What Krita does
Krita is a free and open-source digital painting application developed by the KDE community and released under the GNU General Public License. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it accessible across the most widely used desktop platforms. Krita is built specifically for digital painting and illustration rather than general-purpose image editing. Its brush engine is central to the application and supports a wide range of brush types — pixel, smear, filter, and more — each with extensive per-brush settings. A built-in stabilizer helps artists draw smooth lines and curves, which is particularly useful when working with a graphics tablet. Krita has broad support for pressure-sensitive tablets and styluses, translating pen pressure, tilt, and rotation into painting behavior. The layer system supports raster layers, vector layers, group layers, fill layers, and a full set of blending modes and layer masks, giving illustrators and concept artists fine-grained control over their compositions. A dedicated frame-by-frame 2D animation workspace lets artists work directly in the same tool they use for still images, without switching to a separate application. Wrap-around mode is available for artists painting seamless textures, a common requirement in game development pipelines. Krita reads and writes its own native KRA format, and also supports PSD (Adobe Photoshop), PNG, JPEG, TIFF, EXR (for HDR painting), and other common formats. Python scripting is available for artists who want to automate repetitive tasks or build custom tools. The full offline installer on this page is sourced directly from download.kde.org, the official KDE distribution server. Only download Krita from the official publisher or the domain shown on this page to avoid modified or bundled software.
