Krita

Version 1.6.3
© 2000-2008 the Krita Team

Winner of the 2006 Akademy Award for Best Application

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. Krita contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images.

Krita 1.6.2 -- photograph by Balachandran Chandrasekharan

Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 will be held in Wroclaw, Poland this year. Krita developers, generously sponsored by KDE e.V., will attend this event, which is the most important meeting for developers and users of Free graphics software. Funding is low, and we really want to have as broad as possible a meeting, so the organizers ask your help with organizing this year's meeting:

In only two years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has become a hugely important meeting place for free software graphics developers. With surveys showing that the main gaps in the Linux desktop offering now are graphics applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, AutoCAD), the conference becomes even more vital to the advancement of the free software desktop.

Thank you for your help!

Press

Dan Sawyer reviews Krita in Linux Journal:"Build from the ground up on LCMS, Krita's 32-bit color management system is flanked by well-built, sophisticated tools for accessing it... making it suitable for a broad range of professional graphics demands...This workflow streaming is great...The number of drawing tools is rivaled only by Photoshop and there a few nifty enhancements in this area where Krita outdoes the venerated veteran from Adobe." (Dan Sawyer, "Deep Images", Linux Journal 159, July 2007)

Help the Krita Team!

The Krita team needs a new set of advanced Wacom Intuos graphics tablets so we can develop painting tools that make use of stylus tilt and the new advanced 6 degrees of freedom Art Pen -- that allows you to rotate your stylus. Please see our Dot story or donate directly:

Features

Development on Krita was started in 1999. However, due to frequent changes of maintainer and long pauses between bursts of development wasn't ready for use until 2005. Now Krita is a reasonably capable image editor and a great platform for future development.

Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel! With the development of KOffice 2.0, all these colorspaces will be available to all KOffice applications that need color management. An experimental watercolor colorspace that tries to follows the physics of paint is included in 1.5.

Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg. Other image formats, like xcf, can be imported and sometimes exported through the GraphicsMagick import/export plugin, but are not fully supported.

Krita has a large array of tools. The 1.6 release contains freehand, line, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, polyline, star, bezier curve, duplicate, paint-with-filters, crop, move, transform, perspective transform, contiguous fill, gradient, text, color picker, pan, zoom, perspective grid, selection paint, selection erase, rectangular select, elliptical select, polygonal select, contiguous area (magic wand), outline, magnetic selection, bezier curve select and select by similar colors. All paint tools can be used in soft brushes, hard pencil, airbrush or eraser mode. SIOX-like foreground extraction is in the works.

Krita has image layers, group layers, adjustment layers and the innovative part layers: any KOffice document can be embedded as a layer in Krita.

Krita is scriptable in Python and Ruby and offers a small, but useful DCOP interface. Krita 2.0 will also be dbus-enabled.

There is a rich set of filters for image enhancement, color enhancement and artistic reinterpretation of your image.

Krita is a very modular application and if you want, you can easily extend Krita by creating new tools, paint modes, filters, dialogs, colorspaces and import and export filters. Most of these plugins are described in the "Developing Krita Plugins" document. Krita also has an extensive user manual.

Documentation

• Developing Krita Plugins - also a work in progress. A manual on writing C++ plugins for Krita.
• Manual - a work in progress, but rapid progress. By Sander Koning, Boudewijn Rempt, Casper Boemann and Cyrille Berger.
• FAQs

Plugins

• Krita-Plugins, this project contains tools and filters for 1.6 which extends the feature set of Krita.

Presentations

• The presentation Boudewijn Rempt and Cyrille Berger gave at the 2007 Libre Graphics Meeting. (As ogg: http://people.xiph.org/~giles/2007/lgm/LGM_20070505-4-Rempt_Berger.ogg
• Michael Thaler's 2006 presentation on Krita at Linux Info Tag in Augsburg. (German)
• The slides for Bart Coppens' Krita presentation at Fosdem 2006.
• The slides for the Krita presentation at aKademy 2005.

Blogs

• Fading Memories blog on Krita, by Boudewijn Rempt
• News from development on Krita, by Cyrille Berger
• Bart Coppens' Blog
• Boemann's Blog

Development

Who's working on what, and what's planned to be done can be found on the Krita TODO and who's doing what page.

To join the development, contact one of the developers or join the KImageShop (Krita) mailing list. To join the list, send mail to kimageshop-request@kde.org with the subject "subscribe your email address". Please don't include a signature or other information that would confuse the list server that processes your request. There is a mailing list archive at http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-kimageshop.

Read also the Developing Krita document for a high-level overview of the architecture of Krita, and Painters and Paint Devices for information on the 2D canvas library that is at the heart of Krita.

Libraries Krita currently uses

Krita depends on the following libraries, apart from what KOffice needs itself:

• Image Magick X11 Image Processing and Display Package
• Little CMS — a free color management system in 100K
• OpenEXR

Inspiration

The following applications, not all of them free, provided some inspiration for Krita:

Free:

• The Gimp (The GNU Image Manipulation Program)
• GSumi (Simulation of brush or pen and ink drawing)
• Wet Dream (Watercolor paint simulation), see also An Architecture for "natural" brush types.
• A Gimp Brush Proposal -- never implemented, I guess, but interesting nonetheless.

(Non free:)

• Corel Painter (the descendant of Fractal Painter)
• DogWaffle
• e-Paint
• Smoothdraw
• Pixarra Sketchbook

Academic:

(These dissertations are made available for non-commercial purposes by Bill Baxter on his projects webpage)

• Wet & Sticky -- dissertation by Tunde Cockshott on modelling wet paint.
• Applying Color Science to Computer Graphics -- dissertation by Kenneth Paul Fishkin.
• Physically based interactive painting -- dissertation by Bill Baxter.
• dAb Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes
• IMPaSTo - A realistic, Interactive Model for Paint