Krita’s interface is very flexible and provides an ample choice for the artist to arrange the elements of the workspace. An artist can snap and arrange the elements, much like snapping together Lego blocks. Krita provides a set of construction kit parts in the form of Dockers and Toolbars. Every set of elements can be shown, hidden, moved and rearranged, that lets the artist to easily customize their own user interface experience.
As we’ve said before, the Krita interface is very malleable and the way that you choose to configure the work surface may not resemble those shown below, but we can use these as a starting point.
Your canvas sits in the middle and unlike traditional paper, or even most digital painting applications, Krita provides the artist with a scrolling canvas of infinite size (not that you’ll need it of course!). The standard navigation tools are as follows:
Many of the canvas navigation actions, like rotation, mirroring and zooming have default keys attached to them:
You can rotate the canvas without transforming. It can be done with the
Ctrl
+
[
shortcut or
4
key and the other way with
Ctrl
+
]
shortcut or
6
key. Quick mouse based rotation is done with the
Shift
+
Space
and
Shift
+
shortcuts. To reset rotation use the
5
key.
You can also find these under
.
Dockers
Krita subdivides many of its options into functional panels called Dockers (also known as Docks).
Dockers are small windows that can contain, for example, things like the layer stack, Color Palette or list of Brush Presets. Think of them as the painter’s palette, or his water, or his brush kit. They can be activated by choosing the
Settings
menu and the
Dockers
sub-menu. There you will find a long list of available options.
Dockers can be removed by clicking the
x
in the upper-right of the docker-window.
Dockers, as the name implies, can be docked into the main interface. You can do this by dragging the docker to the sides of the canvas (or top or bottom if you prefer).
Dockers contain many of the “hidden”, and powerful, aspects of
Krita
that you will want to explore as you start delving deeper into the application.
You can arrange the dockers in almost any permutation and combination according to the needs of your workflow, and then save these arrangements as Workspaces.
Dockers can be prevented from docking by pressing the
Ctrl
key before starting to drag the docker.
Sliders
Krita uses these to control values like brush size, opacity, flow, Hue, Saturation, etc… Below is an example of a Krita slider.
The total range is represented from left to right and blue bar gives an indication of where in the possible range the current value is. Clicking anywhere, left or right, of that slider will change the current number to something lower (to the left) or higher (to the right).
To input a specific number, hold
on, or
the slider. A number can now be entered directly for even greater precision.
Pressing the
Shift
key while dragging the slider changes the values at a smaller increment, and pressing the
Ctrl
key while dragging the slider changes the value in whole numbers or multiples of 5.
Changed in version 5.1:
Shift
while dragging will now also enable “relative mode”, which means that the cursor can be dragged outside the slider area.
Toolbars
Toolbars are where some important actions and menus are placed so that they are readily and quickly available for the artist while painting.
You can learn more about the Krita Toolbars and how to configure them in over in the
Toolbars section
of the manual.
Putting these to effective use can really speed up the Artist’s workflow, especially for users of Tablet-Monitors and Tablet-PCs.
New in version 5.0:
In addition to shortcuts and the toolbar, you can also search and quickly through all actions via the action search bar, which is accessed with
Ctrl
+
Enter
.
Workspace Chooser
The button on the very right of the Toolbar is the workspace chooser. This allows you to load and save common configurations of the user interface in Krita. There are a few common workspaces that come with Krita.
Pop-up Palette
Pop-up Palette
is a feature unique to Krita, designed to increase the productivity of the artist. It is a circular menu for quickly choosing brushes, foreground and background colors, recent colors while painting. To access the palette you have to just
on the canvas. The palette will spawn at the position of the brush tip or cursor.
By tagging your brush presets you can add particular sets of brushes to this palette. For example, if you add some inking brush presets to inking tag you can change the tags to inking in the pop-up palette, and you’ll get all the inking brushes in the palette.
You can
tag
brush presets via the
Preset Docker
, check out the
resource overview page
to know more about tagging in general.
If you call up the pop-up palette again, you can click the tag icon, and select the tag. In fact, you can make multiple tags and switch between them.
When you need more than ten presets, go into
and change the number of presets from 10 to something you feel comfortable.
Revision
3e75f7f
.
Built with
Sphinx
using a modified
RTD theme
.
Krita official website
|
Git repository for docs.krita.org
|
KDE Impressum
.
