Best Art Program Krita Reddit 2018
Krita - Free and open source digital painting application for Illustrators, comic artists, concept artists, matte painters etc. R/krita is for sharing artworks made in Krita, general help, tips and tricks, troubleshooting etc. The XP-Pen Artist 12 sports a fairly simple design overall. The tablet comes with a pre-applied screen protector which has a very minimal amount of texture. I don’t think it’s an anti-glare screen protector because it doesn’t blur reflections at all, but XP-Pen’s product page says it has an anti-reflective coating. Nov 29, 2018 Thanks for all the info about brushes especially the links you provided. I will be checking these out probably tomorrow since it is already 11:30pm when I saw your replies. Once I get used to how Krita works, the UI etc it will probably become my default art program. Have a great day, Robert. Today, I share 7 or so tips with you, to help you get started painting in Krita!IMPORTANT LINKS:Krita drawing tablet https://www.amazon.
Interested in turning photographs into works of digital art, such as cartoons, charcoal drawings, ink drawings, oil paintings, pastel drawings, and watercolors? Here are brief descriptions of some key software tools for desktop computers. Unless otherwise noted they work in Photoshop as plug-ins.
FotoSketcher
FotoSketcher is a versatile free standalone Windows program that allows you to create drawings, paintings, and a few other effects. It can transform photos into cartoons, oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, pen and ink drawings, pencil drawings, watercolor paintings. and other types of artworks. It is standalone freeware.
Sliders and other controls for each effect allow you modify image rendition. For example, for the oil pastel sketch effect you can control minimum stroke size, maximum stroke size, number of iterations, edge intensity, and filter precision. You can also soften edges, add a frame, add texture, add text, and use a retouch brush. There is a small preview window in the floating control panel.
This program is especially useful for oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, and watercolors.
Snap Art by Exposure
Snap Art is a full-featured Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to easily create charcoal drawings, color pencil drawings, comics, crayon drawings. impasto paintings, oil paintings, pastel drawings (including hard, oil, and soft pastel), pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, Pointillism paintings, stylized illustrations, and watercolor paintings.
There are a variety of presets for each effect, and slider controls for background (e.g, for oil paint: brush size, photorealism, coverage, stroke length, and color variation), detail masking (similar controls as background), colors (e.g., brightness, contrast, and saturation), lighting (e.g., angle, direction, and highlight characteristics as well as vignette effect), and canvas effects (e.g, pastel paper). You can create your own presets. The ability to close side-panel controls permits a large preview space.
This program is especially useful for charcoal drawings, colored pencil drawings, oil paintings, and pencil drawings. It has good canvas and paper texture effects.
Dynamic Auto-Painter by MediaChance
Dynamic Auto-Painter, a Windows/Mac stand-alone program, allows you to paint in the style of famous painters, such as Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. It allows you to create a wide variety of types of artworks.
There are a variety of controls for each preset, such as brush strokes, canvas, detail brushes, faithfulness, realism, palette, and quality. It supports advanced (e.g, color shift), retouch, outline, canvas, material, color, and layer adjustments. It is highly customizable. Artwork rendering occurs in stages, with further user fine-tuning possible during some stages. It typically renders vivid, saturated images, but image saturation can be adjusted.
While the presets can be used to easily create artworks, the real power of this program is not revealed until you start using the numerous advanced controls and directing brush strokes during the creation process. You are likely to experiment with a number of adjustments to get desired effects.
This standalone program is especially useful for oil paintings.
Other Digital Art Software to Consider
Depending on your artistic requirements and style, the following software may also be of interest.
- AKVIS Charcoal (charcoal and chalk drawings)
- AKVIS Draw (highly expressive, loose drawing effects)
- AKVIS OilPaint (oil painting and oil pastel effects)
- AKVIS Pastel (crayon, oil pastel, and pastel effects)
- AKVIS Sketch (charcoal, color pencil, lead pencil, pastel, and watercolor effects)
- AKVIS Watercolor (aquarelle and watercolor effects)
- JixiPix Aquarella (watercolor paintings)
- JixiPix Artoon (cartoon drawings)
- JixiPix Moku Hanga (block printing)
- JixiPix Impresso Pro (standalone; oil painting effects)
- JixiPix Pastello (chalk, crayon, pastel, and pencil effects)
- JixiPix Watercolor Studio
- ToonIt! (cartoon, graphic novel, woodcut, and other effects)
Useful Photo Editing Software
The following software is recommended for editing artistic works:
- Exposure (standalone and plug-in; very powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets; highly recommended)
- Luminar (standalone and plug-in; powerful full-featured photo editors, especially useful for light ray effects)
- ON1 Photo RAW (standalone and plug-in; powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets)
- Topaz Denoise AI (very effective noise reduction)
Purchase Advice
It is highly recommended that you download and test digital art software demos prior to purchase. Try all the presets. A software company's idea of what a good art effect is may not match your own, so experiment with changing the settings of unsatisfactory effects before concluding that the program cannot do what you want.
