.. index:: FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions
This page contains common problems people have with Krita
Contents
- Krita FAQ
- General
- What is Krita?
- Krita starts with an empty canvas and nothing changes when you try to draw or Krita shows a black or blank screen or Krita crashes when creating a document or Krita's menubar is hidden on a Windows system with an Intel GPU
- Krita freezes when saving to PNG or JPEG on OSX or macOS/ I cannot enable OpenGL on my mac
- Is it possible to use Krita in my own language, not English?
- Does Krita have layer clip or clipping mask?
- OBS can't record the Krita openGL canvas
- Where are the configuration files stored?
- My resource disappeared with installing 3.0! Did Krita delete them?
- Resetting Krita configuration
- Krita tells me it can't find the configuration files and then closes, what should I do?
- What Graphics Cards does Krita support?
- I can't edit text from PSD files created by photoshop
- How much memory does my image take?
- Why do I get a checkerboard pattern when I use the eraser?
- Can I use Krita with sandboxie on Windows?
- Can krita work with 8 bit (indexed) images?
- How do I export gifs with Krita?
- How can I produce a backtrace on Windows?
- Where can I find older versions of Krita?
- On Windows, the Krita User Interface is too small on my HiDPI screen.
- I'm using MacOS Sierra and Krita won't start
- I'm using Linux and Krita crashes on start
- Tablets
- Toolbox
- Resources
- Krita is slow
- Tools
- License, rights and the Krita foundation
- Who owns Krita?
- Is there professional support available for Krita?
- Who and what is Kiki?
- Why is Krita Free?
- Can I use Krita commercially?
- Can I get Krita for iPad? for Android?
- Who translates Krita and are there translations available?
- What are Krita’s Development Goals?
- Would you like bug reports?
- Can I join the fun?
- Reference
- General
General questions
This is our vision for the development of Krita:
Krita is a free and open source cross-platform application that offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital art files from scratch. Krita is optimized for frequent, prolonged and focused use.
Explicitly supported fields of painting are illustrations, concept art, matte painting, textures, comics and animations.
Developed together with users, Krita is an application that supports their actual needs and workflow. Krita supports open standards and interoperates with other applications
- Update to Krita 3.3 or later:
- Go to Settings/Configure Krita/Display, change Renderer to ANGLE and restart Krita. If this doesn't work, disable Canvas Graphics Acceleration and please also make a bug report about it.
If the former, you probably have an AMD Radeon display chip and are running a version of Krita lower than 3.2. Disable opengl in Krita. If the latter, you've still got an AMD display chip in your mac and are running Krita 3.2 or 3.3. The problem is that Apple's AMD opengl drivers hang Krita 3.x when trying to save to a single-layer file format. No, we don' t know why, and we don't have the hardware to figure out why. But Krita 4.0, this problem has been solved because there Krita saves a copy of the image in the background.
Unless you belong to a proud tribe of a minority language, YES it is POSSIBLE! You can easily do this by going into
- settings → switch application language. An small window will appear.
- click Primary language and select your language.
- click OK to close the window.
- restart krita and it will be displayed in your selected language!
Krita has no clipping mask, but it has a clipping feature called inherit alpha. Let's see :ref:`this page <clipping_masks_and_alpha_inheritance>` and learn how to do clipping in Krita!
Apparantly the workaround for this is to either...
- Turn off OpenGL in settings → configure Krita → display.
- Or don't use the hardware accelerated mode(game recording mode) in OBS, so capture the whole desktop instead of attempting to capture only Krita.
For Krita 3.3 or later: You might be able to work around by using the ANGLE renderer instead of native OpenGL.
These are stored at the following places for the following operating systems:
- Linux
- :file:`$HOME/.config/kritarc`
- Windows
- :file:`%APPDATA%\Local\kritarc`
- MacOS X
- :file:`$HOME/Library/Preferences/kritarc`
The kritarc file is the configuration file.
Don't worry, Krita nor the installer know how to delete your brushes(unless you use the 'delete backup files' in the resource manager)
Your old 2.9 brushes should be at
- Linux
- :file:`home/.kde/share/krita`
- Windows
- :file:`User\\AppData\\Roaming\\krita\\share\\apps\\krita\\`
For 3.0, these should go to
- Linux
- :file:`$HOME/.local/share/krita/`
- Windows
- :file:`user\\Appdata\\Roaming\\krita\\` or :file:`%APPDATA%\\Roaming\\krita\\`
- OSX
- :file:`~/Library/Application Support/Krita/`
Just copy the files over!
