Krita

Krita is the bitmap graphics editor software included with the KDE based KOffice suite. Designed to be both a painting application and a photo editor, Krita is free software and distributed under GNU General Public License. It was released for the first time as a part of KOffice version 1.4.0, on June 21, 2005. Before any public release, it was called KImageShop and then later Krayon, but legal matters motivated a change from these names.

Krita's design emphasizes creating new images as opposed to manipulating existing photographs. It been influenced to an extent by Corel Painter. As of 2006, many plugins written over the years for these other applications were not yet available for Krita.

Notable features found in the 1.5 release include CMYK, L*a*b and many more colorspaces, 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, or paint brushes with ink or oil paints, even simulating the drying of the paint. The development version of Krita is the first publicly available paint program with proper color mixing.

Krita 1.5 also features complete integration with KOffice allowing (among other things) embedding of KWord text components 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 and a bezier curves tool, many new filters and a PDF import tool.

Now the work is being focused on KDE 4, for which natural painting tools are planned, but also better KOffice integration, better performance and being more feature-complete.