Initial development was slow, but picked up strongly from 2003, resulting in the first public release with KOffice 1.4 in 2004. The name KImageShop fell foul of trademark law in Germany, and KImageShop was renamed to Krayon, which also appeared to infringe on an existing trademark, so Krayon was finally renamed to Krita in 2002. It was going to be a corba-based application with out-of-process filter plugins, compatible with GIMP plugins, which are also out-of-process, though of course not corba-based. The basic idea back then was to make KImageShop a GUI shell around ImageMagick. Renamed to KImageShop, this was the start of Krita.Īt the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Elter. Not being in a position to work together, people within the KDE project decided to start their own image editor application Development focused on an application that was part of the KOffice suite, called KImage, by Michael Koch. His patch was never published, but did cause problems with the GIMP community at the time. Matthias wanted to show the ease with which it was possible to hack a Qt GUI around an existing application, and the application he chose to demo it with was GIMP.

The origin of Krita can be traced to Matthias Ettrich’s at the 1998 Linux Kongress.

Drawing on krita