Krita

Krita

Krita 2.2
Developer(s)	KDE
Stable release	2.7.5 (27 October 2013 (2013-10-27)[1]) [±]
Preview release	2.8 Beta 2 (12 January 2014 (2014-01-12)[2]) [±]
Written in	C++
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows[3]
Type	Raster graphics editor
License	GNU General Public License v2
Website	krita.org

Krita (Swedish for crayon) is the digital painting and illustration software included based on the KDE Platform and Calligra Suite libraries. Designed as a digital painting and illustration suite, Krita is free software and distributed under GNU General Public License. It was released for the first time as a part of KOffice version 1.4.0, on June 21, 2005.

Krita's design emphasizes creating artwork from beginning to end as opposed to manipulating existing images. Therefore it has been influenced to an extent by software such as Corel Painter, but Krita supports a very different feature set than the most comparable applications. For example Krita developers included the ability to work with both bitmap and vector illustration on one hand, but deliberately choose to avoid high end photography plugins in favor of features more specific to painting and drawing.

Speed Painting by David Revoy using Krita 2.4

Vision

Krita's vision is defined on the official website as:

Origin of name

A README file accompanying Krita's source code states:

History

A "KImage Shop" was proposed by KDE founder Matthias Ettrich on 24 May 1999, following dissatisfaction with the GIMP's user interface.^[7] As that name clearly indicates, KImageShop was meant to be a Photoshop clone. Before any public release, it was called KImageShop and then later Krayon, until legal matters motivated a change from these names. As early as 2004 a desire for a change of focus was apparent: "I want Krita to occupy the niche Corel Painter has in the Windows world, not Photoshop."

Version 1.4

Krita 1.4 was released June 24th together with KOffice 1.4. It was the first public release of Krita since development started in 1998.

Version 1.5

Notable features introduced in the 1.5 release included CMYK, L*a*b and many more color spaces, with bit depths from 8 to 32 bits per channel.

Krita 1.5 also integrated with KOffice, allowing (among other things) embedding of KWord text components into images.

Version 1.6

The 1.6 release added support for handling perspective in drawings, including perspective transformation, perspective grid and perspective clone, layer masks, some enhanced tools such as a new magnetic selection tool and a bezier curves tool, many new filters and a PDF import tool.

Version 2.0

The first release based on the KDE Platform 4, this release included new brush engines such as Sumi-e, chalk and dynadraw, an OpenGL based canvas, clone layers and physically based image resolution display. Marked as a primarily a developers release for testing the port and new features.

Version 2.1

Largely a stability release, version 2.1 was marked as a release for early adopters, rather than general users. It featured new brushes including the deform and spray brushes (which has a similar functionality to image hose on other applications). It also included 3D representations of tools being used, an infinite canvas that let artists paint without a finite fixed canvas area and the dyna tool, used to simulate tablet pressure by instead using mouse velocity.

Version 2.2

Including over 1600 changes since Krita 2.1, Krita 2.2 included the first phase of fixes and features done by community sponsored coder, Lukáš Tvrdý. Version 2.2 introduced more new brush engines, a new brush settings preset system, new file filters for xcf, jpeg2000 and OpenEXR, action recording, a new core image handling system and a quick-access popup palette for recently used colors and brushes. 2.2 introduced many speed enhancements, mainly targeted at large scale brushes and canvases.

Version 2.3

Krita 2.3 (code named Chagall) was released on 30 December 2010 with 1120 updates.^[8] Chagall was notable for being the first KDE4 based release stated as being "ready for end users". It included new brushes such as the sketch and hatching brush, a transform / shear tool, a grid based warp tool and a new color space aware color selector which introduced a range of selector shapes, last used colors swatches, automatic color variant swatches (e.g. complimentary colors, triads, contrasting colors etc.). Chagall included speed increases such as a 400% increase in performance of the standard autobrush tool as well as pervasive multithreading. 299 bugs were also closed over version 2.2. Navigation enhancements included a stylus / middle mouse button only pan and zoom, OpenGL-based, lossless canvas rotation and an on canvas draggable brush size.

