Krita - free digital painting and illustration

[tproli]

Krita

Krita is a FREE digital painting and illustration application.

Krita offers CMYK support, HDR painting, perspective grids, dockers, filters, painting assistants, and many other features you would expect.

Krita is an open source sketching and painting application created to offer digital artists the means to create detailed works of art using intuitive tools and if necessary, to customize it so it perfectly fits their needs.

The application provides users with both a classic and a new set of tools. Using Krita you are able to export your creations to PSD, PPM, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and PDF formats.

As is expected, Krita offers you both vector and raster tools to aid you with your work. You also get smudge, filter, hatching, texture, curve and spray brushes for which you can create custom profiles.

With Krita you can enjoy a very large number of filters amongst which levels, curves, glur, color to alpha, sharpen, sobel and unsharp are found.

Website
https://krita.org/

Requires Vista or above.

Portability: saves settings to %Appdata% by default. The application needs only an environment variable set to save settings to a custom directory. Trolltech keys are added to the registry.

Forum topic on Krita's portability:
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=137&t=123689

yaP launcher config:
http://rolandtoth.hu/yaP/#examples/Krita.ini

[shnbwmn]

Krita 3.0 released (The Animation Release) Full changelog

The yaP launcher unfortunately won't work with it (see here for why). Until this is fixed, use the 2.9 series (last version 2.9.11). The PAF dev version is still at version 2.9.7.6.

Krita 3.0 load and saves its configuration and resources in a different place than 2.9 so it’s possible to use both versions together without conflicts.

Note that the "portable" 3.0 builds on the Krita download page write their settings to %LocalAppData%/krita and %AppData%/krita.

[shnbwmn]

Update: Krita Portable (3.0) @ PortableApps (announcement).

[webfork]

Krita Portable (3.0) @ PortableApps

I'm so far very impressed with this program: there's a remarkable amount of functionality built into this.

Krita is similar to other paint type programs like Artweaver, ArtRage, and MyPaint. MyPaint is also open source but not in active development.

[shnbwmn]

MyPaint is also open source but not in active development.

The program itself or the WinPenPack launcher? MyPaint seems to be in very active development: https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint

[webfork]

MyPaint is also open source but not in active development.

The program itself or the WinPenPack launcher? MyPaint seems to be in very active development: https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint

Thanks for the clairification. Yes, just the WinPenPack version, as you the changelog includes recent updates.

[webfork]

This program is a lot of fun to play with. I blew 20 mins easily just exploring the various different available brushes. Kind of relaxing as well.

[shnbwmn]

• Krita 3.1 Released

• OSX is fully supported from now on. The OpenGL canvas works just as well as everywhere else.
  There might still be OSX-specifc bugs, of course! But now is the time for OSX and MacOS fans to
  use Krita and report any issues they might come across.
• Krita can now, with FFmpeg render an animation to gif, mp4, mkv and ogg.
• There is now automated tweening of opacity between frames in an animation. You can color-code
  frames in the timeline, and animate the raster content of filter layers, fill layers and masks.
• There is a new color selector, accessible with the dual color button on the top toolbar. This color
  selector supports selecting HDR colors, colors outside the sRGB gamut of your screen. It can pick
  colors from Krita windows accurately and has much nicer support for working with palettes.
• The Quick Brush engine is a really fast and really simple brush engine.
• There is a stop-based gradient editor in addition to the existing segment-based gradient editor
• We added a halftone filter

• More details @ https://krita.org/en/release-notes-for-krita-3-1/
  
  

[webfork]

Krita 3.2.0 is out with a lot of changes since the last post:
http://linux.softpedia.com/progChangelo ... -2254.html

[webfork]

I retested v.3.2.1 but unfortunately it's still writing to AppData. The documentation specifically refers to it https://docs.krita.org/KritaFAQ so I'm thinking the only way around this is with a wrapper program.

[Midas]

Topic update: Krita v4.1.7 released, dated 2018-12-13 (announcement at https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-1-7-released/; major release notes at https://krita.org/en/krita-4-1-release-notes/; it should be noted that Krita v4.2 is already in the works and major changes are already announced at https://krita.org/en/krita-4-2-release-notes/).

Most importantly, Stephen Leibowitz posted a batch based portability workaround at viewtopic.php?p=93211#p93211 (FTR, originally posted at https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?p=416324#p416324).

BTW, the last link also points towards Krita Portable, the PortableApps.com package, currently fully updated and available from portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/krita-portable.

Highlight due to Krita's release notes including a video to detail new features:

[douniu]

I've been told multiple times that Photoshop is industry standard when it comes to digital art, but I never really understood why. So I just wanted to see what other people thing. Btw, everyone who told me you can't do anything in Krita is into graphic design and photo manipulation, not painting. And I agree, Photoshop is the best for those things, but not for painting (imo) SAI is ok but you can do all of that in Krita plus much much more.

I tried Photoshop as well and Krita is still superior imo, especially with brushes. I simply don't understand why some people think Photoshop is a must for digital art.

Seconded. If you're looking to use a drawing tablet (I have a xp-pen deco pro) and you want some good brushes and hand drawing functionality, you also can get Krita as an option.

[mossydoodle]

I've been searching for something similar and free. Sometimes it's better to try unknown brands than popular ones,

[Midas]

Krita v4.2.8 released 2019-11-27 (announcement at https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-2-8-released/).

Apparently, Krita is really popular with the Windows crowd:

... 1,500,000 distinct Windows 10 users of Krita in the past month...

@ https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-2-8-released/

FYI, Krita now advertises native portability (untested!): get the corresponding ZIP files from https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/4.2.8/.

[webfork]

Added to the database: https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=2994 ... please vote.

---

I actually met the developer of Krita and talked to him about portability. This is the one and only time I've ever done this for anything but occasional developers. He was a very nice guy and seemed receptive so I think I was hoping he would eventually follow through on that. Maybe he figured the PA version was more than adequate.