32 am »

Krita means chalk or crayon in Swedish. I wonder if they're from here.
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Sean Mirrsen

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Re: Krita - THE drawing program you should get [FREE!]
« Reply #11 on: October 05, 2019, 12:49:55 pm »

Krita means chalk or crayon in Swedish. I wonder if they're from here.
The Krita Foundation appears to be in the Netherlands, and the original development of the program's progenitor was possibly in Germany (where it was previously named, among other things, Krayon), so I think it's a fair assessment of the name's roots.

In other news, which aren't news to anyone already using it, Krita is still a great art program and is still complemented nicely by MyPaint for starting sketches and all kinds of prototyping artwork.
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