Krita 2.9 Review, And Overview of The Key Features

For those who don’t already know it, Krita is an open source digital painting software of a rare quality! It is an excellent tool to do concept art, illustration or to draw manga or comics. It is suitable for game artists as well, hobbyists and professionals alike. In this video, I want to give you a broad overview of what Krita has to offer. You can download the software for free on Krita.org. It is updated often, so I advise you to follow the developers on social networks. Once you have launched Krita, you can close the welcome window and create a new document using the shortcut CTRL N. Let’s create a custom document, by selecting the 2nd option in the left column. In the image size category, we are going to enter 1920 in “Width” and 1080 in “Height”. We can then click on the Create button in the bottom right corner. We get an empty document with a single layer, filled with white. We are first going to add a layer using the insert key. You can see the newly created layer in the “layers” tab on the right side of the interface. It is a classic layer manager with folders, masks, but also flexible filter layers, a bit like Photoshop’s smart filters. On the left, we have a toolbar, as in most drawing software. On this toolbar, we can find the Almighty brush tool. Like Photoshop’s counterpart, it is a single tool that simulates all sorts of drawing feels. You can find the long list of default brushes in the bottom right corner of the interface. Pencils, putty knives, or even shadow patterns, for those of you who are interested in mangas… There are all sorts of tools and effects at your disposal. By right clicking on the canvas, you can bring up a shortcut wheel. It gives you a fast access to all brushes tagged as favorites, and it features a color picker. You can’t pick a brush just by clicking on it on the wheel. You still have to activate the brush tool itself in the toolbar or to press the B key. Once the brush is active, we can freely paint on the document. At any time, you can toggle the document’s symmetry by pressing the M key. This is very handy to quickly see if we made any mistakes while drawing. Krita also possesses an integrated stabilizer that improves your strokes in real time. This option adds some delay to your input, but you can tweak and deactivate it in the “Tool Options” tab at the bottom right of the window. Krita handles the eraser in a peculiar way: there is no eraser tool separate from the brush tool in the toolbar. The eraser mode is activated when a brush is selected by pressing the E key. By pressing E again, the eraser mode is deactivated and we can paint again using our brush. This means that when you use this shortcut, your eraser will actually have the same shape and feel as your brush. It won’t be a separate shape. However, you can use Krita’s shortcut wheel to jump from your brush to a specific type of eraser pretty fast. All of Krita’s brushes are set up and can be tweaked using its multiple, powerful brush engines. You can access those parameters by clicking on the icon that resembles a brush on the top navigation bar. Every single aspect of the tool can be assigned to a parameter and tweaked using a curve. This facilitates the creation of new brushes because everything works according to a unique principle. This is also very flexible, as you can fine-tune everything. With Krita, you can both paint in axial and radial symmetry, in multiple ways. It is not only possible to use any kind of drawing tool in symmetry thanks to the 2 dedicated buttons in the top navigation bar. There is also a tool called “Multibrush” with which you can draw multiple strokes at the same time. This permits you to create rich patterns easily. The flood fill as well as the magic wand selections are especially clean in this software. This is something I’m fond of because Photoshop is seriously weak in that regard. Krita is capable of filling any portion of a drawing without affecting the painting’s quality. It is also possible to set up the flood fill to expand or shrink it down relative to the fill area. That is quite useful for both comic artists and game artists. Krita has another strong point: the variety of its transform modes. You can activate the transform tool by pressing “CTRL T”. The software not only possesses all of the classic functions to scale, shrink and shear your selection, but also the perspective deform type, 2 sorts of cage transforms and a Liquify mode, to freely deform any selection. There is a functionality in particular that I love: the ability to rotate your transform in space. When you are in transform mode, you just have to keep the control key down and to click and drag outside of the transform zone. So far, we have talked about some of Krita’s advantages. Let us now talk a bit about the limits of version 2.9. First of all, by default, I think it lacks shortcuts. There is a number of very useful functions in the software to which you will have to assign your own keyboard shortcuts, like the essential fill tool. It is not possible either to assign the same shortcut to multiple tools at the same time as in Manga Studio or Photoshop. Krita mostly shows serious performance issues on big documents or when performing resource heavy operations. This can be a handicap if you have to create illustrations for print or large textures. However, as I mentioned in the previous video, Krita’s developers just got the next version funded on Kickstarter, and the software is evolving really fast thanks to that. The next major version should bring serious performance improvements as far as painting is concerned. Version 3 should also integrate a fully-fledged traditional animation toolset in the style of TVPaint (awesome). In this video, we haven’t spent time on the details of each tool and function in Krita. The goal was to give you a global overview of what the software has to offer. Krita is full of interesting ideas that sometimes even its rivals lack! For example, it is possible to instantiate shapes, to replicate your canvas to paint textures easily, and much more. All sorts of functions we will explore in greater details in the future. That’s it for today! Please don’t hesitate to like the video and to become a subscriber! This helps new people to find them on Youtube. Do you have questions, critiques or suggestions? Please tell me in the comments below. I want to thank you kindly for watching. ♥ Be creative, have fun… until next time! ♥