CheckSum | Krita is an awesome, free-to-use alternative to Paint.NET, Adobe's Photoshop, and GIMP
CheckSum – quick reviews of gizmos, software, and doohickeys
Quite a few PC users looking for something more capable than Microsoft Paint - yet not as overwhelming as Photoshop or GIMP - end up installing Paint.NET. Don't get us wrong here; the latter is a great piece of code.
While not nearly as popular, Krita is about as simple to use as Paint.NET - but gifted with more talents.
We used a system running Windows 10 to test the PortableApps edition first; then we switched to a system running elementaryOS to check out the FlatPak edition. Strangely enough, the latter took just a minute to install whereas the former was a longer-than-expected 200 MB download that, by the time it was done unpacking its contents, left our computer's available disk space a further 900 MB shorter.
A macOS edition of Krita exists as well; sadly, we haven't had the opportunity to test this one out yet.
Krita is considered to be a painting application, first and foremost. This is for a good reason. A myriad of different brushes are on offer here, enabling one to draw surfaces of pretty much any kind with ease. However, nothing prevents one from using the app to achieve simpler objectives, such as lightly editing a selfie at a friend's request.
The app has a simple interface (that can nonetheless seem overwhelming at first to people that are new to all this). Upon launching Krita, the user is greeted with a screen offering to either create a new image or open an existing one. Apart from the usual PNG and JPG options, a lot of additional file formats are supported - some of which we have not even heard of.
All the functionality that users expect to have in a modern image editor is present here, such as the ability to use layers. (Krita offers a choice between several different kinds of layers, in fact.) The "polygonal selection" tool lets one quickly select an arbitrary portion of an image, which is something many other image-editing apps can only dream about.
Last but not the least, we have not encountered any bugs, and neither have we experienced any performance issues while editing our pictures with Krita. This means the developers are really putting their best effort into this lovely project of theirs.
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