You can reset the Krita configuration in two ways:
For Krita 3.0 and later: Delete/rename the kritarc file, found here:
There can be two other files you might want to remove: kritaopenglrc and kritadisplayrc.
If the config was causing a crash, don't delete but instead rename and send us the file so we can figure out what caused the crash.
First, search your filesystem for kritarc. If it's nowhere to be found, then that is the main problem.
Causes for this could be the following:
- It might be that your download got corrupted and is missing files(common with bad wifi and bad internet connection in general), in that case, try to find a better internet connection before trying to download again. Krita should be around 80 to 100 mb big when downloading.
- It might be something went wrong during installation. Check if your harddrive isn't full. If not, and the problem still occurs, there might be something odd going on with your device and it's recommended to find an computer expert to diagnose what is going on.
- Some unzippers don't unpack our zipfiles correctly. The native ones on windows, OSX and most linux distributions should be just fine, and we recommend using them.
Krita can use OpenGL to accelerate painting and canvas zooming, rotation and panning. Nvidia and recent Intel GPUs give the best results. Make sure your OpenGL drivers support OpenGL 3.2 as the minimum. AMD/ATI GPU’s are known to be troublesome, especially with the proprietary drivers on Linux. However, it works perfectly with the radeon free driver on linux for supported AMD GPU.
For Krita 3.3 or later: Krita on Windows can use Direct3D 11 for graphics acceleration (through ANGLE).
There is no text support for psd file yet. The text will appear rasterized and converted into paint layer.
For simple images, that’s pretty simple: you mulitply width * height * channels * size of the channels (so, for a 1000×1000 16 bit integer rgba image: 1000 x 1000 x 4 x 2). You multiply this by the number of layers plus two (one for the image, one for the display). If you add masks, filter layers or clone layers, it gets more complicated.
You’re probably used to Gimp or Photoshop. The background, that is default or first layer in these applications doesn’t have an alpha channel by default. so, on their background layer, the eraser paints in the background color.
In Krita, all layers have an alpha channel, so if you want to paint in the background color, you should do that, instead of erasing. You get the same effect in, say, gimp, if you create new image, add an alpha channel and then use the eraser tool. Most Krita users actually on starting a sketch in Krita add a new blank layer first thing they do (the INSert key is a useful shortcut here.) That doesn’t use extra memory, since a blank layer or a layer with a default color just takes one pixel worth of memory.
No, this is not recommended. Sandboxie causes stuttering and freezes due to the way it intercepts calls for resources on disk.
No. Krita has been designed from the ground up to use real colors, not indexed palettes. There are no plans to support indexed color images, though Krita can export to some indexed color image formats, such as GIF. However, Krita does not offer detailed control over pixel values.
Currently, Krita 3.0 doesn't have gif, apng or spritesheet export yet. Krita 3.1 does have :ref:`render_animation`.
For big projects we recommend exporting your animation as a png sequence, and then inputtng that into a video editor.
*See also: :ref:`Dr. Mingw debugger <dr_minw>` *
If you experience a crash on Windows, and can reproduce the crash, the bug report will be much more valuable if you can create a backtrace. A backtrace is somewhat akin to an airplane's blackbox, in that they tell what set of instructions your computer was running when it was crashing(where the crash happened), making it very useful to figure out why the crash happened.
For Krita 3.1 or later
The :ref:`Dr. Mingw debugger <dr_minw>` is bundled with Krita. Please visit the page :ref:`Dr. Mingw debugger <dr_minw>` for instructions on getting a backtrace with it.
For Krita 3.0
first you need to install DrMingw, which is a debugger application:
https://github.com/jrfonseca/drmingw
Then you need a special version of Krita, one with debugging information. The latest development builds with all the latest bug fixed are here:
- http://files.kde.org/krita/3/windows/debugbuilds/krita3-x64-dbg-latest.zip
- http://files.kde.org/krita/3/windows/debugbuilds/krita3-x86-dbg-latest.zip
You can download the right file, unzip it and double-click on the krita link in the unzipped folder. If you now reproduce the crash, Windows will ask you whether you want to debug it; answer yes, and DrMingw will pop up and after some time show you a lot of text. You can paste that into your bug report.
