Kala Paint is a new Windows painting application written by Oliver Lawson, a Cambridge-based artist who spent fifteen years as an illustrator and concept artist before moving into games as a C++ tools developer and technical artist. It sells for $79.99 as a one-time purchase, and the pitch is aimed squarely at people who resent paying Adobe every month.
What is in it
The brush engine runs on the GPU, and the headline claim on the site is that brushes stay responsive past 3000px — the size range where most painting apps start stuttering, and exactly where you end up when blocking in a 4K texture sheet or a wide concept plate. Photoshop ABR brush import is described as roughly 80 percent complete, so existing brush libraries partly carry over.
Beyond that, the feature list is closer to a working painting tool than an alpha usually is:
- Layer groups, clipping masks and layer masks, with blend modes that read from the whole visible stack rather than the layer directly beneath
- Non-destructive filters: blur, sharpen, high pass, median, mosaic and a textured blur
- GPU liquify that works across multiple layers at once
- Lasso Paint with texture and pattern support and pressure-sensitive control
- Selective Colour+ for sampling and pushing a colour range
- Hue blending, aimed at keeping mixes from going muddy
- Clone stamp, gradient, magic wand and the usual selection tools
- Timelapse recording, camera bookmarks, limited-palette modes, greyscale proof view and pressure curve settings
There is also a Sketchbook Mode that organises paintings on virtual shelves and loads consecutive pages in the background, and a challenge mode that imposes gameplay-style restrictions on a painting session.
File formats and the .wip claim
Kala Paint reads and writes PSD, and exports JPG and PNG. Its own format is .wip, which the developer states is three to twenty times smaller than an equivalent PSD and five to nine times faster to load. Those are the developer’s numbers and worth testing against your own layered files before you commit a project to them — but if they hold, they matter for anyone versioning texture source files into a repository.
The caveats
The current build is version 0.1.23 and the project describes itself as alpha, one year into full-time development. It runs on Windows 10 and 11 only. Linux AppImages, Android and iPad builds are listed as planned; there is no mention of a macOS version, which rules it out for a large share of studio artists.
Licensing is a one-time $79.99 with three reusable activations across devices and, in the site’s words, no subscriptions ever. A 14-day fully-featured trial is available; after it expires the app keeps working except that saving and loading .psd and .wip files stops, while JPG and PNG export continues. The site also commits explicitly to never adding generative AI.
Who should care
If you hand-paint textures for Unity or Unreal, or do concept work upstream of a 3D pipeline, this is worth the trial. Krita remains free and mature and is still the sensible default, and Photoshop still owns interoperability. The case for Kala Paint is brush performance at large sizes and an owned licence, from someone who has shipped in the same pipeline you work in. Being alpha software, download the trial and paint on it for two weeks before spending. Details are on the Kala Paint site.
