Krita as a Legit Photoshop Rival!

Krita is a program that is used for digital art, graphics manipulation... anything you can imagine in your head, you can translate it onto a digital canvas.  Much like what Photoshop can do.  But Krita is freeware.  Free to download and use.  And with all things free, it is of course deemed not as good as its premium rival.  But is this also the case with Krita?

I do use Photoshop from time to time.  It has lots of advanced filters and effects, but it also comes with a host of problems and drawbacks.  I experienced a lot of lag especially when using the brushes.  Most probably in the newer versions of Photoshop, they fixed this.  My experience with the software is not very recent.  But another thing that I dislike about Photoshop is the way the shortcuts and the interaction flow.  The way you select elements and layers to manipulate.  I used a lot of Adobe Fireworks since 2004, and I found that the flow was awesome.  I could do a lot of things with it, namely design and banner creation.  But then I could also do digital art with Fireworks.  This piece was created with Fireworks:

The awesome software finally died out when Adobe refused to release newer versions of it.  Therefore, creating images with huge resolutions with Adobe Fireworks became a pain, since it does not support 64bit.

This is where Krita comes in.  I didn't want to use Photoshop for everything, and I was looking for something more lightweight.  Some Youtube video suggested Krita and I gave it a spin.  It isn't Fireworks, but it isn't Photoshop either.  After learning to use Krita from Youtube videos and also some online articles, I developed my own style and system to use Krita and finally be able to create many types of artwork, ranging from anime style to digital paintings.  Of course a lot of them aren't perfect.  Most are just experiments, but I myself was surprised at how I was able to create this type of artwork from this free software alone!  Take a look:

If you would like try out Krita, just go to www.krita.org and download it!  Very good customizable brushes.  I like the shape brush engine very much.  This maybe the era where open source free software is becoming on par with premium software.  Krita is one of them.  Blender is another one, challenging the industry leaders such as Maya and 3DS Max.

Are you interested in learning Krita as well?  Do you not feel like spending money on expensive graphics or digital painting software, and you want learn how to do it in free Krita?  Or do you think Krita is not good enough?  Let me hear your thoughts on Twitter!