All older versions of Krita that are still available can be found here:
If you're using Windows, you can set the display scaling to1 150% or 200%, and enable the experimental HiDPI support in the config:
- On the menu, select :menuselection:`Settings --> Configure Krita`
- Switch to :guilabel:`Window`
- Check :guilabel:`Enable Hi-DPI support`
- Restart Krita
We don't sign Krita binaries on OSX because we feel Apple already has more money than is good for them and in order to sign our binaries we have to give them money every year. In Sierra, Apple removed the “Anywhere” button in the security pane, making it even less obvious how to start Krita. Here's the trick: go to the krita app bundle in Finder and ctrl-click on it. Then Krita will start, and macOS will remember that. Or you can re-enable the button by executing the following line in your terminal:
sudo spctl --master-enable
If you also see somethine like “QIODevice::seek: Invalid pos: -18” on the command line, it's quite likely that at one point you had the Deepin file manager installed. That comes with some qimageio plugins that are completely and utterly broken. Krita's reference images docker scans your Pictures folder on startup, and if your Pictures folder. It reads the images using Qt's QImageIO class, which loads that Deepin plugin. The issue is reported to Deepin, but the Deepin developers don't seem convinced that it makes sense to check whether there are any bytes to read, before reading the bytes.
Krita isn’t much fun without a pressure sensitive tablet. If the tablet has been properly configured, Krita works with Wacom, Huion and other uc-logic based tablets, on Windows and Linux (look below for more information on Huion Linux support). N-Trig tablets should work too, but some setting up might be needed. Genius tablets are know to have problems. You can find a community curated list of tablets supported by krita :ref:`here <list_supported_tablets>`.
If you're looking for information about tablets like the iPad or Android tablets, look :ref:`here <krita_android>`_.
We would like to see the full output of the following commands:
lsmod
xinput
xinput list-props
(id can be fetched from the item 2)- Get the log of the tablet events (if applicable):
- Open a console application (e.g. Konsole on KDE)
- Set the amount of scrollback to 'unlimited' (for :program:`Konsole`: :menuselection:`Settings --> Edit Current Profile --> Scrolling --> Unlimited Scrollback`)
- Start Krita by typing 'krita' and create any document :)
- Press Ctrl + Shift + T, you will see a message box telling the logging is started
- Try to reproduce your problem
- The console is now filled with the log. Attach it to a bug report or paste using services like paste.kde.org
- Attach all this data to a bugreport using public paste services like paste.kde.org
First check whether switching to the Windows 8 Pointer API makes a difference: Settings/Configure Krita/Tablet. Then, if you still have problems with Windows and your tablet, we cannot help you without a tablet log.
- Install DebugView from the official Microsoft site
- Start :program:`DebugView`
- Start :program:`Krita`
- Press Ctrl + Shift + T, you will see a message box telling the logging is started
- Try to reproduce your problem
- Go back to DebugView and save its output to a file. Attach this file to a bug report or paste using services like paste.kde.org.
If you see that your tablet pointer has an offset when working with Krita canvas, it might be highly probable, that Krita got incorrect screen resolution from the system. That problem happens mostly when an external monitor is present and when either of monitor or a tablet was connected after the system boot.
Now there is a simple solution to fix this data manually.
- Lay you stylus aside
- Start Krita without using a stylus, that is using a mouse or a keyboard
- Press Shift key and hold it
- Touch a tablet with your stylus so Krita would recognize it
You will see a special dialog asking for real screen resolution. Choose the correct value or enter it manually and press OK.
If you have a dual monitor setup and only the top half of the screen is reachable, you might have to enter the total width of both screens plus the double height of your monitor in this field.
If this didn't work, and if you have a Wacom tablet, an offset in the canvas can be caused by a faulty Wacom preference file which is not removed or replaced by reinstalling the drivers.
To fix it, use the “Wacom Tablet Preference File Utility” to clear all the preferences. This should allow Krita to detect the correct settings automatically.
Warning
this will reset your tablets configuration so you will need to recalibrate/reconfigure it.
For Krita 3.3 or later: You can try to :ref:`enable “Windows 8+ Pointer Input” <tablet_settings>`, but some features might not work with it.
Krita 3.3.0 supports the Windows Pointer API (Windows Ink) natively. Your Surface Pro or other n-trig enabled pen tablet should work out of the box with Krita after you enable Windows Ink in Settings/Configure Krita/Tablet.
Unlike Wacom's Companion, the Surface line of tablets doesn't have working hardware buttons. Tablet Pro is a (non-free) utility that puts virtual buttons on screen. Krita 3.1 (currently in beta) will have predefined shortcut profiles to work with Tablet Pro.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKXZgYqC3tI for instructions.
This applies to Huion models: H610 (maybe others too? report your model here..)
First, if you use a linux kernel version 3.13 or above, remove the buggy huion driver with this command line:
rmmod hid-huion
or, depending on your distribution:
modprobe -r hid-huion
Then build and install the correct kernel driver.
