Krita Release Notes

Several years in the making, Krita 5.3 is a release filled with long anticipated features. The text tool and object has been completely rewritten, but even if text leaves you cold, there's a ton of improvements and useful tools across the board, like gap closing for the fill tool, a selection toolbar, an all new knife tool and much much more.

Krita 6

That's right, this is also a release of Krita 6!

Krita 6 is our Qt6 port of Krita, that is, when you build Krita 5.3 with Qt5, you get Krita 5.3, but when it is build with Qt6, you get Krita 6. We are doing this because several Linux distributions are already dropping support for Qt5. By switching to Qt6 we will have future proofed Krita for years to come.

But support for Qt6 isn't the only thing Krita 6 brings. It also comes with Linux Wayland support, in particular a full featured implementation of the Wayland Color Management protocol. This finally brings HDR support to the Linux version of Krita!

The Wayland Color Management Protocol is still very young. It was the key feature we have been waiting for all these years: where on the older X11 display servers we could always figure out on which monitor we were on and which color profile to associate with that monitor, Wayland's architecture is designed around not giving away that information so easily.

This is a problem for a painting application which core feature is fully integrated color management. Now, the Wayland Color Management Protocol will provide us with all the information we need to provide color managed views of images, including everything we need to know for HDR display. Because this part of Wayland is still very young, using it means you will need an up-to-date window manager that supports it. We ourselves recommend the manager the code has been written against: KWin 6.4.4 and above.

In addition to Color Management, Wayland support also means support for fractional scaling and 10 bit display.

Beyond the Wayland support, Krita 6 and 5.3 share all the same features.

Note that Krita 6 is not available for Android yet, and that Krita 6 on all platforms is considered early access.

There are also so many changes between Qt5 to Qt6 that it is inevitable that there will be bugs in Krita 6 that are not present in Krita 5. Our focus will from now on be on making Krita 6 as stable as possible.

Check the manual for more info on Wayland Color Management

Text Tool

The text tool has been fully overhauled for 5.3! The main attraction is of course that text can now be edited directly on canvas, with full support for the usual keyboard and mouse interactions, as well as IME support. But we did not stop there! Lets go over some of the highlights:

Wrapped Text, Text in shape and Text on Path

Krita now has the ability to make auto wrapped text. You can drag an area to create a simple inline wrapping area, or click on a shape to have the text flow inside. In conformance with SVG 2, the text flow area can be composed of multiple shapes, with some adding and others subtracting from the final flow area.

Aside from wrapped text, you can also set the text to follow a path, as well as control the start position.

Text Properties Docker

The text properties docker allows you to style the text. This separate docker allows not only editing the current text selected with the text tool, but also multiple texts when selected with the shape selection tools. To ensure you do not get lost inside the list of 50+ editable properties, Krita will by default hide properties that have not been set on the selected text or its paragraph. You can configure the visibility rules of each of these to your liking, allowing you to hide properties you never use, or show all properties regardless.

A large part of the work on this was the font selector, as this required special indexing of the fonts on your system. Due this work, you can now select all types of fonts, from obscure postscript to modern opentype variable fonts (all axes included) inside the font selector. Beyond that, fonts are now resources can be tagged, searched, and will show localized names (and samples) if these were present inside the font.

With 50+ properties, it can be hard to remember your favourites. To this end, Krita now also has style presets, which allow you to quickly apply a selection of properties to the current text, or use them as a base for new text.

Glyph Palette

Another new addition is the glyph palette. The glyph palette allows you to select alternate glyphs that may be present in the currently used font. While the text properties docker allows configuring all the OpenType features in a font, the glyph palette is far more convenient. Furthermore, it allows selecting unicode character variations, which will be doubly handy for those typesetting in CJK scripts.

Type Setting Mode

In addition to the Text Properties Docker, you can edit a number of properties on-canvas with the new Type Setting Mode. This separate mode in the text tool provides controls to edit Font Size, Baseline Shift, Line Height and Dominant Baseline directly on canvas. When text is not auto-wrapped, you can even edit the position of every single glyph in detail!

Miscellaneous

• All properties were given a bit of polish, which means that Krita has full support for CSS-Inline-3 Dominant and Alignment baseline. These properties are useful for configuring the alignment of text of different sizes when they are in scripts like Devanagari or Han script.
• The new text widgets are in QML, our first foray into modern QML.
• As a side effect of the text work, vector shape editing is now a little faster, and select all/deselect now work in all vector tools.
• Similarly, we now support SVG 2 paint-order property, which allows the outlines to be drawn behind the text.

Manual pages:
Working with Text, Text Tool, Text Properties Docker, Font Family Resource, and Style Preset Resource.

A variety of technical blog posts were written on the topic:
Fonts, Open Type, Font Metrics, various other properties, Text in Shape and Type Setting Mode.

Community Spotlight:
Weird Meeting by Sad_Tea

Tools

• A new Comic Panel Editing tool was added (MR 2331, manual). With this tool, you can split and merge vector objects quickly, making it easy to set up panel layouts for comics.
• Free transform bounding box rotation (MR 2113, manual) — Our transform tool draws a bounding box around the selected area. However, this was always in the direction of the pixels, which can be quite cumbersome when transforming a picture drawn at an angle. You can now rotate the transform bounding box with Ctrl + Alt to fit the visual angle of the selection you are transforming.
• Liquify Transform Mode speedups (MR 2461) — The liquify mode in the transforms tool was greatly sped up.
• Adjust smoothing based on stroke speed (MR 2192, manual) — This allows you to reduce smoothing of a stroke with the speed. The idea is that most jitters happen when drawing slowly, so naturally the smoothing needs to be higher when the brush stroke takes longer. Conversely, fast brush strokes need less smoothing.
• Pixelart smoothing mode (MR 2158, manual) — Ken Lo's 2024 Google Summer of Code project, the pixel art stablizer provides better results when drawing with a single pixel line.
• Selection toolbar (MR 2422, manual) — Ross Rosales' 2025 Google Summer of Code project, the selection toolbar provides a floating bar for when a selection is active.
• Multibrush has gained a 'Copy Translate at Intervals' mode (MR 1968, manual) — This allows drawing multiple brushes at set intervals.
• Improved number inputs in the shape selection tool (MR 2199) — You can now right-click these to set the units.
• The fill tool also got some love, now sporting Close Gaps functionality (MR 2050 and MR 2079, manual), which allows it to close gaps in the line work when determining the area to fill.

Community Spotlight:
Skeleton and Cat by ShangZhou0

Assistants

• Configuration of the assistant widgets (MR 1966) — The on canvas widget for the assistants have been overhauled, and a duplication function has been added.
• Curvelinear perspective assistant. (MR 1960 and MR 2055, manual) — The curve linear assistant is an alternative to the fish-eye point assistant, and uses arcs instead of ellipses.

