Krita

Krita is a painting application aimed at illustrators, concept artists and comic work rather than at photo retouching, and its brush engine is the reason people choose it. Pressure and tilt from any tablet the operating system already recognises work without a driver of its own. The application is free under the GPL, and the paid copies on the console and desktop stores buy automatic updates and put money back into development. A 4 GB machine will run it and a 16 GB one is what the project asks for.

The application is free under GNU GPL v3, downloaded from the project as an installer for Windows and macOS or an AppImage for Linux. Paid builds exist on the Microsoft, Steam, Epic and Mac app stores; the project states these buy automatic updates and send money back to development after the store takes its fee, and it quotes no figure for any of them. Nightly builds are published beside the release for anybody wanting fixes early.

An illustrator or comic artist with a drawing tablet who wants a painting application without a subscription, which is the exact gap between the free image editors and the paid art software. The animation timeline makes it a reasonable first step for anybody trying frame-by-frame work. Photographers wanting to correct exposure and colour are in the wrong place, because the tools here are built for making marks rather than for developing files.