Features
Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and spectral colorspaces, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel! We support color management through ICC and OpenCTL.
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: there are freehand, line, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, polyline, star, bezier curve, duplicate, crop, move, transform, perspective transform, contiguous fill, gradient, 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 tools.
Instead of creating a separate tool for every type of brush, all brush engines (like pixel brush, sumi-e, filter paint, eraser) can be used with all painting tools. Even on selections!
Krita has image layers, group layers, filter layers, shape layers that can contain text or vector data, clone layers, as well as filter, transparency and selection masks.
Krita is scriptable in Python and Ruby, although the scripting interface is in flux at the moment and is not included in Krita 2.0.
There is a rich set of filters for image enhancement, color enhancement and artistic reinterpretation of your image. Apart from filters, there is also support for generators: plugins that create fills computationally.
Krita supports opengl, both for display and — experimentally — for developing filters with.
There is great support for tablets: you can have a different tool and brush engine for every wacom stylus you have, as well as for the mouse. Having the mouse set to pan and your stylus to brush is a very effective way of working!
Krita provides the very innovative and experimental “painterly” colorspaces, that allow you to mix colors as colors are mixed in the real world in a mixing canvas, or on screen.
Text and vector functionality is provided through KOffice’s Flake technology: you can add multi-paragraph text or artistic text — that is, text on a path — by simply dragging a shape object on your image. The same goes for vector shapes and even weirder things, like editable musical notation or mathematical formula’s.
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.
