OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr has been playing with analogue and then digital photography all his life.
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr has been playing with analogue and then digital photography all his life.
Can you believe Linux Format has never run a Krita tutorial, despite many reviews over the C years? Krita has finally turned v5 and we’re taking a flying tour of its features. It’s aimed at digital artists, but we’re coming to Krita from a photography angle, which is more likely how most readers want to use it. This also helps to introduce the Krita interface without getting bogged down in its more complex drawing features aimed at artists, and it’s likely you’ll be more familiar with similar tools in GIMP and other photography tools. See the box top-left for installation.
Opening Krita for the first time isn’t very impressive; you’ll want to click the open file and choose a suitable image before the interface springs into life. Take a gander at the annotation (below-left) for highlights of the interface.
Ironically, Krita’s crown jewel is the digital-artisttargeting pop-up brush palette. We’re largely ignoring this, which is a shame as it’s a delightful bit of interface design. Hopefully, you’ll appreciate just how versatile and functional this would be if you were using a tablet with stylus or a dedicated graphics tablet, enabling you to instantly pop it open, adjust your drawing tool and mode, then effortlessly dismiss it. See the boxout (on page 63) for more on brush control.
When it comes to adjusting photographs, there’s a few jobs we find ourselves doing over and over. The first is fiddling with colours, largely contrast, saturation and perhaps the colour temperature on indoor shots. We also often clone small areas to touch up images, alongside area selection, so we can clone or target adjustments to specific parts of a photo. We’ll look at how these areas work in Krita before walking you through adjusting a landscape photograph.
Not too bright!
Rather than a discussion of the intelligence of LXF’s editor, this section is about Krita’s colour controls. These are the same array of controls as you find in GIMP and most image editors, such as Brightness/ Contrast, Levels, Curves and Saturation.
Interestingly, Krita doesn’t have a straight Brightness/Contrast control, but it does have an Auto Contrast adjustment that you can find – along with the other colour controls – under the Filter > Adjust menu. If you want to balance the black/white contrast levels, we suggest using Levels. Levels let you more easily adjust the overall tonal range of a photograph, balancing the black and white points. It’s such a fundamental element of photo editing that it should be one of the first things you apply to a new image. Press Ctrl+L to bring up the classic Levels controls, then drag the left-hand Black and the right-hand White levels to enhance the contrast.
Do note the grey and colour mix icons top-left; click the colour one to see the mix of RGB over the intensity range. This also activates an individual channel selector, including Hue, Saturation and Lightness controls. To the right is a double-arrow icon that resets any changes and below this is a magic wand icon, which activates the Auto Levels mode.