1/5
Fast enough to keep pace
Pan a 400-megapixel canvas, stack forty adjustments, and still watch every change land as you drag. What you see on screen is what lands in the export — no proxy previews, no waiting on a render pass.
kalobyNorthlight
Design without the meter running (Yes, the whole app is free)
Drawing, retouching and page layout in one application — download it for macOS or Windows and keep it. No trial clock, no seat count, no upsell at export.
A workspace that bends to you, not the reverse
Kalo ships with Draw, Retouch and Pages built in, but nothing is bolted down. Move panels, mix tools from any of the three, and save the arrangement as your own studio. Switch setups in a click, or send yours to a colleague and use theirs.
Draw
Retouch
Pages
Custom
Polygon · sides 6 · curve −100%
Smooth points
Colour
Layers
1 of 1
Drag to adjust edge curvature. Hold ⌥ to ignore snapping.
One room for the whole job
Draw the marks, correct the photograph, then set the pages — all inside one document, with nothing exported in between.
2/5
Nothing gets flattened
Edits stay live on top of the original pixels. Reorder them, dial one back, or pull it out entirely three weeks later — no smart objects to wrangle and no destructive step you can't walk back.
3/5
Retouching with real depth
From a quick blemish pass to full frequency separation, the photo tools go as deep as the work needs.
Frequency separationSplit tone from texture and treat each on its own layer.
Live blend rangesTune how a layer meets what sits beneath it, non-destructively.
4/5
Type that behaves
Optical kerning, real small caps and hanging punctuation come as standard. Set a paragraph style once and it holds across 180 pages without drifting.
5/5
Print-ready first time
Soft-proof against the press profile, check overprint and ink coverage on the page, then write a PDF/X-4 the printer will accept without a phone call.
Bring the old files in
Open PSD, AI, IDML, DWG and a dozen other formats with their structure, layers and creative intent intact. And because Kalo costs nothing, the people you hand a file to can open and edit it without a licence in the way.
Get KaloMade in Kalo
“Kalo keeps moving the line on what a desktop tool is allowed to cost. I've drawn three books in it now, and every release has taken something off my plate rather than adding a subscription to it.”
Rosalind Ekwueme
Illustrator, Lagos
Nothing to pay, ever
Kalo really is free. Every tool in Draw, Retouch and Pages, plus the full set of export and customisation options, with no watermark, no page cap and no card on file. If your team already pays for Northlight Pro, the assistive tools switch on inside Kalo too.
macOS
Built for Apple silicon, with Metal acceleration and full colour management on Intel machines too.
Download for MacWindows
Runs comfortably on a mid-range laptop, and gets noticeably quicker with a discrete GPU.
Download for PCiPad
A pencil-first version is in the workshop. Sign up and we'll write to you the week it lands.
In the workshopExtend canvas · 3:2 → 16:9Cancel
Extending canvas
Ridgeline study (50%)
Included with Northlight Pro
How it works
Assistance that stays out of the way.
Useful tools, not a co-author
On a Northlight Pro plan the assistive features appear inside Kalo — canvas extension, background removal, object selection and vector tracing. Each one lives where you'd expect it in the toolbar, does one job, and hands the result back as an ordinary editable layer.
Every result stays editable
Nothing arrives flattened or locked. Generated pixels land on their own layer with a mask you can paint into, so you can keep a quarter of the suggestion and throw the rest away.
Your work stays your work
Documents are never used to train a model, and nothing leaves your machine unless you invoke a tool that needs the server. You can switch the whole panel off in Preferences and Kalo behaves as though it were never there.