Krita is a trademark owned by the Stichting Krita Foundation. This page outlines the policy and guidelines of the Stichting Krita Foundation for the trademark and the logo we use to identify Krita.
The following information helps ensure our mark and logo are used in approved ways, while making it easy for the community to understand the guidelines. If you have any questions about the use of logos or trademarks that are not addressed in these guidelines, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
The purpose of this policy is to protect the public, by ensuring that the identity, provenance, and open-source nature of Krita remain clear. Throughout this document, the "Marks" refers to the Krita name and logo, individually or together.
Guidelines for Using the Marks
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You may use the Krita Mark without prior written permission for the following purposes (subject to the other sections):
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To refer to the Krita software in substantially unmodified form ("substantially unmodified" means built from the source code provided by the Krita project, possibly with minor modifications including but not limited to: the enabling or disabling of certain features by default, changes required for compatibility with a particular operating system distribution, or the inclusion of bugfix patches);
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To identify Krita as a distinct component of a software offering;
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To refer to the Krita project itself, its products, or its protocols.
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You may use "Krita" as part of the name of a product designed to work with Krita, so long as the name as a whole (via its other components) clearly and unambiguously distinguishes the product from Krita itself, and the general presentation of the product does not imply any official association or identity with Krita. Because it would be awkward to attach a trademark symbol to a portion of a larger name whose other portions might themselves be trademarked, the requirement to display the symbol is waived for this circumstance.
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You may not use the Marks in the following ways (without prior permission):
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In any way likely to cause confusion as to the identity of the project, the provenance of its software, or the software's license;
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In any way that indicates a greater degree of association between you and the Krita project than actually exists;
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In any way that implies a designated successor to Krita (e.g., "Krita NG" would be bad).
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The Stichting Krita Foundation reserves the sole right to:
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Determine compliance with this policy;
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Modify this policy in ways consistent with its mission of protecting the public;
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Grant exceptions to this policy, of any kind and for any reason whatsoever, other clauses notwithstanding.
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If you have questions about using the Marks, or if you think you should be able to use the Marks for any purpose not allowed by this policy and would like permission for that use, please contact the Stichting Krita Foundation by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
The 2013 Libre Graphics Meeting is over and everyone has returned home and gone back to the drawing board or the keyboard. Krita has been very well represented at this LGM with three artists and a coder, giving three presentations and two awesome workshops!
The Medialab Prado venue was pretty much perfect: hacking space, auditorium, workshop space, open until late, and an endless supply of good coffee. The presentations were life-streamed, but there appear to be no recordings available yet.
(Image by Timothee Giet)
So what happened?
First, Timothee Giet gave his workshop on Krita Sketch. Unfortunately, what with slow network, it turned out to be quite hard to make sure everyone had Krita Sketch on their systems, so in the end, the workshop became more an "install and get introduced to Krita" workshop, which was pretty cool, too -- since the workshop was early on Thursday, and it meant many people had Krita on their system for the rest of the week!
That evening (or afternoon, for the Spanish among us, the days were long this year, with presentations going until well after Dutch dinner time!), Boudewijn presented the Krita Foundation. As regular readers of Krita news know, the Foundation was created to support Krita development.
This was closely followed by Timothee Giet speaking about Krita Sketch, how the project came to be, the goals, the gui design and his role in the development. This is what Krita Sketch looks like these days, and an update on Intel AppUp is expected soon!
The next day, Ramon Miranda gave a lightning talk on the Muses DVD he is preparing. Slated to be ready for Akademy in Bilbao (Ramon's hometown), the dvd promises to be wonderful, not just teaching Krita, but teaching the fundamentals of digital illustration. Pre-order your copy now!
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
Or read more about in the bilingual (Spanish/English) Flyer we handed out at LGM!
Also on Thursday, David Revoy gave his Krita workshop. starting with the basics of calibrating your tablet and creating an ergonomic setup, David continued teaching the fundamentals of underpainting (make sure you use only one, big, round brush, work in grayscale, never use the extrems of value available, switch between eraser and normal all the time, paint values, not symbols and remember this: it's painting that's a hard skill you need to work on, applications are easy to learn), and then coloring and detailing. There were some very pretty things made during this workshop!
The great thing about the Libre Graphics Meeting is, of course, getting together. There are developers, artists, thinkers, users. People are working on magazines, typefaces, music, generative art, illustrations, comics, layout tools and more. And it's a great place for teams to get together and start a cooperation initiatives, like the new brushpack resource specification, or ways Krita could integrate with the animation application Tupi or how the MyPaint brush engine could be integrated into Krita, Gimp or Tupi.
