Edit photos with Krita
Creative Workshop
Not many people are aware that Krita, the popular open source painting program, is also great for editing photos.
Few photographers are aware that Krita, the popular painting program [1], can also be used to edit photos. Considering that many illustrators and graphic designers use Photoshop or Gimp for digital painting and drawing, this is not surprising.
In fact, Krita's approach is identical to that of classic layer-based image editors in terms of the basic functions. However, it has several pretty significant advantages compared with Gimp. On the one hand, Krita lets you edit photos in large color spaces like Adobe RGB. This is especially important if you want to print a high-quality image with intense colors. On the other hand, Krita has filter masks, a counterpart to Photoshop's adjustment layers. They allow for far more comfortable image editing, because numerous effects can be adjusted retroactively and masks can be edited directly in the layer.
Krita is also one of only a few graphics programs that support 10-bit screen output. In combination with a 10-bit capable monitor, this gives you a far more accurate display of fine color nuances and gradients. In the following, I will use a concrete example to demonstrate how photo retouching with Krita works. (The original image can be found online [2].)
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