Some programs do not have a variety of presets. It is more difficult to create your own presets from scratch rather modifying presets.
It is especially important to test the limits of a program and to determine what features can be disabled. For example, see how much detail you can get in a painting and check whether it is possible to turn off the texture effect (i.e, canvas).
In some cases, it is worth buying a program for one or two unique effects even though the rest may not be satisfactory or may duplicate effects you already have in other programs.
If possible, save older versions of software. New versions may drop or significantly change features you rely on.
Software Licensing and Sales Policies
AKVIS has separate home, home deluxe, and business licenses. Only business licenses allow commercial use. Dynamic Auto Painter has home and pro versions.
Companies may offer one or more software bundles, which reduce the prices of included products.
Some companies, such as Exposure, offer their products at substantial discounts during sales, which typically occur during major US holidays. These are especially good times to buy software bundles.
About the Author
Digital artist Charles W. Bailey, Jr. transforms public domain and personal photographs into noncommercial digital artworks using specialized Photoshop plug-ins and art programs. He has made over 600 digital artworks freely available under versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses, providing detailed information about how each artwork was created, and, for public domain images, attribution of the original image creator (if known).
This page is about drawing tablets, what they are, how they work, andwhere things can go wrong.
What are Tablets?¶
Drawing with a mouse can be unintuitive and difficult compared to penciland paper. Even worse, extended mouse use can result in carpal tunnelsyndrome. That’s why most people who draw digitally use a specializedpiece of hardware known as a drawing tablet.
A drawing tablet is a piece of hardware that you can plug into yourmachine, much like a keyboard or mouse. It usually looks like a plasticpad, with a stylus. Another popular format is a computer monitor withstylus used to draw directly on the screen. These are better to use thana mouse because it’s more natural to draw with a stylus and generallybetter for your wrists.
With a properly installed tablet stylus, Krita can use information likepressure sensitivity, allowing you to make strokes that get bigger orsmaller depending on the pressure you put on them, to create richer andmore interesting strokes.
Note
Sometimes, people confuse finger-touch styluses with a proper tablet. You can tell the difference because a drawing tablet stylus usually has a pointy nib, while a stylus made for finger-touch has a big rubbery round nib, like a finger. These tablets may not give good results and a pressure-sensitive tablet is recommended.
Supported Tablets¶
Supported tablets are owned by Krita developers themselves, so they can reliably diagnose and fix bugs. We maintain a list of those here.
If you’re looking for information about iPad or Android tablets, look here.
Drivers and Pressure Sensitivity¶
So you have bought a tablet, a real drawing tablet. And you want to get itto work with Krita! So you plug in the USB cable, start up Krita and…It doesn’t work! Or well, you can make strokes, but that pressuresensitivity you heard so much about doesn’t seem to work.
This is because you need to install a program called a ‘driver’. Usuallyyou can find the driver on a CD that was delivered alongside yourtablet, or on the website of the manufacturer. Go install it, and whileyou wait, we’ll go into the details of what it is!
Running on your computer is a basic system doing all the tricky bits ofrunning a computer for you. This is the operating system, or OS. Mostpeople use an operating system called Windows, but people on an Appledevice have an operating system called macOS, and some people, includingmany of the developers use a system called Linux.
The base principle of all of these systems is the same though. You wouldlike to run programs like Krita, called software, on your computer, andyou want Krita to be able to communicate with the hardware, like yourdrawing tablet. But to have those two communicate can be reallydifficult - so the operating system, works as a glue between the two.
Whenever you start Krita, Krita will first make connections with theoperating system, so it can ask it for a lot of these things: It wouldlike to display things, and use the memory, and so on. Most importantly,it would like to get information from the tablet!