Let us all meet again, next year!
Next week, the Libre Graphics Meeting will happen again! This time in the Media Lab Prado in Madrid, and titled "Future Tools", it looks set to be an amazing experience. And with plenty of Krita content!
Timothée Giet will give a workshop on using Krita Sketch at 14:30, Thursday April 11th at the Libre Graphic Meeting in Medialab Prado‘s brand new building in Madrid city center.
Later that day, at 17:40, Boudewijn Rempt will introduce the Krita Foundation in a lightning talk. The Krita Foundation is essential for the future of Krita, we'll go through problems and challenges that the Foundation was created to cope with.
Hot on Boudewijn's heels, Timothée Giet will present the Krita Sketch project: Krita Sketch is touch-enabled tablet-oriented application derived from Krita. Timothée will discuss how the project happened and much more.
Then, on Friday, David Revoy will give a painting workshop with Krita. The main topic will be "speedpainting with Krita", so bring your laptops and tablets, and try to have the latest Krita installed! (Use David's scripts, for instance.) Place / Date / Hour: Friday 12 april 2013 at the Libre Graphic Meeting in Medialab Prado‘s brand new building in Madrid city center. Workshop will happen between 14h30 - 16h30 ( duration 2h ) in Room C.
All LGM long, Ramon Miranda will be around to answer questions about his "Muses" project, the second Krita training DVD, There will be ample opportunity for pre-orders on the spot, as well! Ramon speaks both Spanish and English, so grab the opportunity!
But, of course, you can also pre-order the DVD on-line:
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
Following the succesful "Comics with Krita" DVD by Timothee Giet (now sold out!), and supported by the Krita Foundation, Ramon Miranda has started working on the second Krita training DVD: Muses. Let yourself be inspired by Ramon's Muses, and learn how to paint wonderful and evocative images from a professional artist.
The DVD will have more than three hours of HD video focused on creating digital illustrations from scratch to the final print, including
- An explanation of Krita's gui and the best way to setup Krita for maximum productivity and fun. Ramon will demonstrate a solid and productive workflow.
- Creating interesting new brush presets, working with layers, masks and filters. color in theory and practice and an introduction to styles in art.
- Creating an illustration from scratch: creating the ideas to begin with, sketching, getting into the flow, blocking, shading and values, painting a face, finishing the artwork with color and effects, printing considerations.
"Muses" will come with a full set of brushes and brush presets, icons ready to use with your own presets and much more. The voice over will be in English and Spanish, with unobtrusive pop-over messages for extra clarity.
Muses -- the color sketch for the projected DVD cover
You can pre-order the DVD now from the Krita Foundation. If you do not wish to use paypal, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for alternative payment methods. Pre-ordering the DVD will help support Krita development. Currently, Dmitry Kazakov is being sponsored by the Krita Foundation to work on improved mask handling, performance and much more. The contents of the DVD will also be released as Creative Commons.
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
And everyone who pre-orders will be credited on the DVD, too.
Ramon Miranda is an illustrator from Spain who has been using open source tools professionally for a long time. He is well known for his instruction videos, his beautiful art and his work on Gimp Paint Studio.
If you are at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid, you will be able to meet Ramon.
Thursday, 21st March, David Revoy, Boudewijn Rempt and Inge Wallin took a plane to London to visit Double Negative. Double Negative is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, VFX studio in London. We were invited by Simon Legrand, who works as a technical director at Double Negative. Simon has been using Krita for his work in a previous studio on G.I. Joe 2 and other unreleased titles, and he had invited us there, to meet with him and his colleagues from the industry.
On Thursday, we sat down with Simon and looked at ways Krita can be integrated in a VFX pipeline -- we're already doing pretty good, with OpenColorIO and OpenEXR support, but things could be better, still. Deep integration with Nuke, dynamic, file-based layers, an Adobe Bridge like image manager -- which made us think of Gwenview or Dolphin. In the evening, we sat down with Andrew Harvey from Reliance Mediaworks, formerly Digital Domain London where Simon made extensive use of Krita previously.
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David, Boudewijn, Inge and Simon in the Double Negative lobby |
Next day, Inge, as a representative of KO GmbH, started working on prices and support offerings, while Boudewijn started hacking on the file-based layers feature.