Filters and Layers

• Propagate Colors Filter has been added. This filter makes it so that an image with colors and transparency is modified to have its colors expand into the transparent areas. Such a thing is very useful for 3D and game texture workflows. There transparency often needs to be handled as a separate texture, and when the colors have been prepared with this filter, it reduces the chance of alignment issues between the transparency and the colors. (MR 2161, manual)
• Reset Transparent (MR 1860, manual) — A filter related to the above. In the case that a transparent pixel has values, using reset transparent allows you to set all fully transparent pixels to be transparent black.
• All our blending modes got double checked for HDR support. Previously, Krita would sometimes clip high range colors when doing compositing with a given blending mode, even if the blending mode supported it. Now, every blend mode that supports HDR will do so. (MR 2294)
• Fast Color Overlay Mask. A filter that colorizes a sketch with a given color. This is different from the existing HSV filter, as it is optimized for speed and quick use, with a special button on the layer docker. This will be useful for artists preparing their sketch for inking. (MR 2285, 2318, 2303, 2282, manual)
• Transform shortcuts now work on multiple layers. When using the Mirror, Rotate, Scale, Shear and Offset layer shortcuts while multiple layers are selected, all layers will be transformed (MR 1811).

Community Spotlight:
Curly Hair by Celes

Dockers

• Real Time Capture Mode for the Recorder Docker. Previously, the recorder docker would only capture once every few frames for performance reasons. Now, multi-threaded capturing has been added to the docker, allowing for real time recording (MR 2010).
• Dockers can now be added to the pop-up palette. This replaces the on canvas brush editor, which in turn has been changed into a docker. As well, dockers can now also be added as a popup in the toolbar, by adding the "Docker Box" to the toolbar (MR 2062, MR 2104).
• Various improvements have been made to the Grids and Guides. In particular a new Isometric mode, which is a little bit more predictable to use, and can be used for hexagonal grids. Grid and guides color configuration is now saved to the document. And finally, there's the ability to turn off either the horizontal or vertical lines in the rectangular grid, allowing for a grid that is a mere line pattern. (MR 2090, manual)

Brushes

Two new improvements were added for working with textures in the brushes.

• Soft texturing mode for the Pattern option (MR 2068, manual) — By default, Krita's texturing option uses the strength and pattern options together to limit the brush by the pattern, based on the strength. This gives a nice textured stroke, much like using a dry brush on a textured piece of paper in real life. The new Soft Texturing mode switches the behaviour of strength, making it instead control how much the pattern has effect on the brush, with at low values the pattern being invisible. This is more akin to switching between a wet and a dry brush over time.
• Pattern 'Auto Invert For Eraser' (MR 2264) — When working with the texture option, you might want to keep the texture cohesive, even as you erase. For this reason, we've now added the "Auto Invert For Eraser", which'll invert the texture as you switch to erase mode.
• Corner mode for curves (MR 2191, manual) — Krita's brush engine uses curves extensively to configure the effects of various sensors on the brush. By default, the points on this curve are smooth cubic curves, which is useful in most cases. However, sometimes you want a little bit more control, so Krita 5.3 now comes with the ability to make sharp corners by Ctrl + clicking a given node. Filters using curves also benefit from this feature.
• Marker blend mode (MR 2375, manual) — a blend mode that prevents building up opacity across multiple strokes. When used with build-up painting mode, this gives the same effect as the same mode in Drawpile or the marker tool in other programs. Unlike Greater, Marker still blends colors normally even when it doesn't change the opacity of what's on the layer.

Community Spotlight:
Time Keeper by Elixiah

Files

• Radiance RGBE (.hdr) support (MR 1806) — Krita 5.3 now has support for loading and saving Radiance RGBE files. This is an older but fairly widely used HDR image format, and it should be a boon for people working with HDR images.
• New Bundle Creator (MR 1802) — Srirupa Datta's GSoC project, which consisted of overhauling the bundle creator. It now tries to guide you through the bundle creation process, with a new feature being the ability to store tags into bundles as well.
• Jpeg-XL: You can now use CICP instead of ICC color profiles to store the color space, as well as save alpha in lossless mode (MR 2077).
• Jpeg-XL: Support was added for Multi-Layered and Multi-Pages JXL files in addition to animated JXL files (MR 2411).
• Support for Text, Shapes and Guides for PSD (MR 1954) — Krita can now load and save shapes, vector masks and guides from and to PSD. In addition, it can load text from PSD, including the advanced text information, like text on path and open type features. Saving text to PSD is possible, but unfortunately more limited due the complexity of the format.

Python Plugins

This release contains several python API improvements. Most notable is that we now have an API for painting brushstrokes (MR 2195, MR 2198, and MR 2211).

Wrappers were added for the following qt widgets:

• AngleSelector (MR 1979)
• SliderSpinboxes (MR 1991)
• FileDialog (MR 2402)

And finally we added more methods to...

• Scratchpad (MR 2087)
• Grids and Guides (MR 2087)
• Document autosave state (MR 2160)
• Canvas panning (MR 2338)

Finally, the following bundled python plugins were added:

• Brush Mutator Plugin (MR 2322) — A python extension for Krita which adds brush variation through artist-invoked settings randomization. When the Mutator extension is active, brush parameter (size, rotation, color, etc.) mutation ranges can be configured in the "Mutator Docker", and random mutations can be manually triggered via the "Mutate" action (bound to "z" by default).
• Python Palette Docker re-added (MR 2374) — The python palette docker was ree-nabled. This docker is largely meant for palette editing experiments, having support for export to gpl and svg.
• Workflow buttons docker (MR 2210) — The workflow buttons docker allows you to configure your own little docker with all sorts of buttons, with a highlight being the ability to order and resize them to your choosing.

Other

• Separate eraser cursors for non-brush tools (MR 1624) — When drawing it can sometimes be hard to remember whether you are in eraser mode, so there's an update for all the tool cursors with an eraser icon.
• Pen tilt tweaks (MR 2314, MR 2337, manual) — Krita has support for the tilt direction reported by some models of drawing tablets. However, not all tablets support tilt, and furthermore, if you create a brush as a left-handed user, it can feel very different for a right handed user. To that end controls were added to allow adding extra pen tilt offset for different handedness, as well as the ability to set a default pen tilt when the tablet does not support tilt.
• Soft Proofing overhaul (MR 2279, manual) — Previously, our softproofing did not allow black point compensation on both transforms, leading to a difference in looks compared to converting the document to said profile directly. We've overhauled the softproofing settings to allow configuring both transforms, with defaults to use either the current monitor profile configuration or simulate paper white and black (Note: Wayland users, due the newness of the Wayland protocol, softproofing will behave a little differently in Absolute Colormetric mode, check the manual for more details).
• CSS palette support (MR 2119) — The palette docker can now load .css files with classes representing the swatches.
• More actions available in Canvas Input Settings (MR 1801) — This adds a variety of actions, like color sampler, deselect, layer activation and some tool activation to the canvas input settings so they can be activated by touch gestures.
• Save global color history, option to save per document (MR 1424) — Color history can now be saved either globally or per document.
• Zoom shortcuts now have the ability to zoom to mouse or zoom to canvas center separately (MR 2152) — Before Krita would use the mouse to zoom to cursor and the keyboard keys to zoom to center of the canvas. This split up makes it explicit to which of the two a shortcut will zoom. The default will now zoom to canvas center.