But it can’t! Turns out your operating system doesn’t know much abouttablets. That’s what drivers are for. Installing a driver gives theoperating system enough information, so the OS can provide Krita with theright information about the tablet. The hardware manufacturer’s job isto write a proper driver for each operating system.
Warning
Because drivers modify the operating system a little, you will always need to restart your computer when installing or uninstalling a driver, so don’t forget to do this! Conversely, because Krita isn’t a driver, you don’t need to even uninstall it to reset the configuration, just rename or delete the configuration file.
Where it can go wrong: Windows¶
Krita automatically connects to your tablet if the drivers areinstalled. When things go wrong, usually the problem isn’t with Krita.
Surface Pro tablets need two drivers¶
Best Art Program Krita Reddit 2018 Movie
Certain tablets using n-trig, like the Surface Pro, have two types ofdrivers. One is native, n-trig and the other one is called Wintab.Since 3.3, Krita can use Windows Ink style drivers, just go toSettings ‣ Configure Krita… ‣ Tablet Settings andtoggle the Windows 8+ Pointer Input (Windows Ink) there. Youdon’t need to install the Wintab drivers anymore for n-trig based pens.
Windows 10 updates¶
Sometimes a Windows 10 update can mess up tablet drivers. In that case,reinstalling the drivers should work.
Wacom Tablets¶
There are three known problems with Wacom tablets and Windows.
The first is that if you have customized the driver settings, then sometimes,often after a driver update, but that is not necessary, the driver breaks.Resetting the driver to the default settings and then loading your settingsfrom a backup will solve this problem.
The second is that for some reason it might be necessary to change the displaypriority order. You might have to make your Cintiq screen your primary screen,or, on the other hand, make it the secondary screen. Double check in the Wacomsettings utility that the tablet in the Cintiq is associated with the Cintiqscreen.
The third is that if you have a display tablet like a Cintiq and a Wacom ExpressKeys remote, and you have disabled Windows Ink in the calibration page of the stylus settings dialog, so you have the full set of Wintab features, the Cintiq needs to be the first item in Wacom’s desktop application list. Otherwise, you will have an offset between stylus and mouse that will get worse the more displays there are to the left of the Cintiq display.
Best Art Program Krita Reddit 2018
Broken Drivers¶
Tablet drivers need to be made by the manufacturer. Sometimes, withreally cheap tablets, the hardware is fine, but the driver is badlywritten, which means that the driver just doesn’t work well. We cannotdo anything about this, sadly. You will have to send a complaint to themanufacturer for this, or buy a better tablet with better qualitydrivers.
Conflicting Drivers¶
On Windows, you can only have a single Wintab-style driver installed ata time. So be sure to uninstall the previous driver before installingthe one that comes with the tablet you want to use. Other operatingsystems are a bit better about this, but even Linux, where the driversare often preinstalled, can’t run two tablets with different drivers atonce.
Interfering software¶
Sometimes, there’s software that tries to make a security layer betweenKrita and the operating system. Sandboxie is an example of this.However, Krita cannot always connect to certain parts of the operatingsystem while sandboxed, so it will often break in programs likeSandboxie. Similarly, certain mouse software, like Razer utilities canalso affect whether Krita can talk to the operating system, convertingtablet information to mouse information. This type of software should beconfigured to leave Krita alone, or be uninstalled.
The following software has been reported to interfere with tablet eventsto Krita:
Sandboxie
Razer mouse utilities
AMD Catalyst:sup:TM “game mode” (this broke the right click for someone)
Flicks (Wait circle showing up and then calling the popup palette)¶
If you have a situation where trying to draw keeps bringing up thepop-up palette on Windows, then the problem might be flicks. These are atype of gesture, a bit of Windows functionality that allows you to makea motion to serve as a keyboard shortcut. Windows automatically turnsthese on when you install tablet drivers, because the people who madethis part of Windows forgot that people also draw with computers. So youwill need to turn it off in the Windows flicks configuration.
Wacom Double Click Sensitivity (Straight starts of lines)¶
If you experience an issue where the start of the stroke is straight,and have a Wacom tablet, it could be caused by the Wacom driverdouble-click detection.
To fix this, go to the Wacom settings utility and lower the double clicksensitivity.
Supported Tablets¶
Supported tablets are the ones of which Krita developers have a versionthemselves, so they can reliably fix bugs with them. We maintain a list of those here.