Version 2.4

Krita 2.4 (code named Mœbius after Jean Giraud aka Mœbius) was released on April 11, 2012. It added new brush engines, improvements to the existing brush engines and productivity features like mirrored painting, plus improvements in performance and compatibility with other applications. New resources added in Krita 2.4 included new default packs of patterns, gradients, brush tips and brush presets. The ability for users to exchange these kinds of resources through an online, server based sharing system ("Get Hot New Stuff" aka GHNS) was also introduced. Finally, strokes may now be influenced by a new range of sensors such as perspective guides, time and distance.^[9]

Version 2.5

Krita 2.5 was released on 13 August 2012. Some of the updates and new features include:

• Color smudge brush has been expanded with a "dulling" mode next to the "smearing" mode.
• New layer compositions docker makes it easy to create particular combinations of visible and invisible layers in the same image and switch between them
• Added several new shortcuts to increase/decrease opacity and lightness, duplicate layers, as well as inserting new layers.
• Smoother canvas interaction in many ways, too: color picking, canvas rotation, zoom and pan now work always the same way, no matter which tool is selected
• Interoperability with MyPaint and GIMP has improved through extending the OpenRaster file format: layer locks and the currently active layer are now stored in ORA (and KRA) files
• Visually select which autosave file to restore when Krita was killed by a power cut or a toddler with an affinity for pressing reset buttons
• Many bug fixes in the PDF importer

Version 2.6

Krita 2.6 was released on 5 February 2013. Some distributions have Krita 2.6 available in their backports/experimental repositories. Some of the key features that were added were the following:

• OpenColorIO color management system that complements ICC-based system
• Improved hardware-accelerated canvas
• Saving PSD files (both RGB and CMYK color models)
• Updated brushes and brush presets

Version 2.7

Version 2.7 was released Friday, August 2nd, 2013. Some of the features that were added include the following:

• Rewritten and hugely improved transform tool
• New line smoothing method for inking.
• Greyscale masks and selections.
• Brushes: the textured painting option has been added to many brushes, the darken brush option has a larger range, faster experimental brush engine with displacement option, the bug in the healing brush is fixed and we will have a smudge mode for the filter brush.
• Filters: HSL and colorize options are now available in tje HSV filter, one can apply a curve to the alpha channel with Color Curves filter, a new user interface for an improved " color to alpha" filter that makes it possible to pick colors from the canvas directly
• Files: support for CMYK to PSD export filter, loading resolution for PSD images is fixed, it's now possible to importing a PSD image as a layer into an existing image, QML export (exports a all the top-level layers in the Krita image as image and creates a QML file where all the images are inserted as image objects) and drag & drop of url’s.
• Texturing: Image offset tool (for creating seamless textures to Krita).
• Tools: you can now finally type upper-case characters in the text tool, there are improvements to the move tool. The path tools are improved: the pencil tool integrates better with Krita, shapes can be stroked with a Krita brush, fix the transformation of path strokes.
• Canvas: the performance of the OpenGL canvas on Linux has been improved. For Krita 2.8, OpenGL comes to Windows, too.
• Docker: new composition docker (stack can be browsed with up and down arrow; the compositions can be exported in one go).
• Layer: new file-backed layers, improved transforming of paint and vector layers, it's now possible to mirror all layers in an image.
• Usability and interface: improved zooming around cursor, two default workspaces (one for painting and one for working with vectors), now you can switch between favorite presets with left and right arrow keys and switch between current and previous shortcut with the / key, systems with multiple tablets and screens (for Cintiqs + classic tablet both connected to dual screen) now work fine, the display of marching ants around selection is improved, you can easily remove blacklisted resources from disk, you can select the most appropriate scale method, The Color button on the Krita toolbar opens the KDE color dialog which allows picking colors in other applications and selecting colors by numbers and there's a menu action to select all opaque pixels in a layer -- check the right-click menu in the layerbox.