Contributors

A special thanks goes out to all our contributors, listed alphabetically:

Agata Cacko — Liquify improvements, Knife tool.
Aries Moczar — Assistant Editor Widget Redesign
Bourumir Wyngs — Saving Color History support.
Carsten Hartenfels — Android support, Marker blend mode.
Deif Lou — Added Soft Texture Mode, Cusps for the brush editor curves.
Dmitry — Reviewed all the MRs, softproofing overhaul.
Emmet — Mutator plugin, animation bugfixes.
Freya Lupen — Provided copy translate for multibrush, on canvas brush docker and helped a ton with porting and testing things on MacOs and Android.
Florian Reiser — Real Time Capture Mode for the recorder docker.
Grum999 — Improvements to the dimension spinboxes in the shape selection tool, grids and guides improvements.
Halla — Administration, Qt6 port.
Isaac Fleetwood — Provided the curve linear assistant.
Ivan Yossi — many MacOS bugfixes and quality of life improvements.
Ken Lo — Pixel Art Stabilizer.
killy |0veufOrever — Smoothness stabilizer.
Krayton Draws — More shortcut actions for touch gestures.
Maciej Jesionowski — Pen Tilt Tweaks, Fast Color overlay.
Mr. xk1000 — Zoom to Canvas Center/Mouse Cursor split.
Rasyuqa A H — Radiance RGBE support, Jpeg XL.
Ross Rosales — Provided the selection tool bar.
Sharaf Zaman — Android support.
Srirupa Datta — new Bundle Creator
Stuffins — Rotating the transformation bounds.
Thomas K/Bidi — CSS palette support.
Timothée Giet — Added workflow button docker, handles icon quality.
Wolthera — text tool, soft proofing overhaul, manual and writing the release notes.

As well as our community of artists, for providing feedback and bug reports during the beta period.

If you're curious what we're going to do next, check out the 2026 roadmap!

Like what we are doing? Help support us

Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.

Original source Report a problem

After 5.0's big resource rewrite and 5.1's general improvements, we decided that Krita 5.2 should focus on tackling some of the biggest pain points in Krita. As such, this release contains a lot of background work that we hope to build future improvements on top of, as well as a healthy assortment of new features and fixes!

Animation

We're happy to share that two major pain points for animation got tackled: synchronized playback of audio (MR 1323) and simplifying video export (MR 1599).

In order to fix various audio-visual sync issues when playing animations with attached audio, Emmet and Eoin reworked much of the animation playback to use the MLT framework behind the scenes. MLT is a proven and flexible framework used by video editing programs like Kdenlive and designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind, and should help Krita animators feel confident that their key frames will stay lined up with their voice work or background music, both inside of the program and in their exported animation videos.

Speaking of the video export option, FFmpeg is a massively important program that manages (among other things) rendering and conversion of audio and video formats. Previously, Krita required users to point to an FFmpeg executable somewhere on their system in order to use many of the features pertaining to video, such as animation video export, video import as animation, and the Recorder Docker for recording your painting sessions. This was mostly good enough for studio use, but it was still difficult to set up for users who aren't that technical, and almost impossible to do on locked down systems like Android or even a school computer. To make this better for almost everyone, we spent some time to include a basic build of FFmpeg into Krita itself, which should include "out-of-the-box" support for every free and open container and codec format under the sun. (Along with Emmet and Eoin, big thanks to Amyspark, Ivan, Sharaf and Dmitry who put in a lot of effort to help get every possible format building and working across various platforms.) Oh, and by the way, Krita continues to support the use of alternative FFmpeg binaries in the rare case that you need to additional features that we aren't able to provide.

⚠️ Note: As of the writing this, animation export via FFmpeg is sadly still not working on Krita for Android due to restrictions of the platform itself, but we are looking for solutions to this going forward.

Text

Because our original one didn't give artists enough control over the underlying text (making it hard to use and extend, as well as write a better text tool on top of), Wolthera completely rewrote Krita's text layout engine.

Demonstration of some new text layout features include (but are not limited to): text-in-shape, text-on-path and color font support.

With the new layout engine, we can handle everything the old engine could, as well as text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. We can now also access OpenType features as well as render emoji (bitmap and colrV0 types) (MR 1607, MR 1767).

This was no small feat and is only just laying the foundation for more improvements to come! For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.

Tools

Dmitry Kazakov overhauled the cumulative undo feature (MR 1780), this feature allows merging undo operations, which is useful when painting many strokes. We’ve simplified the code and made the options more intuitive to use.

The ability to anti-alias the results of the Sketch Brush Engine has been added by Przemysław Gołąb (MR 1425).

Freya Lupen added the ability to transform all selected layers at once with the transform tool (MR 1792).

Fill Tool

Deif Lou has added a new mode to the fill tool: Fill areas of similar color (MR 1577). In addition, both the fill tool and the enclose fill tool have gained Stop growing at the darkest and/or most opaque pixels and Fill all regions until a specific boundary color (MR 1549, 1560), as well as a toggle to use the same blending mode as the brush tool, or to have its own (MR 1749).

From the manual, filling the example in image A at the red dot will result in B for regular fill, in C with expanding the fill with a number of pixels and in D with the 'fill to boundary color' enabled.

Selection Tool

The Contiguous Selection Tool also received the same selection extending option as the Fill tool (MR 1549), and the ability to set the opacity of the selection decoration (MR 1697). Furthermore, the selection decoration has been made DPI-aware (MR 1774).

Shortcuts

Several new actions have been added:

• Toggle Eraser Preset by Freya Lupen, (MR 1689) allows you to switch to the preset that would otherwise be stored for the ‘eraser’ end of the tablet stylus. Not all stylii have an eraser side, and some people really prefer to activate it by hotkey.
• Sample Screen Color by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1720) allows you to select a color anywhere on the screen, even outside Krita, similar to the Sample button in the Select a Color dialogue.
• Select Layers From Menu canvas input setting by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1766) allows you to select a layer on-canvas from a dropdown menu.
• Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme, courtesy of Freya Lupen, (MR 1565).
• Krita can now detect conflicts in the canvas input setting shortcuts thanks to Sharaf Zaman, (MR 1725).

We have no shortage of plans for how to make things better, but only with stable community contributions can we keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.

Dockers

Mathias Wein brought us a ‘Wide Gamut Color Selector’. This selector almost the same as the advanced color selector, except it’s capable of selecting colors in wide-gamuts instead of just sRGB. We eventually want to remove the Advanced Color Selector in favor of this one, when we’re sure we haven’t lost any functionality (MR 1600).

