KRITA
Krita – a program named with Swedish word representing ‘pencil’ or ‘chalk’ is a very promising bitmap graphics editor. Designed to be both a painting application and a photo editor, it is free software distributed under GNU General Public License and a part of K Desktop Environment and its KOffice suite. Previous names of this project were KImageShop and Krayon, but legal matters lead to a change.
Work on the editor started back in 1999 although due to frequent changes of project’s leaders and stagnation resulting from it, Krita was not usable up to 2005. At the moment the application resembles to some extent GIMP or Adobe Photoshop but has a stronger focus on creating new images as opposed to manipulating existing photographs.
Program supports many colorspaces like RGB, grey scale, CMYK, lab, ycbcr in 8- and 16-bit depth. Some of them are supported also in 32-bit.
Krita is able to import RAW images (8-bit and 16-bit depth) and load/save popular TIFF, PNG, JPG files. Other formats are (like i.e. XCF) can be imported and sometimes exported with the GraphicsMagick plugin.
Complete integration with the already mentioned KOffice allows (among other things) embedding of KWord text components into images.
Recent versions brought handling perspective in drawings, including perspective transformation, perspective grid and perspective clone, layer masks, some enhanced tools like a new magnetic selection tool and a bezier curves tool, many new filters and a PDF import tool.
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