Krita - Detailed Information

Krita is a powerful digital painting and animation application designed for illustrators, designers, comic makers, animators, game artists and more. It’s used all over the world by artists of every level: from absolute beginners to seasoned professionals.

One big thing that sets Krita apart is that it’s fully open source and community-driven. This means that it’s developed transparently in coordination with a global community of volunteer artists and programmers, working together to make a great tool for everyone. There are no activation codes, mandatory subscription fees or other roadblocks, because as members of the digital art community, Krita belongs to all of us--to use, to modify, to design and to share.

Krita’s unique development model is only made possible thanks to the support of our users, and by buying through Steam you will be directly supporting Krita's future development. What’s more, buying Krita through Steam also brings the convenience of easy installation on all your supported devices and automatic updates each time a new version is released.

Finally, because Krita is an open source and community-driven project you will always have full access and rights to download and modify Krita's source code; whether you want to modify it for personal use, or work with the community to make Krita better for everyone. You can also download Krita for free from the Krita Foundation website (of course, without any of the benefits of owning through Steam). In order to create a potent tool for artists everywhere, we believe it has to be not only open source but also accessible to as many people as possible no matter their situation and resources. As such, for those who maybe can’t afford Krita or are still unsure about supporting our work, we encourage you to try it out first, hopefully supporting us later if you can, and only because you want to.

There's truly no limit to what Krita can be if we work together as a community.

Key Features

Powerful Brush Engines

Over a dozen different brush engines, supporting pressure sensitivity, tilt, rotation and other features of modern graphics tablets. Standard brushes, texture masked brushes, blender brushes, clone brushes, filter brushes, and many more! Every single one of them can be turned into an eraser or use any of the various blending modes. Krita includes over a hundred default brushes carefully produced or curated by professional artists, with many more available from the community online.


(Original artwork provided by Emmet O'Neill. All rights reserved by owner.)

Immersive Painting

Krita's unique pop-up palette and canvas-only mode allows you to hide almost all of the UI and immerse yourself in your artwork, putting brush preset selection, color selection, canvas adjustment and brush tweaks right at the tip of your pen.


(Original artwork provided by Ramón Miranda. All rights reserved by owner.)

Lovely Layers

Krita's layer stack supports a huge variety of different layers and masks, as well as various blending modes and effects for bringing them all together.

- Paint layers, group layers, filter layers, vector layers, clone layers, file layers and fill layers (with multiple types of fill, including programmable patterns using Seexpr)
- Transparency masks, filter masks, transform masks, colorize masks (which automatically fill the lineart with flat colors) and local selection masks
- Layer effects
- Alpha Inheritance
- Pass-through mode for group layers for compatibility with other software
- Non-destructive editing and unlimited nesting


(Original artwork provided by Ramón Miranda. All rights reserved by owner.)

Transformative Tools

Krita's Transform Tool supports everything from standard translation, scaling and rotation, to advanced perspective transformations, warping, liquification and mesh transformation.


(Modification of original artwork by David Revoy, licensed under CC-BY.)

Moving Pictures

Krita also comes with a host of useful tools for traditional frame-by-frame 2D animation and storyboarding with a dedicated timeline and onion skinning.


(Original artwork and animation provided by Emmet O'Neill. All rights reserved by owner.)

Personal Assistants

Krita's Assistant Tool will help you draw and paint even the trickiest subjects, with assistants for linear perspective, curves, ellipses and different kinds of rulers.
Configurable brush "magnetism" will keep your drawings tight and Krita's built-in brush stabilizer will keep your brushwork clean.


(Modification of original artwork by David Revoy, licensed under CC-BY.)

And even more!

- Powerful tools with a variety of options
- Instant wrap-around mode for ease of painting seamless textures and looping compositions
- A gallery of filters with real-time preview. You can use any filter as an effect layer or mask, for non-destructive workflows
- Multi-brush tool with various options, allowing drawing with any brush in perfect radial symmetry
- Texture patterns and gradient editor
- Extensive resource management for brushes, brush tips, gradients, Seexpr scripts, gamut masks, palettes, layer styles and more
- Many choices for the color selector, including built-in gradients and integrated gamut masks
- Several types of Fill Layers, including solid color, noise, pattern, gradient, screentone, geometric shapes in multigrid, and even programmable patterns using Seexpr scripting language
- Stabilizer for the Freehand Brush Tool, and multiple types of painting tools like Freehand Path tool or Dynamic Brush Tool for convenient drawing
- Over five hundred G’MIC filters
- Fully color managed workflow supporting a wide range of color models: RGB, CMYK, YCbCr, La*b*, XYZ, Grayscale
- Supports a wide range of 3rd party file formats: ORA (MyPaint), XCF (GIMP), JPEG, PNG, TGA, TIFF, BMP, PPM, PGM, PBM, XBM, SVG, WMF and partial support for PSD (Photoshop)
- Fully open source (C++, with GPL license) and scriptable (Python)
- A great online manual, and a fantastic, growing community!



Have some questions? Need some help? Feel free to stop by the support section of Krita-Artists for both official and community support. (And while you’re there, why not introduce yourself to and show off your artwork?)

Want to get involved in the Krita project? Definitely check out our "get involved" page over on the Krita website to learn how to get started.

**Welcome to the Krita Community.**

Have Fun and Make Some Art That’s Uniquely You!

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