The Layers docker got some extra display options:

• On Android, selecting multiple layers is tricky, therefore Sharaf implemented extra checkboxes on the side of the layers (MR 1665).
• Freya Lupen added the ability to see extra information about the layer opacity and blending modes (MR 1501, MR 1520, MR 1615), as well as making the automatic layer suffixes optional MR 1498. On top of that, it’s now possible to change the scaling filter of file-layers (MR 1784).
• Măcelaru Tiberiu has ensured the brush preset docker looks good in horizontal mode: MR 1670.
• Brush Preset History is now configurable (MR 1623).
• Undo, Redo and more for the palette docker (MR 1617).

File Formats

We changed how CMYK blending modes work (with a toggle in the config), (MR 1796), this aligns the blending modes to the way Photoshop handles blending modes in CMYK, simplifying exchange of PSD files with clients that require CMYK PSDs.

Rasyuqa A. H. has been improving the JPEG-XL saving and loading code, implementing CMYK for JPEG-XL, improving compression by giving the JXL library more color space information, better metadata handling and support for saving and loading raster layers to JPEG-XL, (MR 1656, 1693, 1673, 1722, 1795). He also improved WebP compression (MR 1785), as well improving ICC transfer characteristic code (MR 1667 and 1690).

By using JPEG's XYB color space instead of the original profile, the JPEG-XL encoder is able to give much better results both in terms of artifacts and compression on images with extreme highlights, like those that are 40 times as bright as regular white.

• Cedric Ressler has improved EXR multi-layer handling (MR 1677).
• Amyspark has improved the RAW import, both the UI (MR 1679) and sped it up by using tiles (MR 1694).
• Amyspark has also improved the webP exporter by adding better metadata handling and animation support. (MR 1468).

Other

One of the other big technical updates we did was to rewrite the brush settings code to work with the library Lager. Our old code had the brush presets and the widgets entangled in increasingly convoluted ways, which made it hard to extend the settings. We hope to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget (MR 1334).

Wrap around mode can now be limited to vertical or Horizontal direction, making it simpler to creating looping backgrounds.

• Freya Lupen has added wrap-around directions for the wraparound mode (MR 1524).
• Freya Lupen has also added ability to remove single Recent Document entries (MR 1666).
• Joshua Goins has improved the tablet tester, so it now has access to tilt data (MR 1678).
• Sharaf Zaman implemented easier resource location selection for android (MR 1771).
• Stephen Wilson has made sure that Krita resets document metadata when using a template (MR 1769).
• Agata Cacko has spent a significant amount of time on getting better display names of color profiles (MR 1768).
• Amyspark has been cleaning up the UI left and right (MR 1683, MR 1696, MR 1702, MR 1701, MR 1732, MR 1744, MR 1742, MR 1772).
• Shuqi Xiu has added a Lambert shading blending mode (MR 1566).

Thank You

And that’s it! We hope that Krita 5.2 has a little something to help everyone make art.

Finally, a massive thank you to the everybody involved, including all of our contributors, development fund members, and, of course, our community of artists. As an open source and community-driven project, Krita simply wouldn’t be what it is today without an entire community of people testing, coding, writing documentation, creating brushes, translating, chipping in, spreading the word, and generally supporting the project however they can.

And if you're reading that wondering if you can help too, don't hesitate to get in touch--because there's always more to be done on our mission to make a better tool for every human artist.

Original source Report a problem

The first release after the big 5.0, Krita 5.1 comes with a ton of smaller improvements and technical polish. This release sees updates to usability across the board, improved file format handling, and a whole lot of changes to the selection and fill tools.

Much thanks for David Revoy for the majority of the feature demonstrations below, as well as Wojtryb for compiling his favorite new features into a video:

As a free and open source project, Krita needs your help! Please consider supporting the project by becoming a member of the development fund. With your contribution, we can keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.

Layers

• The biggest change to layer handling in Krita 5.1 is Santhosh Anguluri’s Google Summer of Code project 2021: Operations for multiple layers (MR 888). This enables copy, cut and paste and clear on when having a selection on multiple layers at once.
• Beyond that there’s a small number of UI tweaks made to the layer docker: You can now control how strongly layers indent when in a group. Furthermore a button got added for showing the context menu when rightclick is unavailable, and finally, file layers now report if their file cannot be found (MR 1443, MR 1213, MR 1419).
• You can now paint on selection masks with blending modes (MR 1437).

File Formats

• WebP support (MR 891, MR 1268). We had basic WebP support already, but this adds full support using WebP Codec with every possible toggle imaginable.
• Support for Photoshop layered Tiffs (MR 944). Despite Adobe being the steward of the Tiff spec, Photoshop has a unique non-spec compliant way of saving layers into a tiff file: Putting a whole PSD document into the metadata. We now support loading data from such files. On top of this, the export dialog for TIFF was reworked, and we now load and save metadata to tiff (MR 1015).
• OpenExr support for 2.3 and 3+ (MR 1049). Because of a mistake with our build system, Krita couldn’t see OpenExr 2.3 and above, this is fixed now.
• Improve retrieval of image data from clipboard (MR 1296, MR 1431). When you copy data between programs, that data is put into the system clipboard. Sometimes when this is done with images programs add several different options. We’ve improved the UI that allows you to choose which of these options you want to use.
• PSD fill layers and color labels (MR 1309). This allows loading and saving layer color labels to PSD, as well as loading and saving the gradient, pattern and color fill layers. This extends the ASL parser inside Krita, which means that layer styles have better color and pattern import as well. Most PSDs use these fill layers in combination with vector masks, which are not yet implemented.
• Support for JPEG-XL (MR 1363). Joining the implementation of Avif last release, JPEG-XL is the newest update of the JPEG image file format, and one of the new set of file formats that is designed to bring wide color gamuts and HDR to the web. We haven’t yet enabled saving and loading of the HDR color spaces to JPEG-XL, but what we do have is saving and loading animations, making JPEG-XL the first fileformat that doesn’t require FFMPEG to allow exporting animations.
• Support for ASE and ACB color palettes (Commit 6c7ed052). The former is used among Adobe applications, the latter is the format used by Photoshop to describe it’s spot-color list. We urge people to be a little careful with the latter as it seems that the Pantone values in particular get updated quite frequently. Discuss with your printer which spot colors you want to use.

Technical

Some of the biggest changes this time around have been purely technical.

