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Krita is a bitmap imaging suite included as an integrated part of Koffice. It can be used for a range of image creation ranging from natural media painting, sketching and photo editing. It supports many image formats, colour modes and profiles. With a full feature-set, configurable gui and a strong focus on plain productivity, Krita is at home on every artist's desktop. Designed with digital artists in mind, Krita is a full featured and very powerful digital painting and illustration editor. Aiming to be the only digital editor you will ever need, Krita comes with a Wrap-Around Mode, multiple brush engines and blending modes, advanced selection and masking tools, symmetry tools and drawing aids, filters, effects, color management, and last but not least, layer control options.

Krita’s filters can be applied directly on your painting, or as a filter mask and layer. Besides filters, the application also bundles an interesting set of customizable special effects.

Krita has relied on Qt's graphics tablet support since Krita 2.0. We consciously dropped our own X11-level code in favour of the cross-platform API that Qt offered. And apart from the lack of support for non-Wacom tablets, this was mostly enough on X11. On Windows, the story was different, and we were confronted by problems with offsets, bad performance, no support for tablets with built-in digitizers like the Lenovo Helix. Krita’s advanced selection and masking tools, give you the edge you need in order to select and edit difficult parts of your canvases. You can easily select all kinds of shapes and add, remove, or intersect them by selection.

Krita is a complete and powerful digital painting application that focuses mainly on digital painting, but is also well suited for managing vector images and retouching photos. The fact is that Krita is very easy to be liked as it is clearly up there with the best digital illustrator apps and while being completely free, therefore, we totally recommend that you give it a try.

So, with leaden shoes, we decided to dive in, and do our own tablet support. This was mostly done by Dmitry Kazakov during a week-long visit to Deventer, sponsored by the Krita Foundation. We now have our own code on X11 and Windows, though still based on Qt's example. Drawing is much, much smoother because we can process much more information and issues with offsets are gone.

Features

Natural media paint tools
Non destructive filter layers
Filter brushes
Ability to combine both bitmap and vector art
Highly configurable interface
CMYK, LAB and other colour modes
A highly flexible brush engine
Tight integration with the rest of the Koffice suite.