The Unbiased Review of Krita Photo Editing and The Best Alternative
Last Updated on September 20, 2025 by Peter Wood
Is Kirta suitable for photo editing? It should be a difficult question to answer. But when you need to make some cartoons and drawings, it should be the best open-source painting program. It provides a series of features to make the creation of gorgeous paintings. But should you download the program to make drawings, especially for beginners? Learn more about the Kirta review as well as the best alternative from the article.
Part 1: The Unbiased Review of Krita Photo Editor
Krita is an image editing software with beautiful and customizable brushes, pencils, filters, and pens, such as silhouettes. It enables you to tweak the opacity and pressure size characteristics. Moreover, you can make paintings with multiple layers, color palettes, drawing assistants, and others. Krita is the desired 2D drawing tool that can process both vector and bitmap files and is compatible with a variety of file formats.
Features of Krita Photo Editor
1. Provide multiple zoom shortcuts to control the painting process easier.
2. Edit vector graphics for basic vector files and save them in SVG format.
3. Equipped with more than 100 kinds of brushes and preset for editing.
4. Multiple layer functions can be applied in editing to avoid file replacement.
5. Have a distortion function to correct images and save them in high quality.
6. Support both CMYK and RGB color modes to pick a suitable color module.
7. Retouch up portraits with wrinkle removal, coloring lipstick, and others.
Krita Photo Editor Review
Pros
1. Provide free and open source to make paintings and touch-up photos.
2. Has an active community to communicate and make better progress.
3. Provide basic photo editing features, like rotating and adding filters.
4. Apply a variety of selected filters with multiple filters, G’MIC-Qt, and more.
5. Support HDR, multiple layers, OpenGL enhancement, and great layouts.
Cons
1. Difficult to use the text features, which are not usable for some large files.
2. Cannot find the support for updating Krita photo editor or troubleshooting.
3. Limited editing features for touching up the images, besides photo drawing.
4. It is very inconvenient for drawing photos with multiple complicated settings.
How to Draw a Painting with Krita Photo Editor
Step 1: If you have a sketch, you can scan it into an image before importing the file to Krita. Scan the sketch at 600DPI to capture every detail, especially since the drawings are usually on the smaller side. Of course, you can also use the Pen icon to draw the sketch beforehand.
Step 2: Clean the grays for the scanning file or the ink line from the sketch via the Color adjustment window, which you can go to the Filter menu and select the Adjust option. Make sure you get a clean black-and-white sketch before drawing on the sketch to make a painting.
Step 3: Choose a tool to fill in the color, such as paint blocks of color directly with block brushes, fill with the Flood Fill tool, or even use a Colorize Mask. The Colorize Mask option enables you to lay down solid brush strokes to indicate the desired color area as well as the color.
Step 4: Use the Alpha Lock feature to change the color of the pixels only. After that, you can use the Bucket Fill tool that turns your existing lines into a line drawing. Make an under-painting and then paint over the painting with color and have the dark underground shine through.
Step 5: When you get everything done, you can flatten all layers and make them into a single one. When you need to further edit the drawing with Kirta, you can simply save it as a KRA project file. Of course, you can simply export it as PNG or JPEG if you need to share it with others.
Part 2: The Best Krita Photo Editor Alternative
Is there an easy Krita photo editor alternative to make paintings, drawings, and cartoons? Whether you need to edit photos with AI technologies or apply cartoon effects easily, WidsMob AI Retoucher is a multi-functional image editor to enhance the photos with advanced AI algorithms, turn the photos into drawings, cartoons, and sketches, and provides multiple settings for portraits and landscapes. Moreover, it supports the RAW file formats, animated photos, and others.
1. Turn any photo into paintings, drawings, and cartoons within one click.
2. Make the photos into sketches and adjust the B/W for editing with Kirta.
3. Provide special cartoonize features with AI for portraits and landscapes.
4. Support RAW files, animated GIF, AVIF, WebP, and other file formats.
Step 1: Once you have installed WidsMob AI Retoucher, you can launch the program and click the Import button to upload the desired photos you want to edit. After that, you can choose the file and click the Edit button to make it into a painting with AI algorithms.
Step 2: Go to the AI Cartoonization menu from the right side, where you can turn it into a cartoon with one click. Select the Portrait option to make a portrait with selfies or busts into a cartoon. Different from Krita, you can turn the file into a cartoon within a few seconds.
Step 3: Besides the AI cartoonization, you can also turn the other images into paintings with the AI Style Transfer features, including Mosaic, Pointillism, Neon Light, Starry Night, Udine, and others. It will apply stunning effects to the image accordingly.
Step 4: Even if you just need to make some sketches from an image, you can simply choose the Filters menu and select the Pencil Sketch option to make the file easily. Moreover, you can adjust the colors and other parameters to get a pure B/W photo for Krita photo editor.
Part 3: FAQs about Krita Photo Editing
Conclusion
When you need to make some special cartoons, Krita is the professional and open-source photo painting software you should know. Here you can find the review for the features, cons, pros, and usage. Moreover, you can also find the Krita alternative that enables you to make some cartoon images with AI technologies in one click.