Krita, The KDE Image Editor
Krita is the bitmap graphics editor included with the open source KDE KOffice suite. Designed to be both a painting application and a photo editor, Krita is free software and distributed under GNU General Public License. The KDE Image Editor was released for the first time as a part of KOffice 1.4.0 on June 21, 2005. Before any public release, KDE Image Editor was called KImageShop and then later Krayon, but due to legal issues, the name was changed to Krita
Krita's design emphasizes creating new images as opposed to manipulating existing photographs like some image editing programs. KDE Image Editor has been influenced to an extent by the Corel Painter application. Notable features that were recently added in the 1.5 version include: CMYK, L*a*b and many more color spaces, with bit depths from 8 to 32 bits per channel. Work is ongoing on support for natural painting tools that imitate painting or drawing with pencils, paint brushes with ink or oil paints, or even simulating the drying of the paint. Krita KDE Image Editor aims to be the first publicly available paint program with realistic color mixing.
Krita KDE Image Editor can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image file formats such as tiff, png, and jpeg. Other image formats, like xcf, can be imported and sometimes exported through the GraphicsMagick import/export plug-in, but are not fully supported.
Krita has a large array of tools. The latest release, 1.6, contains freehand, line, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, polyline, star, bezier curve, duplicate, paint-with-filters, crop, move, transform, perspective transform, contiguous fill, gradient, text, 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. All paint tools can be used in soft brushes, hard pencil, and airbrush or eraser mode. A SIOX-like foreground extraction is in the works. Krita KDE Image Editor also features complete integration with KOffice allowing, among other things, embedding of KWord text into images. The 1.6 release added support for handling perspective in drawings, including perspective transformation, perspective grid and perspective clone, layer masks, some enhanced tools like a new magnetic selection tool, many new filters, and a PDF import tool. Currently future developing is being focused on KDE 4, for which natural painting tools are planned, but also better KOffice integration, better performance, and making the program more feature rich.
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