Krita

About

Krita

Krita is a free open-source raster graphics editor built primarily for digital painting, concept art, comics, and illustration. The application began as part of the KDE community in 1998 and now operates under the Krita Foundation, a Dutch non-profit established in 2013 to steward the project. Krita runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux under the GNU General Public License, with development coordinated on the KDE infrastructure.

Krita traces its history to 1998, when developer Matthias Ettrich started the KImageShop project inside the young KDE desktop community. Successive rewrites moved the project through the Krayon name and then, in 2004, to Krita as part of the KOffice productivity suite. Krita separated from that suite as it grew into a dedicated painting application, and in 2013 developer Halla Rempt, formerly Boudewijn Rempt, helped launch the Stichting Krita Foundation, a Dutch non-profit that now employs core developers, manages release planning, and channels donations, sponsorships, and Kickstarter proceeds into full-time work on the codebase. The application targets illustration and digital painting rather than photo retouching. Its brush engine ships with more than a hundred preset brushes and multiple stabilizer modes, and users can build custom brushes from scratch through the engine parameters. Wraparound-tile mode supports seamless texture painting, HDR channels and OCIO color management enable print-aware and film-VFX workflows, and vector layers, animation frames, and reference image docks sit alongside the raster tools. Krita reads and writes PSD files well enough for visual iteration, supports OpenRaster natively, and exchanges standard PNG, JPEG, TIFF, EXR, and OpenEXR formats with other applications. Development is coordinated through KDE's Invent Git infrastructure, with public issue tracking, translations across dozens of languages, and long-term-support release branches for studios that need stability guarantees. The Krita Foundation publishes the software free under the GNU General Public License while offering paid Steam and Microsoft Store editions whose revenue funds full-time developers. Community channels include the official website, Twitter as @artwithkrita, YouTube tutorial series, and a large active Reddit community. Educational institutions, comics artists, matte painters, and concept-art studios use Krita as a Photoshop alternative that has been engineered from the start around brushwork rather than retouching, and the application has been included in the KDE Applications release cycle since its earliest KOffice days.