• Fix OpenGl ES for OCIO pipeline (MR 1262), this means OCIO now works on Android. We also use the new GPU pipeline for VFX Platform CY2021 now (Commit 3d24ed13).
• Build a more recent version of Angle for windows (MR 1373, MR 1353). The one we were using was a bit old and this new one has many fixes. Angle has been the most reliable way to allow us to use OpenGL on Windows.
• Added YCbCr profiles (MR 1330). We never shipped YCbCr profiles because there were no open versions of them. This made testing certain features quite hard, in particular file testing. So we created some YCbCr profiles and added them as default profiles.
• Add support for llvm-mingw toolchain on windows (MR 1372).
• Allow compiling with RISC-V (MR 1416). None of us own RISC-V hardware, so this one’s mostly for enthusiasts.
• Port krita from VC to XSIMD (MR 1404). We use these libraries for so-called ‘vector instructions’, which is a special way of using the computer that works especially well for repetitive math like blending and mixing colors together. VC’s development has stalled, so switching to XSIMD now allows us to worry less about the future. A nice side effect is that colored and lightness brush tips ended up with a good speed boost, as well as having a speed boost on ARM devices (that’s tablets and mobile phones).
• Add an option to build Krita with precompiled headers (MR 1471). This is something that’s mostly useful for developers, as it’ll reduce compilation.
• Give better information about the location of the AppData directory on windows (MR 1304). The AppData directory can differ greatly when using Krita from the Windows Store, so we wanted to inform the folks that use that method better.

Usability

• The specific color selector has been extended with a color preview for and a HSV option for RGB. (MR 916, MR 1434).
• Touch gestures (dragging fingers to pan, zoom, rotate) are now configurable, you can choose which action does what (MR 1341).
• We used to have a very vague button that said something like ‘use aspect of pixels’, right next to the zoom. What this mysterious button actually did was switch the canvas zoom between showing pixels at the size of pixels, and showing the canvas at it’s physical size. The latter, if Krita has the available information, means that an inch in Krita is an actual inch on your monitor, which is useful for print, while the former is more useful for digital-only work like game graphics. This button has been revamped to communicate this more clearly (MR 1220).
• More configuration for the pop-up palette (MR 922).
• Dual color selector shortcut (MR 1100)
• Missing filter shortcuts (MR 1109)
• Add ability to switch from scrolling selecting predefined zoom levels to ‘smooth zoom’ (MR 1138).
• The recent files menu has been overhauled (MR 1258, MR 1283, MR 1295, MR 1297, MR 1307).
• Right to left layout improvements (MR 1267)
• Assorted fixes various dialogs (MR 1317, MR 1328, MR 1331)
• hsv sliders to the adjustment filters. (MR 1438).
• Only restrict pivot to transform bound when alt is pressed (MR 1440).
• Reset button and saving state for the Digital Color Mixer (MR 1361).
• New Zoom-to-fit(with margins) option (MR 1344).

Fill and Selection tools

Deif Lou has spend the last 6 months greatly improving the functionality of the fill and contiguous selection tools.

These tools now have better organized tool options (MR 1360, MR 1453), which is necessary, because there’s now sliders for variable softness (MR 1174) and proper anti-aliasing based on the FXAA algorithm (MR 1350).

There’s also three new ways of applying a fill. The first is Continuous Fill (MR 1160), which allows dragging the cursor over all regions you wish to fill.

The second is a whole new Enclose and fill tool (MR 1415), which allows dragging out a rectangle or other shape over everything you wish to fill, and Krita will automatically determine which sections to fill.

The final one consist of massive improvements to the drag-and-drop swatch functionality (MR 1135). You can now drop swatches onto a section of the canvas, and Krita will use the current fill tool options to determine how the dropped color will fill the section.

Brushes

• Gui option to configure max brush speed (MR 996).
• Added shortcut setting for flow, fade and scatter (MR 1037).
• Make erasers snapping to assistant optional (MR 1199).
• Add more particle distributions to the spray engine (MR 1377).
• Make sharpness options outline alignment behaviour optional (MR 1405). Depending on how you do pixel art, you may or may not want this.
• Allow separate cursor settings for erasers (MR 1426).
• Add shortcut setting to toggle brush outline (MR 1430).
• Sketch Brush Engine now has anti-aliasing available (MR 1425).

Other

• Option to hold last frame in recorder docker export, (MR 1087).
• Add option to show result at beginning for recorder export (MR 1293).
• Added a perspective ellipse assistant tool (MR 1343). Srirupa Datta’s 2022 KDE Season of Code project, the perspective ellipse tool assistant helps drawing circles in perspective.
• Subdivisions for ruler assistants (MR 1298).
• Improvements to the screentone generator (MR 1010), the results of the generator can now be made more consistent.
• Various fixes for G’Mic (MR 1464).
• We now warn when the save operation failed (MR 1410).
• The Levels filter can now be applied per-channel (MR 1067).

Like what we are doing? Help support us

Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.

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Note on File Compatibility with Krita 4.x and Krita 3.x files

• Krita 5.0 is a major release of Krita. Krita 5.0 cannot load vector layers created before Krita 3.0 and has a completely reworked resource system.
• Krita 5.0 has an updated brush preset file format (.kpp). Krita 4 and earlier cannot use brush presets created in Krita 5.
• Krita 5.0 fixed an issue with text size in documents. However, opening files created with earlier versions of Krita may require changing a setting to get the originally expected text size.

It has certainly been a long time coming and a lot of hard work, but Krita 5 is here at last! I can say with a measure of pride (and a whole helping of relief for the development team) that 5.0 is up there among the largest and most significant updates that Krita has ever seen, affecting and improving almost every aspect of the program in a variety of ways, big and small. And of course, there's a ton of cool new features that we can't wait for our community of artists to start working with, but before we dig into the details...

Hey, wait! Don't skip this part... Krita really needs your support!

One of the main things that makes Krita stand out from its rivals is its non-profit, open source and community-driven development model. Krita is made by a global team of programmers and artists, some working professionally and others passionately contributing their talents when they can, with the shared mission of creating a powerful and expressive tool for artists everywhere. Moreover, we all believe that artists should own and control their tools, and that digital art should be just as accessible as putting a pencil to paper.

What a concept, eh? But here's the rub: our grassroots development model means, well... grassroots funding.

Faster & More Flexible Resource System

We have fully rewritten Krita's handling of resources like brush presets, gradients, palettes and more. Before we had a fragile system of models, where we should have been using a proper database, and thus, we are now using an SQLite database as the core of our resource handling. This fixes many bugs with tagging and loading resources as well as a handful of UI problems. It also makes our resource system faster and leaner. Because we are now not loading all resources at once, Krita will now start up quicker, and take up less working memory (from our tests, Krita 5.0 took up 200 mb less RAM!).

New bundle manager and configurable resource locations

Krita's resource folder used to be hardcoded. Not any more! You can now configure which folder is the resource folder and where the cache is located. Those of us who'd like to have their resource folder on a USB stick will now be able to do so.

As well, we now support more resource libraries. We already had our own resource bundle format, but now we also support photoshop layer style libraries and brush libraries. Documents can now also be seen as a place to store resources, and though we only use it for palettes right now, we hope to extend this in the future.

