Digital art tutorials krita free#

Krita’s UI was designed from the ground up for extended periods of heavy brush use. While you can expand them yourself (check out my list of the best GIMP brushes) and create new ones, Krita has over 100 high-quality – and actually useful – brushes pre-installed. GIMP has excellent brush support, but the brushes that are pre-installed leave a lot to be desired. A few tweaks to the brush parameters can recreate a range of sketching media from ink to charcoal, in addition to the wide variety of painting styles that Krita is more known for. Krita’s right-click context menu when you’re working on an image is extremely usefulĮxcellent digital sketching is sort of a bonus that comes along with the impressive brush system created for digital painting. Digital painting is the primary goal for Krita’s developers, and it shows in the care and attention they’ve put into everything from the interface design to high FPS rendering options. While GIMP does offer some excellent brush-based tools, it can’t compete with Krita’s absolute focus on them. While GIMP has some advantages in terms of photography and general image editing, Krita has a distinct edge in the more artistic side of the creative world. Krita has much more limited plugin support and isn’t intended for this kind of operation in the first place. While GIMP doesn’t handle batch processing natively, the handy BIMP (Batch Image Manipulation Plugin) add-on can make processing hundreds of images a breeze. GIMP’s selection and transform tools are excellent, and the ability to enter custom values for pixel-precise 3D transforms can be extremely useful. When working with technical diagrams and generated data, you need precise tools for image manipulation. The GMIC plugin pack is also available for GIMP, but it might be worth exploring what both programs have to offer since there are too many to cover here properly. Krita has a few filters and effects built-in, but it relies on the GMIC plugin pack (which has to be installed separately by you) for most of its really fancy stuff. It has a huge library of distortions, artistic filters, and color effects built-in, and these functions can be expanded almost limitlessly by adding new plugins. If you want to apply complex stylizing filters and effects to your images, GIMP is a great choice. These responsive and highly customizable brush-based tools make GIMP the perfect choice for photo editing.

This one might seem a bit obvious, but it’s an area where GIMP excels even though Krita offers some similar options in terms of color.Ī couple of optional plugins provide RAW photo support, and GIMP’s healing and cloning tools are excellent for retouching work regardless of the format you’re using. These are the areas of the digital arts where GIMP is the better choice instead of Krita. So if you’re a Krita expert and I’ve missed something important in this comparison, please let me know in the comments! I should say from the start that I’m not nearly as familiar with Krita as I am with GIMP, because my connection to the world of digital art comes through photography and photo editing rather than any skill with a pencil or paintbrush (either real or digital). Instead, I’ll break down the strengths and weaknesses of each program, and help you decide which program is best for your particular project! It’s typically used by artists working with precision input devices known as drawing tablets that offer much better control than a mouse, including tilt and pressure sensitivity.īecause GIMP and Krita are designed for different uses, it doesn’t really seem fair to compare them directly the way I usually do in these “versus” guides. Krita is also a raster image editor, but it is designed from the ground up to focus exclusively on digital drawing. It’s typically used for photo editing and image manipulation, but it also has some decent brush-based tools for creating complex artistic projects from scratch. GIMP is a general-purpose raster image editor that excels at the most common editing tasks. They’re both open-source image editors that are in active development, but they each have their own unique areas of specialization within the world of digital imagery.

Digital art tutorials krita free#

GIMP and Krita are two of the most popular free graphics programs available at the moment.