(note that you’ll have to redo those steps after each kernel update, until this driver is included in mainline kernel.)
Now you should have a working tablet in Krita and Gimp (sadly, it doesn’t work with current mypaint version, probably because of GTK3..) But as by default the whole tablet area is mapped to the whole screen, depending on your screen ratio you may want to adapt the active area of the tablet to have the same proportions.
For this, first you need to install xinput-calibrator (check in your package manager it may be named a bit differently, with – or _ in the middle…)
Now, you’ll need the name or ID of your device, so list devices with this command line:
xinput_calibrator --list | grep H610
Then I noticed the huion report two different devices with the same name, just different ID. So to find out which is the one corresponding to the actual stylus tablet area, get devices values with this command line:
xinput_calibrator --device 10
(adapt id number the the values you found on previous step…)
It will open a sort of calibration window, don’t click the crosses, just press any key to abort. Then you can see the default values of the device appeared in the console. One devices has much bigger max values (0 40000 0 25000), this is the one you should get the ID number. (in my case here was ID 10 )
Then calculate the values to set the active area to the same ratio as screen.. For example, for a 1920×1080 screen, I did this operation: 40000*1080/1920=22500
And finally set the calibration values (TopX BottomX TopY BottomY) like this:
xinput set-prop 10 “Evdev Axis Calibration” 0 40000 0 22500
Weird stuff happens on Windows, like ripples, rings, squiggles or poltergeists
Windows comes with a lot of settings to make it work with a pen. Al these settings are annoying. This tool can help to set the settings correctly if you're using a tablet:
https://github.com/saveenr/Fix_My_Pen/releases
You either reset the workspace by pressing the right most button on the toolbar, the workspace switcher, and clicking a workspace from the list.
Or right-click on any docker titlebar or open space in any toolbar, and select Toolbox. It's the first option.
Or check the Settings menu, it's got lots of interesting stuff, then go to the Dockers menu and... select toolbox.
Right click the toolbox to set the size.
This is due to the toolbox being too big, for example, when it's accidentally made 1-columns wide. Resize it to make it 2 columns wide.
Is there a way to restore a default brush that I have mistakenly overwritten with new settings to default?
Yes. First go to the resource folder, which is
- Linux
- :file:`$HOME/.local/share/krita/`
- Windows
- :file:`user\\Appdata\\Roaming\\krita\\` or :file:`%APPDATA%\\Roaming\\krita\\`
- OSX
- :file:`~/Library/Application Support/Krita/`
You can easily do this by going into :menuselection:`settings --> manage resources --> open resource folder`.
Then go into the paintoppressets folder and remove the latest created file that you made of your preset.
Then go back to the resources folder and edit the blacklist file to remove the previous paintop preset so Krita will load it. (Yes, it is a bit of a convoluted system, but at the least you don't lose your brushes)
Right-click a brush in the brush docker and assign it a tag. Then when clicking the lower-right settings icon you can pick you tag.
Yes, but there are limitations. You can load ABR files by using the Add Brush button in the predefined brush tab in the brush editor. Since Adobe hasn’t disclosed the file format specification, we depend on reverse-engineering to figure out what to load, and currently that’s limited to basic features.
There is a myriad of reasons why this might be. Below is a short checklist.
- Something else is hogging the cpu.
- You are running Windows, and have 3rdparty security software like sandboxie or total defender installed
- you are working on images that are too big for your hardware (dimensions, channel depth or number of layers)
- you do not have canvas acceleration enabled
Please also check this page: https://phabricator.kde.org/T7199
You probably have too many resources installed. Deactivate some bundles under settings → manage resources
If you're using Windows and the portable zip file, Windows will scan all files everytime you start Krita. That takes ages. Either use the installer or tell Microsoft Security Essentials to make an exception for Krita.
- Check if you accidentally turned on the stabilizer in the tool options docker.
- Try another display filter like trilinear. settings → configure Krita → display
- Try a lower channel depth than 16-bit.
- For NVidia, try a 16-bit floating point color space.
- For AMD (Krita 2.9.10 and above), turn off the vector optimizations that are broken on AMD CPUs. settings → configure Krita → performance
- It's a fairly memory hungry program, so 2GB of ram is the minimum, and 4 gig is the preferable minimum.
- Check that not something else is hogging your CPU
- Check that Instant Preview is enabled if you're using bigger brushes (for very small brushes, disabled)
- Set brush precision to 3 or auto
- Use a larger value for brush spacing
- If all of this fails, record a video and post a link and description on the Krita forum.
