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I typically try to refrain from just talking up tools on here. The thinking goes, why would I go to the trouble of writing something without having some sort of thesis in mind. If I’m just writing to talk up some program, then I’m not really offering anything worth reading. Well stuff that nonsense, I’m gonna sing the praises of my favorite image creation and editing program for a bit.

If you make, use, edit, or otherwise deal with digital images, you owe it to yourself to download Krita. I’ll even put the link right here https://krita.org/ .

The first real image editor that I ever used was photopaint. The original version of Corel Photopaint. The really old one. Before that I had used some nasty pixel editors, microsoft paint, and even tried to wrap my brain around illustrator. They all sent me scrambling back to paper and pencil. Computers, it seemed, were just not yet ready to be image creation tools. At least not for me. That changed when I discovered what could be done with Corel Photopaint. Suddenly pixels were flexible, plastic things. phosphors could be lit and changed with ease. Multiple versions of the program were released, and I kept using that same original copy, partly because I had no money to upgrade, and partly because I just really liked the way it worked.

A few years later, and I was going to school for art and animation, and everyone was using Adobe Photoshop. The gold standard in image editing. Photoshop is so dominant it has become a verb. People who have never dealt with the business end of a Wacom stylus will know what it means to photoshop something. Since I wanted to hang with the cool kids, I learned to use photoshop, and I learned to use the piss out of it. There are certainly people out there that have more experience using photoshop than I do. There are people who know the the toolset more intimately, and are just flat out better at using photoshop than I am. You don’t need to drive NASCAR to put the peddle to the floor. Me and photoshop, we made some shit.

I have tried some other image editors and image creators, but to tell you the truth, they were all poor replacements. Photoshop was still better at so many things than programs the likes of The Gimp, that I would be continually frustrated by the terrible user experience.

I downloaded and tried Krita a few versions ago, and almost instantly I was done with Photoshop. Krita has grown by leaps and bounds since then, but even in that earlier state I think it was superior to Photoshop in many ways. Now, I think that Krita is better than photoshop in almost every respect.

There are a few, excusable, slowdowns when working with large images, but it improves with every new version. And did I mention that all the new versions are free. Yeah, you can just go download them. It costs nothing. Even though it’s free, I would willingly and gladly pay the very small amount they request in donations to keep the project running. In fact I have. I got a postcard from a russian software developer, so that was nice I suppose.

You could offer me a free version of Photoshop at this point and I wouldn’t be interested. Krita! Try it!