New Resource Manager

This new manager allows you to mass-tag brushes as well as delete and undelete resources at will (Krita will deactivate these). It comes with nice little UI features, like a tagging widget that shows all the current tags on a resource in one quick glance.

Layer styles are now resources

This allows tagging and searching amongst layer styles, as well as sharing them, or loading several layer styles at once from a downloaded ASL file.

Smoother Gradients & Improved Gradient Tools

Dithered gradients (MR 668)

Gradients are an excellent way to quickly setup the main color swatches of your image, for example, a quick linear gradient for the horizon, or several radial gradients for light sources. However, if you used subtle gradients, you would sometimes see banding, caused by there being too few colors available in 8 bit images for a smooth gradient. We have implemented dithering for gradients in 8 bit images, which involves using a blue noise pattern to create a little bit of offset in the boundary between colors. This way, even 8 bit images which don't always have enough colors to trick the human eye that something is smooth, can have the illusion of smoothness in these gradients.

There was a Libre Graphics Meeting talk discussing the technical details.

Wide gamut and unbounded gradients (MR 668 , MR 675)

But not only the 8 bit images got love. For images in 16 and 32 bit, the gradients Krita generates will now be able to use the full scale available. Furthermore, we've made it possible to store wide gamut and unbounded colors using SVG 1.1 icc-color definitions, meaning that you can now have radial gradients that contain rec2020 green, or whites that would only be possible in HDR images, bringing the conveniences of the gradient tool to people who work in these higher bit depths. We hope to support CSS 4 color definitions for the stop gradients when it's draft has been completed.

Gradient Editors got an overhaul (MR 857)

They are now more cohesive, compact and convenient, with small options left and right to make creating gradients easier than before.

• Easier option on UI to delete stops
• New tear drop display of stops
• New color sorting options
• Cycle through stops with left and right arrows

Faster color management with fast float plugin (MR 726)

With the fast float plugin, the speed of color management improves drastically, especially with 32bit float. This is enabled by default. Color management via LittleCMS enables us to display colors accurately, and is also necessary for professional features like soft proofing and color model support, and is always applied to Krita's view of the image.

Faster Smudge Brushes & New MyPaint Brush Engine

Rewritten Color Smudge engine (MR 765)

With the pixel brush now capable of lightness and gradient mapped brush tips, the color smudge engine was to follow. This required a full rewrite of how the engine works, and often requested features like separation of color rate and color smudge have been added into the mix as well, plus optimization improvements!

MyPaint Brush engine (MR 464, MR 582)

MyPaint's brush engine is known for its interesting experiments in how to think of brushes. Krita had some support for it in the distant past, but we had to remove that plugin. Now, Ashwin has created a new integration of this engine, allowing for MyPaint 1.2 brushes to be loaded into Krita and used for your artworks.

New modes for textured brushes (MR 806)

Deif Lou has added a variety of new modes for the texture option. Hard Mix, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Overlay, Height, Linear Height and more will now be available for all engines supporting them, and the Hard Mix Softer mode is also available for the Masked Brush blending. These are accessed through the brush editor with pixel engine brushes. Go to Texture group > Pattern > Options tab. The new modes have been added to the Texturing Mode drop-down.

Animation Overhaul

Our Timeline Docker has a new look and a variety of improvements. We've removed the old Animation Docker and moved its core functionality directly onto the Timeline. Also, animations can be paused at any time, pinning layers has been made easier, playback range automatically adapts as key frames are added, and a number of other changes have been made to improve visual clarity and the overall feel of navigation, transport and editing. (MR 311, MR 317)

Redesigned Animation Curves Docker (MR 601)

Like the Timeline Docker, Krita's Curves Docker has also been updated with an emphasis on improving the overall look and feel of navigation and editing. Value key frames are now easier to edit thanks to the improved mouse controls with axis snapping, and a box for reading and writing the specific value of the selected key frame. The visibility of individual channels can be hidden or soloed. And, new navigation options like zoomable scrollbars as well as "fit to curve" and "fit to channel" buttons make it much easier to move around the new, dynamic graph view.

Clone Frames (MR 469)

Krita 5 now supports Clone Frames, a much requested feature that allows animators to reuse the exact same key frame at multiple times throughout their animation. Clone frames are great for building looping animations and finding clever other ways to save yourself time while animating. Just remember that editing one clone edits them all!

Transform Mask Animation (MR 493)

What good is a shiny Curves Docker without some new things to animate? Along with layer opacity, Krita 5 also brings the ability to animate the position, rotation, scale and shear of any layer through animated Transform Masks. Sometimes referred to as "tweening" in other software, this feature should help with animations that are difficult or inconvenient to do through drawing alone. With animated transform masks, moving a walking figure as shown in the video will be a piece of cake.

Import Videos as Animations (MR 778)

Community contributor "KnowZero" has iterated on Scott Petrovic's feature which allows for importing videos and animated images as Krita animations. This improved importer can be used with an existing document or to create a new document, works with a wider range of formats, and also decreases disk overhead. It's great for studying and rotoscoping! Thank you both!

Even More Animation Improvements!

New Options for Exporting GIF, APNG and WEBP (MR 734)

Another useful patch from "KnowZero" allows animated images to set configuration options while exporting, just like their video counterparts. This should make it much easier to work with animated image formats.

Improved Render Settings Behavior

Animation export paths are now stored directly in each Krita document and settings like render FPS are automatically set to match your timeline setting.

Crop Active Frame

It's now possible to crop only the contents of the current frame by setting "Applies to: Frame" in the Tool Options menu while the Crop Tool is active.

Apply a filter on all selected frames (MR 665)

There's a toggle for applying a filter on all selected frames, or just a single one.

Render Animation from composition docker (MR 407)

The composition docker allows for storing the state of visibility in the layer docker, while this new feature is a bit of convenience for animators to render the current animation with a given stored composition. Useful for situations where you only need a few layers rendered.

AutoKey Blank Mode

We've added a new "AutoKey Blank" mode. This mode should help speed up your animation workflow by creating a new blank key frame each time you draw on an empty frame. You can find this setting by clicking on the arrow next to the AutoKey button within the Timeline's settings menu.

Select Matching Key Frame

For those of you who organize your key frames with color labels, Krita now has an action for selecting the previous or next key frame of the same color. This can be found by searching for "matching" in Krita's "Keyboard Shortcuts" configuration menu.

Improved Animation Backend and Caching

We've also made a lot of changes to how our animation system works under the hood that will hopefully add up to further improved stability and cache reliability for Krita animators.

New Animation Workspace

We've put together an updated animation workspace that takes advantage of our more space-efficient dockers.

New Storyboarding Tools and Workflow

Thanks to the help of one of our 2020 Google Summer of Code students, Saurabh "Confifu" Kumar, Krita now has a Storyboard Docker that can be used to plan the shots and storytelling of complex shorts or films. (MR 392). This docker does not just allow you to collect and annotate scenes, but also a wide variety of export options, such as PDF and SVG. There are multiple views you can switch between (screenshot showing the row view).

