Krita is an open source digital painting tool targeting painters, illustrators, comic artists and animators. As it originally started off as an image editor and Photoshop competitor, it also still retains many of those functionalities too.
Krita features a nice modern looking user interface with a good layout that may additionally be customised to individual user’s preferences. As it focuses on drawing and painting rather than photo editing, the brushes panel with nice thumbnails are prominently placed, but overall the interface is very similar to Photoshop. Other convenient features: a nice zoom slider; a few basic vector tools. Krita also has some basic animation abilities like e.g. onion skinning and key-frames.
In general, the Krita feels very much like Photoshop, their interfaces are similar and even the keyboard shortcuts are very close, which makes transitions and/or cross-overs between the both fairly straight-forward. However, Krita misses some heavy duty image manipulation tools a photographer would likely like to have, thus it’s better suited for drawing and painting – as it’s intended.
It’s good to know for workflow within courses that Krita may interchange files with Photoshop, i.e. Krita can open files created in Photoshop, and can also save images to Photoshop format – though Photoshop will not recognise Krita’s indigenous file format.
Krita’s homepage includes an extensive online manual and great array of video tutorials; more are available on Youtube. It’s further supported by a lively support community
Krita is a desktop app and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. It may be used in over 90 languages.
Link:
Krita
Provider:
Krita Foundation (Netherlands)
Costs:
free
Tutorial (by third party):
here
