Krita

Krita

Krita 2.3.0
Developer(s)	KDE
Stable release	KOffice 2.3.3  (March 1, 2011 (2011-03-01)) [±]
Preview release	Calligra 2.4 Beta 6  (January 11, 2012 (2012-01-11)) [±]
Operating system	Cross-platform
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, and as such has been influenced to an extent by software such as Corel Painter. Krita, however 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 more painting / drawing specific features.

Speed Painting by David Revoy using Krita 2.4

Vision

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

"Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.

Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering.

Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response."

Origin of name

A "README" file accompanying Krita's source code states:

Krita is a paint application for raster images. It's also, according to the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

The first of four Hindu periods contained in the great Yuga, when the genius of Truth and Right, in the form of bull, stood firm on his four feet, and man gained nothing by iniquity.

In the Mahabharata, the name 'krita' is used in a context where this can be translated with 'perfect' - the perfect age.

Krita is Swedish for chalk and rita means "to draw".

History

Krita sprint
Year	Venue	Date
2005	Deventer, Netherlands
2010	Deventer, Netherlands	2/26-3/7
2011	Amsterdam, Netherlands	5/20-5/22

A "KImage Shop" was proposed by KDE founder Matthias Ettrich on 24 May 1999, following dissatisfaction with the GIMP's user interface. 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 1.5 release

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 release

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 release

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 release

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 release

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 release

Krita 2.3 (code named Chagall) was released on 30 December 2010 with 1120 updates. 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 (eg 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.

Future Development

Krita 2.4 is currently in development, with planned features including: Realistic simulation of paint color mixing, use of MyPaint brushes, a stable version of Krita for the Microsoft Windows operating systems, pervasive hotkeys, OpenCL, GPU hardware acceleration and further speed and stability optimizations.

See also

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