Halla Rempt recently celebrated her twentieth year as the project lead of Krita, the open-source digital art and image editing package that’s been growing in popularity as its vast capabilities and ease of use become better known across the globe.

When someone has been the lead on a project this long, they are reasonably the person to credit for the project’s successes, and complain to for its mistakes. But in the case of Krita – one of the best Photoshop alternatives – you would be hard-pressed to find many mistakes. And when you do (after all nothing is perfect), you might find that the Krita team has already acknowledged the issue on one of their public forums.

And their attitude is always one of “Yes, we know that needs addressing. And we are hoping to get to it later this year.” Or even, “We know that needs work, but to be honest we have not had much luck resolving that issue.” Their transparency and candor is the stuff ‘Best Practices’ are made of. And that same attitude shone through when we spoke to Halla in the interview below.

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Why Krita is so important

Most computer users only require a few applications. Generally, an email client, a web browser, a word processor, and an image processor. So universal are these needs that both Macs and Windows machines come with some or all of them as part of the operating system. (Though MS made much of its money selling Word.)

While the browser wars and other sources have taken care of many needs, the included image/paint tools have always been rudimentary at best, and pure rubbish at worst. This has been an absolute boon to Photoshop, and Adobe, and lead to many subscriptions.

Well I’m here to tell you that Krita breaks that paradigm to bits. It’s an almost equally capable tool to Photoshop, offering at least 80% of PS’ capabilities on all three major platforms, Mac, Windows and Linux. And it’s free and open source.

Plus, for anyone coming from Photoshop, Krita is very easy to use. With but a few exceptions, the workflow is similar enough to PS that I have hardly needed a manual. But yes, they offer good documentation online as well, for when it is needed.

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Krita is important because the need for competent image creation/editing goes well beyond professional communications needs today. While the average person doesn’t need video or audio editing tools, almost everyone needs at least some image editing and painting capability. And Krita is easy enough for lay-folks. But powerful enough for we visual professionals.

Halla breaks the paradigm

As you watch the thoroughly enjoyable 22 minute interview with Halla above, keep in mind all of the paradigms she breaks. Not only is she giving the world its first professional-grade open source image editing and painting program, but she has been tirelessly working towards this goal for over two decades.

You will also see in her an abundance of charm, and even a wonderful child-like enthusiasm that too many of us lose as we become adults. She has not lost this passion, and she has used it to give the world a truly magnificent gift.

Here are a few take-aways from the interview:

• The current focus is on the text tool and adding support for comic panels.
• Photoshop PSD file format is supported to open, and to save into. It should work with most content, but is not always going to be 100%. It’s own Krita format (KRA) is the best to use for your own work.
• Krita’s main focus is its use as a painting and art creation too, but it has an almost identical toolset to PS for working in image manipulation/editing too.
• For retouching its version of the Healing Brush is not as good as PS, but it is serviceable.
• Krita’s brush tools are second to none, and compete favorably to either those in PS, or Coral’s Painter.
• It’s typography tools are currently serviceable. But they have been working on a major overhaul which should become available later this year.
• It does support GPU acceleration for screen navigation, zooms and such. But tools and filters are not GPU supported. So they depend on your CPU, making it a bit slower than PS. Perhaps not even noticeable on a fast computer.
• Its AI tools, made available by installing a third-party plugin called “AI Image Generation” allows locally generated AI artwork. Thus, no render fees.
• It is said that Adobe’s rendering in the cloud runs at around the same speed as a NVIDIA 3090. So if you have a more contemporary card from the 4000 or new 5000 series of GPUs, you can expect to render faster, all locally, and for free.

Krita is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and other platforms. Dive into its tremendous capabilities for painters and for image editing. If you are into AI, install Krita’s third-party AI plugin. And if you are a Blender user, install the plugin that allows bringing in Blender content

And if you find yourself falling in love with it, as we have, consider making a small contribution. For this is one of the gems of open source, and we want to keep it going. To learn more, see our comparison pieces on GIMP vs Krita and Photoshop vs Krita.

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