Krita
Free digital painting app for Mac with brush engines, animation and HDR painting for artists and illustrators.
Adobe PhotoshopKrita is a painting program for illustrators, concept artists, comic artists and texture painters. It focuses on drawing and painting from a blank canvas rather than photo editing.
It ships with more than nine brush engines, including Color Smudge, Shape, Particle and Filter, and you can tag brushes to keep them organised. Three stabiliser modes smooth your strokes, and the Dynamic Brush tool adds drag and mass. Wrap-around mode repeats the canvas so you can paint tileable textures and patterns. Drawing assistants help with vanishing points, straight lines, ellipses and fisheye perspective.
Layers come in paint, vector, filter, group and file types. The animation workspace has a timeline, onion skinning, tweening and audio, and exports to video or image sequences. Krita 5.3 added a new text tool with on-canvas editing and full OpenType support, a fill tool that can close gaps and a faster liquify mode. Colour management uses ICC profiles through LCMS and OpenColorIO, and you can paint in HDR. A Python API lets you write your own plugins, and the Resource Manager imports brush and texture bundles.
Krita is free from krita.org and licensed under GPL-3.0. Paid copies on the Mac App Store and Steam are the same program and help fund development. The download page lists macOS 10.15 as the minimum.
Frequently asked questions
Is Krita free?
Yes. Krita is free to download from krita.org. The Mac App Store version costs money, and buying it is a way to support the project, but the program is the same.
Is Krita safe and open source?
Krita is open source under GPL-3.0, and its code is hosted on KDE's GitLab at invent.kde.org. The macOS installer from krita.org is a signed .dmg.
How do I install Krita?
Download the macOS installer from krita.org, open the .dmg and drag Krita to Applications, or run brew install --cask krita in Terminal. You can also buy it from the Mac App Store.
What macOS version does Krita need?
The krita.org download page lists macOS 10.15 Catalina as the minimum. The project notes that the minimum can change between releases.
How does Krita compare to Adobe Photoshop?
Photoshop is sold only through a Creative Cloud subscription, with a 7-day trial for individuals, and covers photo editing as well as painting. Krita is free and built for painting, with brush engines, drawing assistants and frame-by-frame animation. If your work is mostly photo retouching, Photoshop is the closer fit.
Can I animate in Krita?
Yes. Krita has an animation workspace with a timeline, onion skinning, tweening and audio support. You can export the result as a video or as a sequence of images.
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