Illustrator releases Kala Paint — a digital painting editor with a one-time license and no generative AI

Illustrator and concept artist Oliver Lawson has released Kala Paint — a digital painting editor for Windows sold under a one-time license. The developer specifically puts two promises on record: the program will never move to a subscription and will never get generative AI. The product is at the alpha stage, but it can already be bought or tried free for 14 days.

Lawson describes the idea simply: he was writing the painting program he had been missing across fifteen years of work as an illustrator and concept artist. Hence the positioning — aimed at artists tired of Adobe's subscription model. Lawson has been working on Kala Paint for about a year and is on the project full time.

The graphics card does the brushes

The developer's main bet is on the brush engine. Every brush stamp is computed on the GPU and, according to the author, a brush 3000 pixels across behaves just as smoothly as a ten-pixel one. For artists who work in large strokes on big canvases this is the most practical part of the release: it is precisely at large diameters and small stamp spacing that a stroke usually starts to lag behind the pen.

The second emphasis is paint blending. The blending mode picks up color from the entire visible stack of layers: with the option to sample from all layers enabled, color can be pulled and mixed right on the canvas without flattening the image. Filters — blur, sharpen, high pass, median, mosaic, texture blurs — work non-destructively: they sit above the layer with the paint, are recomputed on the GPU during compositing, and can be stacked, reordered, switched off and, if needed, baked. Liquify is computed on the GPU as well, and across several layers at once.

The lasso painting technique familiar to concept artists has been worked on separately: lasso presets store a texture, a stroke-only mode and noise patterns, while pen pressure controls color and the softness of the edge. Plus stroke stabilizers, a magic wand, color range selection, a clone stamp, layer masks, clipping masks, blending modes, saved named selections and checking the image in grayscale.

A format of its own instead of PSD and a shelf of sketchbooks

Kala Paint imports and exports PSD and supports brushes in the ABR format — ABR import, according to the developer, is about 80% ready and is still being refined. The program stores its own files in a proprietary .wip format: according to the developer's figures, the same multi-layer drawing in .wip takes 3–20 times less space than PSD and opens 5–9 times faster, and Windows Explorer shows a preview for the file. For those who keep dozens of versions of a heavy multi-layer piece, that saves both disk space and waiting time when opening a file.

Two more features are singled out by the developer. The first is timelapse recording: a checkbox turns on capture in the background, and you can record the whole window, the canvas area or only the artwork itself, with finished recordings collected in a separate manager. The second is Sketchbook mode: works are arranged into virtual sketchbooks on a shelf and the pages can be flipped through, while the files stay on disk in the same place they were.

What is worth knowing before buying

A Kala Paint license costs 79.99 dollars as a one-time payment and allows three reusable activations that can be moved between devices. The price includes the Windows build and updates within the current major version. The trial version is fully functional for 14 days, after which the program keeps running and exporting JPG and PNG but stops saving and opening .psd and .wip.

There are limitations too. Right now only Windows 10 and 11 are supported; AppImage builds for Linux are announced as the next step, versions for Android and iPad are in the plans. The product is officially in alpha, one person is developing it, and some of the capabilities (that same ABR import) have not been finished yet. Buying at this stage is a bet that development will continue.

Why a one-time license has become an argument again

Kala Paint arrives against the backdrop of a process that has been dragging on for several years now. Adobe moved Photoshop to a subscription and built Firefly's generative features into the logic of its plans — generative credits became a unit sold together with access to the editor. Part of the market reacted the other way round: Procreate publicly stated that there will be no generative AI in its products, and Celsys wound down an experimental image generation panel in Clip Studio Paint soon after announcing it, having run into protest from users. The community around Krita restricted materials and tools related to generative AI on its own platforms.

Against this backdrop, refusing generative features has also become a marketing argument a product can be built around. Kala Paint is not the first example here, and probably not the last: the niche of paid editors with a perpetual license, where there are neither monthly bills nor generation by prompt, will most likely keep filling up as long as the big vendors move in the opposite direction.

The risk is clear as well. Such projects rest on one or two developers, and their staying power is tested by years of updates. If Kala Paint reaches stable versions and the promised builds for Linux and tablets, artists will have one more alternative to a subscription; if development stops, the buyers of the alpha will be left with the current build.

Would you switch to Kala Paint for a one-time $79.99 license?