In the afternoon, Gavin Graham from Double Negative hosted a meeting in the Double Negative offices. He is a head of 3D at Double Negative. It was an awesome experience to present Krita to him and a room full of artists from different departments -- matte painters, texture painters, concept artists.
David gave live demos on a big screen of the features these people were asking for -- and sure, there were some wishes, like better cloning/healing, improved masking (which Dmitry Kazakov, sponsored by the Krita Foundation is already working on!), but it was great to see how well Krita already supports the needs of the VFX industry!
A great meeting was followed by an impressive tour of the Double Negative offices, room after darkened room full of people totally focused on the next blockbuster movie.
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Inge, Boudewijn and David in the Double Negative Office |
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Inge, Boudewijn and Gavin in the Double Negative Office |
Finally, on Friday night we went to a night club (first time in my life!) to meet with people from The Foundry. Nuke looks like a prime candidate to integrate with Krita, and now we only have to figure out how to do that...
A quick batch of cool links while I'm in London with David Revoy and Inge Wallin, "studying the VFX industry" -- learning a lot, actualy, about why Krita is awesome as part of a VFX workflow, and what can be better... And there is already work being done on features that are important for texture artists and matte painters"
Sponsored by the Krita Foundation, Dmitry Kazakov has improved the Color to Alpha filter beyond all recognition. His work was mentioned before on this website, but check out his blog to see what can be done to sweeten Tears of Steel.
Lukáš Tvrdý, a previous recipient of sponsored development, started working on improving support for texturing, implementing a layer offset tool. Read all about it on his blog and watch the cool demo video.
Two weeks ago, the Krita team assembled in the Linux Hotel in Essen-Horst. Sven Langkamp gives a report on his blog. Work on what has been discussed is already going on -- though obviously, we could use more helping hands. So if you want to be part of a fun, open, welcoming project, check out the Join Krita page Valerie created!
And while I don't think that we're really competing with Gimp -- Krita and Gimp have quite different target audiences, an article like this one by Carla Schroeder is always nice to read.
And did you know that Krita has already been used on real feature movies? I saw some actual footage yesterday. Awesome! It's always inspiring to see work done with Krita -- like David's warm-up images, or Ramon Miranda's landscapes.
The Krita community would like to thank you for your support! You can fund Krita's development in several ways:
- Support general development by donating to the Krita Foundation
- Support general development by buying Krita products
- Receive personalized, commercial support and feature development through KO GmbH
- And of course, Krita is always welcoming new volunteers to help Krita's development
General development
To better support Krita's development, Krita's community created the Krita Foundation in 2012. The Krita Foundation is an independent non-profit, public organization with the following goals:
- To develop free graphics software, especially Krita
- To provide services for users and developers of Krita
- To provide artists and studios with everything they need to create digital art
Donations to the Krita Foundation will be used in the following order of priority:
- Fund development of Krita (priority): The Foundation will sponsor a developer to work full-time on Krita for a specific period of time, for tasks including bug-fixing, adding new features and improving support on platforms other than Linux. Please find the results of such past initiatives here.
- Hardware: The Krita Foundation may sometimes use funds to provide some developers with needed hardware such as Wacom tablets. This is only done if they need to work on coding for that hardware.
- Fund travel to events: Such as the Libre Graphics Meeting and Development sprints. Krita will usually try to get funding for these from other sources first, like the event planners themselves.
Ongoing sponsored development: Dmitry Kazakov, who has already improved the free transform tool, finalized the textured brush feature, improved the Color to Alpha filter and fixed some issues with the Windows build and implemented the much awaited Grayscale selections and masks.
Donation methods:
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Stichting Krita Foundation Korte Assenstraat 117411JP Deventerthe Netherlandsemail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. telephone: +31 620 839 638 |
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Bank Account Account number: 7216397 |
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Monthly Donation through Paypal |
One-time donation through Paypal |
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Monthly subscriptions are ideal, as sponsored developers get their monthly funding, but all forms of donations are welcome!
Merchandise
Krita currently offers:
- The Comics With Krita package, by Timothée Giet, including a training DVD with 6 Hours of HD video focused on creating comics from scratch, and the actual comic book. The DVD is sold out, but you can watch it on youtube or get it through bittorrent
- Krita merchandise shop: This shop is currently quite empty and unmaintained. With the help of volunteers, we are currently making plans to fill it up with merchandise. Stay tuned! :-)
All proceeds are used to fund the Krita Foundation.
