Tutorial
Table of Contents
The toolbars and palettes shown in these tutorials may not match your installation of Krita. Our apologies for this inconvenience.
So, let's show you all the niceties. In your KDE menus,
Krita should be placed either under Graphics or under Office —
it depends a bit on who packaged KOffice for you. Or do what I do:
press Alt+F2
(which opens krunner), type
krita and press
.
A little later, you'll be greeted by a dialog:
The Create Document dialog
This is standard for KOffice: you can create a new document, choose a document from among your files or select a document you had opened in an earlier session. We have got a bunch of templates here, ordered by color model. Krita is a very flexible application and can handle many different types of images: CMYK images for printers, RGB images for the web, RGB images with high channel depths for photographers; and more. For now, choose Custom Document. That will allow us to see the New Image dialog box:
The New Image dialog
Here you can give your document a name, determine the dimensions and the resolution. The resolution of your image determines its physical size. An image with a resolution of 100 pixels per inch will take, at 100% zoom exactly one inch on screen or on paper. Of course, you can also work in a mode where one pixel of your image is exactly one pixel on your screen: more about that later.
The next group of options is very itneresting: Krita is an enormously flexible application and you can work with many kinds of images. For this tutorial, just select RGB (8 bits/channel). You can also select a profile. For now, we leave this at the default setting of sRGB built-in - (lcms internal).
In the third option group, you can select the initial canvas color. Furthermore you can add a description of the contents. We leave these options at their default settings as well, so click to actually create the new image.
You will now see the main Krita screen.
Krita's main screen
On the left hand side and on the top, there are toolbars which offer you access to tools for painting, editing, and selecting. Note that the toolbox on the left-hand side consists of two parts: the top part is the flake toolbox and works on vector shapes, the bottom part (the biggest part, actually) are the krita tools. By default, the krita freehand painting tool is selected
You can find a more detailed description of these toolbars here. The actual painting area is in the middle. On the right side of your screen, there are various palettes, which you can read more about in this section. Finally, there is a menu bar at the top of the screen, as usually. Read more about it here.