- check whether opengl is enabled, and if it isn't, enable it, or if it is, and you'r on windows, try the Angle renderer. Or disable it.
Once you have the slowdown, click on the image-dimensions in the status bar. It will tell you how much Krita is using, and if it's hit the limit, whether it's started swapping. Swapping can slow down a program a lot, so either work on smaller images or turn up the maximum amount of ram in settings → configure Krita → performance
The transform tool makes a preview that you edit before computing the finalized version. As this preview is using the screen resolution rather than the image resolution, it may feel that the result is blurry compared to the preview. See https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=139&t=127269 for more info.
In Krita 3.0.1 we changed the default zooming mode to zoom to the cursor instead of to the canvas center as that was more intuitive for artists. we call this relative zoom mode.
If you want to get the old behavior back, go to and change all 4(!) entries with into plain .
The Stichting Krita Foundation owns the Krita trademark.
Yes, the Krita Foundation and Boudewijn Rempt Software offer support for Krita through the development fund, sponsoring opportunities, consultancy and dedicated development contracts.
Kiki is a squirrel. She’s our mascot and has been designed by Tyson Tan. We choose a squirrel when we discovered that ‘krita’ is the Albanian word for Squirrel.
Krita is developed as free software within the KDE community. We believe that good tools should be available for all artists. You can also buy Krita on the Windows Store if you want to support Krita's development or want to have automatic updates to newer versions.
Yes. What you create with Krita is your sole property. You own your work and can license your art however you want. Krita’s GPL license applies to Krita’s source code. Krita can be used commercially by artists for any purpose, by studios to make concept art, textures, or vfx, by game artists to work on commercial games, by scientists for research, and by students in educational institutions.
If you modify Krita itself, and distribute the result, you have to share your modifications with us. Krita’s GNU GPL license guarantees you this freedom. Nobody is ever permitted to take it away.
Krita will probably not be available for iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPad Pro) any time soon because Apple's Appstore's terms and conditions add restrictions that are thought to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU Public License. And then there are problems actually building Krita and all its dependencies on iOS as well as problems getting Krita into the app store.
As for Android, there are no licensing problems, and we would like to see a version for Android, but Krita is an enormous application and we haven't managed to build it for Android yet.
Krita is a KDE application — and proud of it! That means that Krita’s translations are done by KDE localization teams. If you want to help out, join the team for your language! There is another way you can help out making Krita look good in any language, and that is join the development team and fix issues within the code that make Krita harder to translate.
The translations are easy to install on any linux distribution. On Windows they are bundled and you can set them via settings->change application language. On OSX, we are working to make them work similarly to windows, but there are a few bugs preventing the translations work correctly at the time of writing.
Krita is primarily a painting program, although it has image processing capabilities. This means that Krita is intended for creative people who desire to paint and draw with computer software as they do with real-world tools in an art studio.
If you are looking for a tool primarily to apply effects to existing images or photos, to catalog images, or to view images other software (such as Digikam) may be more suitable.If you want to work on collage, photo editing or print production work, Gimp might be more suitable. Ease of use and power as a painting application will always have a higher priority in Krita’s ongoing development.
Definitely. Please take care to include backtraces if you’ve got a crash, and if there’s an image that breaks Krita for you, try to attach the image to the report. If it’s too big, contact me (that’s ‘boud’) on irc: #krita, or directly via email. Adding new wishes to bugzilla isn’t terribly useful, I’m afraid. We have a lot on our TODO already, and to create a new feature, we need to engage in some deep interaction with you, so drop by on the forum, mailing or irc instead. You can report bugs at the KDE bug tracker. We try to reply to bug reports within a week.
If you find signing up to KDE’s bugzilla too much of a bother, or aren’t sure you found a real bug, don’t hesitate, and drop by on the forum or on IRC.
Starting with Krita 3.1, we will have the :ref:`Dr. Mingw debugger <dr_minw>` built into Krita. Check out the instructions for debbugging with it.
Yes.The best thing you can do is use and enjoy Krita! Learn to use Krita and teach others. Create tutorials and sample files, create artwork to show off what Krita can do and spread the good word. And if you want to be more directly involved, well, I didn’t know any C++ when I started hacking on Krita and I managed. You can do it, too! Check the Join Krita page for more information.
And if you don’t feel like hacking C++ — well, there’s the manual that needs someone attending to it, a set of tutorials would be nice, we are everlastingly needing more artwork for interface elements, and finally, we really appreciate reports from people using it, telling me about their work flow and what hampers or helps them.