Commercial support
With a large set of professional tools and the ability to handle very large images effortlessly, Krita is well adapted to VFX needs in movies, games and advertisements.
KO GmbH offers commercial support for the 3 versions of Krita:
- Krita Sketch: touch-based painting for ultrabooks and tablets
- Krita Desktop: the main Krita desktop build, on Linux and Windows
- Krita Studio: HDR painting for the movie and VFX industry
Commercial support provides access to a repo that provides Krita on CentOS 6, guaranteed to play nice with Maya, Nuke and Mari installs, with regular updates, email, forum, chat and telephone support, as well as training, custom development of plugins, bridges and special features.
Among other things, KO GmbH has also sponsored the development of OpenColorIO support for Krita 2.6 and has developed Krita Sketch for Intel App-Up.
For more information, please see the Product Info page or the Support Page.
Krita has been developing quite fast, so you may be surprised to know that Krita's core team is actually quite small, not to mention severely overworked. We need your help! Whether you are a developer or non-developer, there are many things that need to be done to improve the Krita experience! In particular, Krita urgently needs:
- A maintainer for Krita's merchandise shop: Krita has a mostly unused merchandise shop on zazzle.com . A volunteer is needed to properly set up and maintain it. Create cool new merchandise, keep a choice selection of t-shirt designs available -- All proceeds will be used to fund the Krita Foundation.
- Developers: You'll be able to work on one of the coolest and fastest-growing open source painting programs out there. Krita also benefits from a modular architecture and the use of the Calligra and Qt libraries, which makes it easier to focus on new features instead of reinventing the wheel. And it makes coding fun!
- Maintainers for Windows and OSX versions: Do you have experience porting and maintaining programs from Linux to Windows or OSX? As we all know, the current Windows version of Krita needs a lot of work. Please help us bring Krita to a wider audience!
- Writers: The website, user documentation wiki and developer wiki are all in need of new content!
- Marketing: Krita needs to regularly announce new releases or fundraising efforts on a variety of websites/blogs/social networks. This requires a lot of coordination work and perhaps a smart strategist.
- Many more: Krita's community is very friendly and supportive. We welcome all types of contributors!
If you've always hoped to contribute back to the project, please don't hesitate to join us at our new Join page, or help us spread the word! You can also support Krita's development through donations. The Krita team thanks you for all the support you have shown us until now!
just updated Krita's Color to Alpha filter on the development 2.7pre-alpha version ( already on Git master ) , so it can now be easily used for removing background from scanned sketches.
To find the feature, in the menu : Filter > Color > Color to alpha.
Algorithm differs from the one used in Gimp ( also named 'Color to Alpha' ) : Krita use CIE deltaE [0] function to calculate the difference between the image and the base color, so it is more flexible and configurable. You can choose to what extent you want to remove the background by changing threshold value.
Dmitry explain the filter's algorithm on his blog :
- Firstly, Krita calculate the difference between the image pixel and the base color and decrease the pixel's opacity according this difference. The less the difference, the more opacity is decreased. As already mentioned ; Krita use deltaE function to calculate this difference.
- Secondly, Krita apply an inverse "composite over" to every pixel. Due to that step, if we put a layer filled with a base color below the filtered image, we will get original image!
What is the advantage compare to put your pencil artwork on a 'mulitply' layer blending mode ?
You can easily 'lock' the alpha of the layer, then color only your lines now. It's a step I usually did in Gimp ( see on my pencil to digital painting tutorial ) and I'm happy to see the feature now in Krita too.
Reference :
Wikipedia Color Difference
Dmitry original blog post
image & text copied from Dmitry blog
pencil artwork CC-By Deevad
Krita is always welcoming new contributors! As Krita is a huge and ambitious project, there is always a lot more work than the small core team can handle. The Krita community is very open, welcoming and supportive. We are in particular looking for contributors with a good sense of initiative and commitment (so please don't disappear without warning halfway through the job!). No resume needed!
If you're interested in joining, there are several ways for you to get signed up:
- Contact the project maintainer directly. That's Boudewijn Rempt. Unfortunately, he's quite overworked most of the time! So it's better to...
- Send us a message at the mailing list.
- Present yourself at the IRC channels
- Introduce yourself at the forum.
- Just get started. Some things don't need prior approval -- you can always create a patch to fix a bug or write a tutorial! Show us what you can do!
