OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr has been playing with analogue and then digital photography all his life.
Can you believe Linux Format has never run a Krita tutorial, despite many reviews over the C years? Krita has finally turned v5 and we’re taking a flying tour of its features. It’s aimed at digital artists, but we’re coming to Krita from a photography angle, which is more likely how most readers want to use it. This also helps to introduce the Krita interface without getting bogged down in its more complex drawing features aimed at artists, and it’s likely you’ll be more familiar with similar tools in GIMP and other photography tools. See the box top-left for installation.
Opening Krita for the first time isn’t very impressive; you’ll want to click the open file and choose a suitable image before the interface springs into life. Take a gander at the annotation (below-left) for highlights of the interface.
Ironically, Krita’s crown jewel is the digital-artisttargeting pop-up brush palette. We’re largely ignoring this, which is a shame as it’s a delightful bit of interface design. Hopefully, you’ll appreciate just how versatile and functional this would be if you were using a tablet with stylus or a dedicated graphics tablet, enabling you to instantly pop it open, adjust your drawing tool and mode, then effortlessly dismiss it. See the boxout (on page 63) for more on brush control.
When it comes to adjusting photographs, there’s a few jobs we find ourselves doing over and over. The first is fiddling with colours, largely contrast, saturation and perhaps the colourbefore walking you through adjusting a landscape photograph.
