Krita Portable

Digital painters, illustrators and concept artists can take advantage of a multitude of professional solutions to create stunning works, but many open-source alternatives are often overlooked, and there are plenty of reasons to give them a chance.

Krita Portable is a powerful yet intuitive digital painting tool that serves as a perfect example. It offers an impressive array of features aimed at a broad range of graphic artists, and it packs everything into a modern, intuitive and customizable interface.

If you are already familiar with Krita, this portable edition is an interesting alternative to the standard installer-based version. It relies on the well-known PortableApps.com Platform, and it offers many advantages over the regular edition.

Most importantly, Krita Portable can be installed on a mobile storage device, such as a USB drive, and deployed on multiple computers without restriction, while maintaining all your settings and profiles.

The application does not leave any traces behind on the host computer, so you can be certain every PC you run it on remains clean.

The most important tools in the arsenal of any digital artist, the brushes, can be customized to a great extent, and the application offers a total of nine unique brush engines. A number of parameters can be modified, so as to cater to the needs of individual users.

Krita Portable offers another interesting feature in the form of the Wrap-Around Mode, which enables you to create seamless textures and patterns while watching the references update in real-time.

The application also provides helpful drawing aids and mirroring tools that you can rely on, and its comprehensive layer management system makes it easy to keep your project organized.

Moreover, Krita Portable supports color management through OpenColor IO for EXR and LCMS for ICC, and it can take advantage of OpenGL to improve the quality of the canvas and increase zooming speed.

The application’s dark-themed UI is both appealing and easy on the eyes, and its layout is quite straightforward, so much so that any artist that has used similar programs in the past should have no problems finding the tools they need.

Speaking of ease-of-use, we should also mention the handy pop-up palette that you can bring up by simply right-clicking anywhere on the canvas. All the tools you use frequently can be stored here, along with some recently used colors.

To sum up, you already use the standard version of Krita, this portable edition is certainly worth a look, as it provides the same features while offering some interesting benefits.

However, if you are a digital artist who has not heard of this application until now, you should definitely give it a try. It is very easy to use, puts an extensive array of tools at your disposal and featuring a modern, intuitive user interface.