Flexible storyboard export templating

Krita's new storyboard docker has a lot of options for exporting your boards, including the ability to use SVG file data to specify a completely custom layout. This advanced feature means that, with a little work, storyboards that you make in Krita can always be made to fit your project's needs or match existing storyboard paper.

User Interface Improvements

Our icons were last refreshed for 2.9, and over the years a few hiccups had emerged. Timothée Giet was hired to give the icon set a good scrubbing, and the UI overall had all sorts of little tweaks done by Raghavendra Kamath, Pedro Reis, Scott Petrovic, Tom Tom, Simon Repp, Paul Franz, Andrei Rudenko, Daniel (Sxnic), and Alvin Wong.

Detach the brush editor from the toolbar

You now have the option to make the brush editor detach to its own window, or stay as a pop-up from the toolbar. A detached brush editor can be great for brush creators that make frequent tweaks to their brushes and want to see the result. No more having to constantly show the brush editor every time you want to make a change.

Add option to auto hide controls in overview docker (MR 739)

This makes it so the view controls hide in the overview docker when not in use, giving the maximum room to the overview itself.

Support for user-installed themes on Linux and widget style selection (MR 557, MR 354)

Krita's looks can be modified with both theme and widget style. You could already choose the theme, but now it's also possible to change the widget style on the fly, allowing users to switch between all widget styles available for your platform.

Docker locks have returned (MR 623)

Locking dockers is helpful for those with sensitive tablet stylii, as sometimes a subtle stroke can undock a docker.

Color Selector Uses Theme Color for Background (MR 365)

This was mid-grey to give an unbiased understanding of the color, but it can now be turned off for extra consistency.

New File Formats with AVIF & WebP

This avif is a frame from Cosmos Laundromat, encoded in rec 2100 pq. Krita opens files like these as 32bit float linear images, making them ready to be used with the LUT docker.

Heif plugin update and Avif support (MR 530)

Heif and Avif are the new formats being used by mobile phone cameras, with Avif in particular being slated as a new image format for websites. Krita now supports loading and saving for both RGB and monochrome, 8 bit, 10 bit and 12 bit to these two file formats. Color space encoding is fully supported, including the HDR options such as Rec 2100 PQ and Rec 2100 HLG. The official binaries will also ship rav1e and dav1d for speedy encoding and decoding of Avif.

Improved Tiff support (MR 907, MR 929, MR 962)

Many improvements have come to the venerable tiff plugin: It now supports signed integer formats (as opposed to only unsigned), floating point formats and premultiplied alpha. The UI has been improved with the fax option removed. There is also a patch in the works for 5.1 to get support for Photoshop style tiffs, which should greatly improve interoperability.

WebP plugin improvements (MR 891)

We've now got a plugin based on the official libwebp codec. Where before the webp options were limited to compression, this new plugin contains all possible configuration options available to libwebp. Including the presets!

krz archival kra file format

A feature request granted, Krita can now save to KRZ, which is a KRA file with the preview removed and compression added. This is useful for archiving.

Resize image when exporting (MR 710)

Sachin Jindal added the option to crop and resize an image before export. When exporting images, you'll often want to crop and resize them before export. Some artists had however made the mistake of accidentally saving over their working file with their export file. With the new advanced export, you can avoid this problem. This can be accessed from the File > Export Advanced main menu option.

Search all Actions pop-up

Pressing CTRL + Enter while the Krita window is in focus will now give a pop-up search bar where you can search for a given action. This will help new users more easily find features, and old user to quickly get to a given feature. Command search bars are becoming more common in intricate programs like Krita, amongst which Kate, whose implementation we were able to reuse.

With Search Actions (on CTRL+Enter), you will be able to search and access any action in Krita.

Text size issues have been resolved (MR716)

In Krita 4.x the size of the text rendered in the document could depend on the resolution of the screen Krita runs on. In Krita 5 this bug has been fixed and now the text is rendered with the same size whatever hardware Krita runs on. That has an important consequence: when loading a .kra file, Krita 5 now converts the font size into the correct value and this new value will be saved into the .kra file later. It means that this file will no longer be compatible with older versions of Krita.

A setting has been added to allow specifying the text resolution to be used when opening old files.

Refactored sliders (MR 697)

Deif Lou reworked the spinbox sliders we use throughout Krita. Now in addition to right click to enter a number, you can also use click-hold and enter while focused. Shift key can be used while dragging to make smaller changes, and the Ctrl key for snapping to predefined values. Last but not least, the dragging in the spinbox sliders is now sensitive to the vertical mouse distance, similar to the angle rotation widget. There are even more subtle features to the new sliders as mentioned in the MR, such as support for very large ranges and more!

Pluginification of G'MIC (MR 581)

G'MIC has been moved to a build-in plugin again, which should improve the G'MIC situation on MacOS.

Brush Preset History improvements (MR 424)

A context menu has been added with several options to control the history, with three new options for history behavior, and the ability to remove a single preset or clear the list, added by Mathias Wein.

Four finger tap gesture for canvas only mode (MR 681)

Useful for Android devices, you can now switch in and out of Canvas-Only mode with a four-finger tap.

Apply Filter Again (Re-prompt) (MR 408)

There's a new option for applying the last-used image filter again that also prompts for settings changes.

Single Finger Panning (MR 970)

For years we've had three finger panning. Thanks to Anunay Jain, when "finger painting" is disabled in the settings, you will be able to use a single finger to pan.

Automatically select an appropriate scaling filter (MR 103)

If you aren't sure which image scaling filter to use, you can now select "Auto" to have Krita decide for you based on your scaling parameters. It will try to pick the best scaling filter for your image and even automatically applies nearest neighbor filtering to super low resolution pixel art enlargements.

Convert Colorize Mask to Paint Layer before splitting layers (MR 894)

A bit of convenience implemented by Srirupa Datta, this feature allows you to apply layer split directly on a colorize mask without converting to a paint layer first.

Improved Brush Smoothing (MR 859)

Our smoothing options make heavy use of the time stamps that belong with tablet stylus movement. Thanks to Victor Moraes, You can now switch between the old timer based method, or the new driver based method. Which of these is the best depends on your operating system, driver, and tablet model.

Filters use sliders more consistently (MR 652)

Sachin Jindal took the time to update all the filters with these new sliders, giving more consistency throughout Krita.

Special Thanks

Krita is a community project, with people all over the world working on Krita, and every release we see old and new contributors. Thanks to the development fund, we can invest more time into onboarding and guiding contributors, but one thing is certain: Without these people, Krita would not be possible:

[Followed by a long list of contributors and their contributions.]

Original source Report a problem

If we had to give a theme to this release, it would be textures and patterns. This was half by coincidence, one of our GSoC students this year focused on getting SeExpr integration going, one of the mentors decided to work in the same area, and two volunteer contributors also came up with pattern and texture related features.

