Open Source Software for Concept Artists, Digital Painters, and Illustrators

Krita for Mac

Krita for Mac

  -  351.66 MB  -  Open Source
  • Latest Version

    Krita 5.2.10 LATEST

  • Review by

    Sophia Jones

  • Operating System

    macOS 10.12 Sierra or later

  • User Rating

    Click to vote
  • Author / Product

    Krita Team / External Link

  • Filename

    krita-5.2.10.dmg

  • MD5 Checksum

    91a25b0cc9078b36edcce34a14f76d08

Krita for Mac is a FREE digital painting and illustration application. The app offers CMYK support, HDR painting, perspective grids, dockers, filters, painting assistants, and many other features you would expect.

Krita for Mac Screenshot 1

Download fast the latest version of Krita for macOS!

Highlights
  • Multiple brush types for different art styles
  • Layers, drawing assistants, stabilizers
  • Animation tools to transform your artwork
  • Brushes, patterns, and vector libraries
  • Texture packs and page templates
  • Plugins that add new functionality
  • Share your artwork and get feedback to improve
  • Give feedback to developers when new features and plugins are being created
Features

Interface and Workspace
The app has a user-friendly interface. In the settings menu, you can choose the color theme, which toolbars and dockers you want to use, and edit keyboard shortcuts. Save a given set of dockers as a workspace and switch between them. The canvas can be easily rotated and mirrored. The OpenGL canvas supports high-bit depth monitors. There is a large set of options available to create a no-distractions canvas-only painting mode.

Wrap-Around Mode
It is easy to create seamless textures and patterns now. Press the ‘W’ key while painting to toggle wrap-around mode. The image will make references of itself along the x and y axis. Continue painting and watch all of the references update instantly. No more clunky offsetting to see how your image repeats itself. You can even paint off the edge and it will automatically start painting on the top. It is one of those features you have to see for yourself.

Multiple Brush Engines and Blending Modes
A brush engine is more than just a typical brush pattern with settings changed. Each brush engine has its own logic and behavior. The included engines are pixel, smudge, duplicate, filter, hairy, hatching, texture, chalk, color smudge, curve, deform, dyna, experiment (Alchemy), grid, particle, sketch, and spray brushes. Brush settings can be saved as presets and shared. There are a staggering amount of blending modes available. The blending modes are arranged by category and have your favorites stored at the top of the list.

Advanced Selection and Masking Tools
Krita for Mac comes with many methods of selecting parts of your canvas in order to edit them. You can select with shapes such as rectangles and circle, paint your selection, polgon selection, select by color, select by Bezier. You can add, remove, or intersect to your selection. You can also make selection by layer contents by context clicking the layer and clicking “select opaque”. You can create a transparency layer by itself, or add one to an existing layer. This is great tool for non-destructive changes.

Symmetry Tools and Drawing Aids
Symmetry tools that go much further than basic mirroring. Take full control by being able to determine how many axis you need. Modify the origin center, angle, and smoothing parameters. Easy to toggle x and y mirror buttons in the top toolbar. Drawing aids such as perspective grids and shapes that have magnetic settings.

Filters and Effects
Filters can be used directly on a layer, or as filter masks or layers. The effect of a filter is previewed on the image itself. There are special effects like wave, oil paint, and emboss. Adjustments such as levels, brightness/contrast, and HSV are also included. Additional tools that can be useful for making selections like color to alpha and color transfer.

Layer and Color Management
Krita has raster, vector, filter, programmatic, group, and file-backed layers. Each layer has settings for visibility, edit lock, transparency lock, and alpha locking. Layers can be dragged and dropped to and from other applications. Vector layers support text, vector shapes and filters on vector shapes. The tool supports the following color models for creating and editing images: RGBA, Gray, CMYKA, Lab, YCbCr, XYZ in 8 bits integer, 16 bits integer, 16 bits floating point, 32 bits floating point. The app always uses color management.

Krita 5.2 Release Highlights (What`s New)

Focus Areas: Krita 5.2 builds on previous releases by addressing significant pain points, improving foundational systems, and introducing new features for enhanced functionality. Key areas include animation, text handling, tools, dockers, and file formats.

1. Animation Enhancements:

Synchronized Playback: Audio-visual synchronization now uses the robust MLT framework, ensuring precise alignment between keyframes and audio.

Simplified Video Export: Integrated FFmpeg into this program, streamlining video export and eliminating setup difficulties for most users (except on Android).

2. Text Tool Overhaul:

New Layout Engine: Features like text-in-shape, text-on-path, and color font support are now available.

Future Plans: In Krita 5.3, a redesigned text tool will allow on-canvas text editing with enhanced controls.

3. Tool Improvements:

Cumulative Undo Overhaul: Intuitive merging of undo operations for efficient painting.

Anti-Aliasing for Sketch Brush: Produces smoother results.

Transform Tool Update: Enables transformation of multiple selected layers simultaneously.

Fill Tool Upgrades: Added new fill modes and blending options for better precision.

4. Shortcuts and Selection Tools:

New Actions: Added eraser toggle, color sampling from the screen, and layer selection via canvas menu.

Selection Tool Enhancements: Options for opacity and DPI-aware decorations.

5. Docker Updates:

Wide Gamut Color Selector: Supports wide-gamut color selection for advanced workflows.

Layers Docker Improvements: Enhanced display options, including blending mode and opacity details.

6. File Format Support:

CMYK Improvements: Alignment with Photoshop blending modes for better PSD compatibility.

JPEG-XL and WebP Enhancements: Improved compression, metadata handling, and CMYK support.

RAW and EXR Updates: Faster processing and improved multi-layer handling.

7. Other Notable Changes:

Brush Settings Rewrite: Introduced the Lager library to simplify and extend brush settings.

