At the Oslo Maker Faire last month I met a digital artist name Christina, (You can check out her website here ) In the course of our conversation I happened to ask what software she was useing. Turns out it's a free program that works a lot like Photoshop except it's more artist oriented. It's called Krita (Check it out on the main website)
So over the course of the past week I've downloaded the program and started checking it out.
Cool features that are immediately apparent:
It's free: Hard to believe once you start looking at the program but true.
Mirror canvas feature. Handy for mapping out a face, or anything else you want to be the same on either side of the middle line. You can turn it on and off at will and the program only mirrors what you are currently painting. Really nice.
A variety of brushes and a handy dandy colour selector. The brushes are SO COOL! It's like a cross between Corel Painter with realistic brushes and Photoshop with easy to use colour selector.
Can save to a variety of formats: Handy because I can just save my files as Photoshop files and touch them up until I know how to do that in Krita.
Shortcuts to resizeing brushes and colour pallete: Saves some time, pretty handy.
Layers: these are just like in Photoshop and just as handy
Less handy features:
There is no dedicated blur tool. I love pencils so I also love blur and smudging but I haven't found a computer program that does it really nicely yet. But you can set up some brushes to blur, how exactly I'm not sure but just like in photoshop the blurring causes some laggyness.
The program is prone to lag a bit more than Photoshop even when all you're doing is some simple painting.
When you first get in and you click on say, the eyedropper tool it can be confusing to find out how to get back into brush mode. (turns out it's the squiggly icon in the toolbar) I spent my first hour or so saving my file, closing and reopening the program to get back into brush mode before I figured that little tidbit out.
So anyway, that's my program review and here is the first painting I did:
So over the course of the past week I've downloaded the program and started checking it out.
Cool features that are immediately apparent:
It's free: Hard to believe once you start looking at the program but true.
Mirror canvas feature. Handy for mapping out a face, or anything else you want to be the same on either side of the middle line. You can turn it on and off at will and the program only mirrors what you are currently painting. Really nice.
A variety of brushes and a handy dandy colour selector. The brushes are SO COOL! It's like a cross between Corel Painter with realistic brushes and Photoshop with easy to use colour selector.
Can save to a variety of formats: Handy because I can just save my files as Photoshop files and touch them up until I know how to do that in Krita.
Shortcuts to resizeing brushes and colour pallete: Saves some time, pretty handy.
Layers: these are just like in Photoshop and just as handy
Less handy features:
There is no dedicated blur tool. I love pencils so I also love blur and smudging but I haven't found a computer program that does it really nicely yet. But you can set up some brushes to blur, how exactly I'm not sure but just like in photoshop the blurring causes some laggyness.
The program is prone to lag a bit more than Photoshop even when all you're doing is some simple painting.
When you first get in and you click on say, the eyedropper tool it can be confusing to find out how to get back into brush mode. (turns out it's the squiggly icon in the toolbar) I spent my first hour or so saving my file, closing and reopening the program to get back into brush mode before I figured that little tidbit out.
So anyway, that's my program review and here is the first painting I did:
So, over all, I'm pretty impressed with Krita. I think I'll still be using Photoshop a bit, but Krita is setting itself up to be my new favourite thing to do on the computer.
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