Version 2.8 (future)

Planned to be released in January 2014. Some of the highlighted features are the following:

• tablet support - wrote our own tablet support to better support the Windows operating system. Drawing is much, much smoother because we can process much more information and issues with offsets are gone.
• OpenGL and Shaders - Improved zooming performance. Implemented a high-quality scaling algorithm on top of the modern, shader-based architecture.
• G'Mic - this new plugin makes it really easy to do things like color line-art
• Windows support - First stable release. While 2.7 has Windows support, it was known that it was still somewhat experimental and crashed more often.
• Clones Array Function - Helps create isometric(2.5D) art
• Wrap-around Drawing Mode - for making textures that need to be tiled seamlessly

Krita Sketch

On 02012-12-1414 December 2012, a new touch screen-optimized version of Krita called “Krita Sketch” was released.^[10][11] This was a joint collaborative work between Intel and Krita team for “a major marketing campaign”.^[11] Krita Sketch is mainly designed for Windows 7 and 8^[11] and uses “Modern UI” theme coined by Microsoft for Windows 8.^{[citation needed]}

Krita Sketch can be Downloaded from Intel AppUp.^[12]

Krita Foundation and Krita Studio

In December 2012, a foundation to support Krita was created.^[13]

In order to fund the development of Krita Desktop and Krita Sketch, KO GmbH launched a new commercially supported Version of Krita which is an extension of Krita Desktop to its use in movie and GFX studios.^[14]

See also

• Comparison of raster graphics editors
• Linux color management
• Comparison of office suites
• OpenRaster
• Blender (software)

References

v t e Calligra Suite Applications Words Sheets Stage Flow Karbon Krita Kexi Plan Braindump Architecture Flake Kross Pigment

v t e KDE Community KDE e.V. Akademy KDE.News Konqi People Matthias Kalle Dalheimer Matthias Ettrich Adriaan de Groot Frank Karlitschek Celeste Lyn Paul Nuno Pinheiro Cornelius Schumacher Aaron Seigo David Vignoni Software Compilation KDE 1 KDE 2 KDE 3 KDE SC 4 Applications Development Cervisia KDbg KDESvn KDevelop KImageMapEditor Kompare Lokalize Quanta Plus Umbrello Education Cantor KAlgebra Kanagram Kalzium KBibTeX KGeography KLettres KHangMan Kig Kiten kst KStars KTouch KTurtle KWordQuiz LabPlot Marble RKWard Rocs Step Games KAtomic KBounce Kolf KMines Graphics digiKam Gwenview Karbon KColorEdit KolourPaint KPhotoAlbum KPovModeler Krita KSnapshot Skanlite Internet Akregator KGet KMail KMLDonkey KNode Konqueror Konversation Kopete Kppp KRDC KTorrent Rekonq Multimedia Amarok Dragon Player JuK K3b K9Copy Kaffeine Kdenlive KMPlayer Office Okular Calligra Suite Words Sheets Stage Flow Karbon Krita Kexi Plan KAddressBook Kile KMyMoney Kontact KOrganizer KPilot Tellico System Dolphin KDE Partition Manager KDE System Guard KInfoCenter Konsole Yakuake Utilities Ark BasKet Note Pads KAlarm Kate KCalc KGPG Klipper KJots Krusader KRename KWallet KWrite RSIBreak Platform User interface K Desktop Environment 1 KDesktop Kicker SuperKaramba Plasma Basic KDM KWin DCOP Other Akonadi Flake KJS KHTML KIO Kiosk KIPI KParts Kross NEPOMUK NetworkManager Oxygen Phonon QtRuby Solid Sonnet Soprano Strigi ThreadWeaver XMLGUI freedesktop.org D-Bus GStreamer Poppler Wayland X.Org Server PulseAudio Packages Accessibility Bindings Education Games Graphics Multimedia Network SDK Utils Web Dev KOffice Extragear Forks Trinity Desktop Environment Category Project Commons