## Krita

After rising from the ashes, Krita, a part of the Calligra suite, has become an almost unique application focused on natural painting, like CorelPainter. Using a brushes metaphor on screen, it has some innovative and quite interesting features like the ability to emulate the way painting colors mix and dry on canvas, a filters gallery to display previews of each filter, adjustment layers, layer groups and tools to precisely manipulate brush strokes.

That alone would make Krita worth adding to your DTP toolbox for artwork, but the major bonus for Scribus users is its versatile handling of a large number of file formats and color spaces. Krita not only handles RGB, CMYK, and Greyscale (up to 16 bit) using the same littleCMS color management engine as Scribus, but also rather unusual color spaces like XYZ and L*a*b. Krita fully supports RGB to CMYK conversion requirements in a simple and easy-to-use manner and can also convert 16 bit images into 8 bit for import into Scribus. (Scribus doesn’t support 16 bit images yet.)

As an extra bonus, user support and feedback from the Krita developers is superb.