FAQ

Is Krita free?
Yes, this program is entirely free and open-source. It operates under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Can I use Krita for professional work?
Absolutely. It offers professional-grade tools for digital art, including color management, vector support, and animation features.

Does Krita support Photoshop files?
Yes, it can open and save .psd files, though certain complex layers or effects might not translate perfectly.

Does Krita work on tablets?
Yes, it supports pen tablets and even has a version optimized for Android tablets.

How can I learn Krita?
It offers built-in tutorials and an extensive online user manual. Additionally, the community provides numerous guides and YouTube tutorials.

Alternatives

Adobe Photoshop - A feature-rich but expensive software known for its versatility in digital art and photo editing.

Adobe Illustrator - Create logos, icons, sketches, typography and other vector art!

Inkscape: Free vector graphics and design software.

GIMP - Another open-source alternative, though its primary focus is photo editing rather than painting.

Canva: Easy online graphic design platform.

PROS
  • Free and open-source
  • Extensive brush engine customization
  • Professional-grade layer management
  • Active and supportive community
  • Cross-platform compatibility
CONS
  • Occasional performance issues with large files
  • Limited support for certain file formats
Note: Requires 64-bit processor.

Also Available: Download Krita for Windows

Why is this app published on FileHorse? (More info)
  • Krita 5.2.10 Screenshots

    The images below have been resized. Click on them to view the screenshots in full size.

    Krita 5.2.10 Screenshot 1

What's new in this version:

Animation:
- We're happy to share that two major pain points for animation got tackled: synchronized playback of audio
- In order to fix various audio-visual sync issues when playing animations with attached audio, Emmet and Eoin reworked much of the animation playback to use the MLT framework behind the scenes. MLT is a proven and flexible framework used by video editing programs like Kdenlive and designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind, and should help Krita animators feel confident that their key frames will stay lined up with their voice work or background music, both inside of the program and in their exported animation videos.
- Speaking of the video export option, FFmpeg is a massively important program that manages

Text:
- Because our original one didn't give artists enough control over the underlying text
- Demonstration of some new text layout features include
- With the new layout engine, we can handle everything the old engine could, as well as text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. We can now also access OpenType features as well as render emoji
- This was no small feat and is only just laying the foundation for more improvements to come! For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.

Tools:
- Dmitry Kazakov overhauled the cumulative undo feature
- The ability to anti-alias the results of the Sketch Brush Engine has been added by Przemyslaw Golab
- Freya Lupen added the ability to transform all selected layers at once with the transform tool

Fill Tool:
- Deif Lou has added a new mode to the fill tool: Fill areas of similar color
- From the manual, filling the example in image A at the red dot will result in B for regular fill, in C with expanding the fill with a number of pixels and in D with the 'fill to boundary color' enabled.

Selection Tool:
- The Contiguous Selection Tool also received the same selection extending option as the Fill tool

Shortcuts:
- Several new actions have been added:
- Demonstrating the “Select Layers Menu” option, this menu shows the layers under the cursor.
- Toggle Eraser Preset by Freya Lupen,
- Sample Screen Color by killy |0veufOrever,
- Select Layers From Menu canvas input setting by killy |0veufOrever,
- Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme, courtesy of Freya Lupen,
- Krita can now detect conflicts in the canvas input setting shortcuts thanks to Sharaf Zaman,
- We have no shortage of plans for how to make things better, but only with stable community contributions can we keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.
- Dockers:
- Mathias Wein brought us a ‘Wide Gamut Color Selector’. This selector almost the same as the advanced color selector, except it’s capable of selecting colors in wide-gamuts instead of just sRGB. We eventually want to remove the Advanced Color Selector in favor of this one, when we’re sure we haven’t lost any functionality
- Wide gamut color selector is shown here as a gradient-square with a rainbow colored circle around it

The Layers docker got some extra display options:
- On Android, selecting multiple layers is tricky, therefore Sharaf implemented extra checkboxes on the side of the layers
- Freya Lupen added the ability to see extra information about the layer opacity and blending modes
- Macelaru Tiberiu has ensured the brush preset docker looks good in horizontal mode: MR 1670
- Brush Preset History is now configurable
- Undo, Redo and more for the palette docker

File Formats:
- We changed how CMYK blending modes work
- Rasyuqa A. H. has been improving the JPEG-XL saving and loading code, implementing CMYK for JPEG-XL, improving compression by giving the JXL library more color space information, better metadata handling and support for saving and loading raster layers to JPEG-XL,
- By using JPEG's XYB color space instead of the original profile, the JPEG-XL encoder is able to give much better results both in terms of artifacts and compression on images with extreme highlights, like those that are 40 times as bright as regular white.
- Cedric Ressler has improved EXR multi-layer handling
- Amyspark has improved the RAW import, both the UI
- Amyspark has also improved the webP exporter by adding better metadata handling and animation support

Other:
- One of the other big technical updates we did was to rewrite the brush settings code to work with the library Lager. Our old code had the brush presets and the widgets entangled in increasingly convoluted ways, which made it hard to extend the settings. We hope to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget
- Wrap around mode can now be limited to vertical or Horizontal direction, making it simpler to creating looping backgrounds.
- Freya Lupen has added wrap-around directions for the wraparound mode
- Freya Lupen has also added ability to remove single Recent Document entries
- Joshua Goins has improved the tablet tester, so it now has access to tilt data
- Sharaf Zaman implemented easier resource location selection for android
- Stephen Wilson has made sure that Krita resets document metadata when using a template
- Agata Cacko has spent a significant amount of time on getting better display names of color profiles
- Amyspark has been cleaning up the UI left and right
- Shuqi Xiu has added a Lambert shading blending mode