Krita

Krita builds its brushes on nine or more engines, each aimed at a job. The color smudge engine blends paint, the shape engine repeats stamped forms, the particle engine scatters elements, and a filter engine applies effects as you paint. You adjust settings inside each engine and save the result as a preset, which you then organize with tags. This depth is why artists can match a range of styles, from clean inking to loose speedpainting, without leaving the app.

A shaky hand is a common problem, so Krita ships three ways to steady a stroke. Basic smoothing softens the corners of quick lines, and higher stabilizer levels delay the stroke and average it to hold both line and pressure steady. A separate dynamic brush tool adds virtual weight and drag for smoother curves. The result is cleaner inking and shading, and you can tune the strength per brush rather than locking one setting across the whole session.

Krita includes vector tools that manage their shapes with SVG. You can drag a speech bubble template from the vector library onto the canvas, then edit anchor points to make your own shapes and build a personal library. A text tool adds captions and dialogue with light layout control, and the SVG support means you can import or export vector art. For comic and manga pages, this covers the parts a pure paint tool leaves out.

Switching to the animation workspace turns Krita into a small studio. It handles multiple layers and audio, plays back with pausing and timeline scrubbing, and supports onion skinning so you can see the frame before and after while drawing in-betweens. You can set start time, end time, and frame rate, drag frames to retime them, and use tweening on opacity and position. When a scene is done, export it as a video or as still images for another program.

Krita handles color through LCMS for ICC profiles and OpenColorIO for EXR, which lets it slot into an existing color pipeline. It ships with a wide set of ICC working space profiles and counts itself as the painting app that can open, save, edit, and author HDR and scene-referred images. With OCIO and OpenEXR support you can also change the view to inspect HDR content, which matters for work headed to print or high dynamic range delivery.

Krita opens PSD files, including some that other editors cannot, and saves back to PSD so work can move between programs. On top of that, a Python API built on PyQt lets you build custom widgets and extend the app, and several plugins come installed as reference. Together these two features matter for teams that mix tools: you keep interoperability with PSD, and you get room to automate repetitive steps without a separate scripting setup.