What do we really need? Well, for instance:
- A maintainer for Krita's merchandise shop: Krita has a mostly unused merchandise shop on zazzle.com . A volunteer is needed to properly set up and maintain it. Create cool new merchandise, keep a choice selection of t-shirt designs available -- All proceeds will be used to fund the Krita Foundation.
- Developers: You'll be able to work on one of the coolest and fastest-growing open source painting programs out there. Krita also benefits from a modular architecture and the use of the Calligra and Qt libraries, which makes it easier to focus on new features instead of reinventing the wheel. And it makes coding fun!
- Maintainers for Windows and OSX versions: Do you have experience porting and maintaining programs from Linux to Windows or OSX? As we all know, the current Windows version of Krita needs a lot of work. Please help us bring Krita to a wider audience!
- Writers: The website, user documentation wiki and developer wiki are all in need of new content!
- Marketing : Krita needs to regularly announce new releases or fundraising efforts on a variety of websites/blogs/social networks. This requires a lot of coordination work and perhaps a smart strategist.
Developers, and bug-testers and technical writers
Bug-testers
The developers do their best to bring you a stable program. However, with many interacting features and several platforms to support, it's easy to overlook the occasional issue. Help make Krita a more stable program by reporting bugs. As Krita uses the KDE bugtracker, simply follow the instructions here. And reported bugs need to be tested on a variety of systems so we can check whether the report is correct: bug triaging is extremely important and very satisfying to do.
Developers
Krita's developer wiki can be found here. To join up as a developer:
- Set up your development environment and build Krita.
- Find a few bugs to fix in KDE's Bugtracking system. It's often a good idea to get some experience with the code through fixing bugs, to get familiar with the development process without being overwhelmed. Though there's nothing against working on that cool feature that scratches your itch!
- For bugs, it's a good idea to start with "Junior Jobs." These are a set of relatively easy tasks for new developers. In the Bugtracking system, these are the bugs marked with "JJ."
To work on Krita, you have to use C++ and Qt. It's a good way to learn both, actually!
College thesis and GSOC
For students seeking a mentor for a thesis or a GSOC program: please note that through these programs, Krita only accepts students with a pretty good level of programming competence, and the potential to become long-term contributors. Don't wait until the last minute to apply, as Krita will give priority to those who have proved themselves with bug-fixes and other contributions (see above). You can find a list of possible projects here.
Sponsored development work
Krita will occasionally raise funds to employ a developer to work full-time on Krita over a period of several months. Note that it will only sponsor developers who have already proven themselves through a long track record of contributions to Krita. To see the results of past sponsorship programs, see here.
Technical documentation
As you may have already seen, Krita's developer wiki is quite outdated and could use some updates and streamlining. It should become easy, in particular, for new potential developers to:
- Find documentation for the development process (whether on Linux or other platforms)
- Find additional resources that will help with coding for Krita
- Find a list of tasks to do, including priority levels, time and experience needed, and supporting blueprints
Non-developer contributors
Krita is far more than just a program, so there is a lot you can help with even if you can't code.
Merchandise
Krita has a mostly unused merchandise shop on zazzle.com. A volunteer is needed to properly set up and maintain it. All proceeds will be used to fund the Krita Foundation.
User documentation
The Krita userbase wiki and Krita Handbook are in need of heavy work. We suggest drawing inspiration from Krita's existing set of tutorials and the documentation of other programs such as Gimp.
Translation
If you are a translator, you can help Krita reach a more international audience by either translating the program itself or translating existing documentation on the Krita userbase wiki .
Website
Do you want to help maintain, improve the website or write articles? Please volunteer, while providing a description of what you hope to accomplish.
Feature ideas
Do you have ideas to make Krita into an even better program? Please submit a feature request on the Bugtracking system. You can also first discuss the suggestion at the Krita forums or IRC Channel. Please keep in mind that it may take years before a feature is implemented. You can help speed this up a tiny bit by working on additional details such as the graphical interface, as well as providing links to relevant resources. See here for an example of a good feature proposal write-up.
Are you an artist?
We'd love to see what you are creating with Krita! Please post your works in the gallery section, and indicate whether you allow us to use them in promotional material. New versions of Krita may also need new splash images and screenshots to demonstrate its new features, so we hope you will be able to contribute then as well.
Tutorials, brushes, patterns, etc.
Do you have resources to share and contribute? They are always welcome! Please share them in the forum.
Others
Do you think you have more ways to help out the project? Please don't hesitate to contact us!