Fill Layers

This release brings a lot of updates and changes to fill layers.

Multi-threading for fill layers

Fill layers can now make use of multi-threading. This means that if your computer has multiple cores, Krita can subdivide the calculation work for making fill layers between them. This makes fill layers a lot faster.

Transformations for the pattern fill

The different pattern transforms possible now. The patterns of fill layers can now be transformed, allowing you to amongst others, rotate the patterns. This has also been implemented for the shape drawing tools and the bucket fill, and had been long on the to-do list.

Screentone

A new fill layer option specialized in filling the whole screen with dots, squares, lines, waves or more. This fill layer allows you to quickly generate the simple pattern you need on the fly, which is very useful for those doing comic book illustration or similar highly graphics styles.

Multigrid

A fill layer that generates, among others, Penrose tilings, as well as Quasicrystal structures. The results are rotationally symmetric, but aperiodic, meaning these rhomb patterns don't repeat themselves.

This filter was inspired by the next item on the list...

SeExpr

Amyspark's Google Summer of Code project, the integration of Disney Animation's SeExpr expression language. SeExpr is in effect a tiny shader language that is used by Walt Disney Animation Studios itself to generate textures and materials on the fly for their animations. Within Krita, this allows you to code your own fill layers. We've also tried to come up with a good set of defaults to work off from and included them.

Brushes

Following the addition of the lightness mode in 4.3, this release sees another round of features for the brush engines.

Top stroke: using a combination of the new lightness parameter with the mix parameter. Bottom stroke: using the texture strength parameter to mix gradient mapped brush tips and textures.

Gradient Map mode for Brush-tips

If lightness mode is not subtle enough for you, you can now also use the global gradient to color a brush tip. Especially useful with small repeating objects like flowers and leaves.

Lightness and Gradient modes for brush textures

Brushes now have the ability to use lightness and the gradients for textures as well.

Diagonal selection lines in MyPaint color selector (Shift+M)

Diagonal lines allow modifying lightness and saturation of the currently active color at the same time.

Support for dynamic use of currently selected colors in gradients

While Krita had support for the GIMP Gradient format, we never supported the dynamic changing of gradients based on the current fore and background colors. Nor did we do so for the layer styles. This has now been added. Several of the bundled presets use the foreground color to easily create sparks, haze and other effects.

Little sparkles added with the 'GPS glare' default, different colors are a different foreground color.

Animation

While most of the animation work is happening in master and will be in the next big Krita release, some choice features have made it to 4.4:

• Audio Support within an AppImage.
• WebM/VP9 preset for Animation Rendering - Based on a request for a web friendly rendering preset.
• Compositions Docker now allows for the exporting of Animations - Requested by animators, the compositions docker allows for saving and loading layer visibility configurations. This adds the ability to setup animation renders for these configurations.

Python

GDQUEST Batch Exporter add-on

An exporter for batch exporting the layers and positions from Krita. Made by the folks over at Game Design Quest.

Python plugin Channels to Layers

By Gwendal Blanchard, this plugin allows you to quickly separate the image channels into layers.

API changes

• Return list of available dockers for application in python
• add signal to notify when theme changed
• Add signal when active view changes in python
• Add showFloatingMessage to View API
• New widget bindings: scratchpad. See an example of a scratchpad docker built using python.

New Python scripting website

To learn about the new scripting APIs, or learn how to script with Krita in general, a new website was made to assist. It is broken apart into various sections of what scripting can do.

Other

• Make Ctrl+C/X/V shortcut work with layers when there is nothing else to copy - Krita can copy pixel data, vector objects and whole layers with blending modes, frames, child layers and other properties. Previously, Krita would only try to copy pixel and vector objects if these were selected and otherwise not copy anything. Now, Krita will copy (or cut) the selected layer if nothing is selected, making it a lot easier to copy and paste layers between files.
• Basic Reapply Filter with Prompt. We already had 'Reapply Filter', but some filters have configuration dialogs that you might wish to change. This function allows for exactly that, and can have a hotkey assigned for quick access.
• Update default layer name to show type - Krita used to give layers names like 'layer 1', 'layer 2', regardless of layer type. Based on artist feedback, we've now added the layer type to make it easier to tell what kind of layer was made.
• Add 'selection as a border' option to the Fill Tool - In some graphics software, the fill tool will treat separately selected areas as separate areas to fill. We've added an option to the fill tool that allows this in Krita. It is a little slower, and therefore off by default.

Bugfixes

A very extensive list of bugfixes addressing undo breakage, boolean operations, move tool, antialiasing, color labels, layer bounds, selection masks, crashes, OpenGL rendering, shortcuts, exporting, loading, Android fixes, and many more issues to improve stability and usability.

Original source Report a problem

Krita 4.3.0, coming a year after the release of Krita 4.2.0, is packed with new features but mostly many, many bug fixes. We want this to be the most stable Krita release ever! We spent more than a year fully focused on improving Krita's stability and performance -- but there are still a bunch of new features, too. Thanks to the generous support of our community, more and more people are working on Krita these days and with great results: there are over 2000 changes in Krita 4.3.0 compared to Krita 4.2.9!

This release also contains the work of the 2019 Google Summer of Code projects. Sharaf Zaman has worked on porting Krita to Android, and the first beta (based on Krita 4.2.9) has entered the Google Play Store for Chrome OS and Android tablets. Krita 4.3.0 will be there as the second beta: until we're happy with the state of Krita on Android it will remain in the beta channel. Tusooa Zhu has rewritten Krita's undo system, and that made it possible to add a snapshot docker. And Kuntal Majumder has added a brand new magnetic selection tool.

Android

On Android, Samsung's Air actions are now supported. Anna Medonosova added the stylus gestures supported by Samsumg Tab S6, Note 9 (partially) and Note 10. You can configure the actions in the Configure Krita dialog.

Animation

Since the start of March, Emmet and Eoin have been working on a whole bunch of fixes, optimizations and improvements to our animation tools.

While many of these changes won't hit until the next major release, a few items made it into Krita 4.3.0:

• New feature: The "Render Animation" dialog has a new option for exporting only the unique frames of an animation.
• New feature: We've made new hotkey bind-able actions for selecting the previous/next sibling layer, for working within a single group of layers.
• Fix: General animation caching improvements should lead to smoother and more consistent playback and scrubbing.
• Fix: Hidden layers can now be properly edited and scrubbed in active isolation mode.
• Fix: Timeline now correctly highlights the current frame when loading a new document.
• Fix: Onion skins no longer become misaligned after cropping.
• Fix: Presence of transform masks on the layer tree no longer glitch animation playback.
• Fix: The "Render Animation" dialog's image settings are now independent and no longer conflict with the image "Export" dialog's settings.
• Fix: The "Render Animation" dialog now correctly synchronizes HDR settings between the video and image sequence options.
• Fix: Added small headers to multiple animation context menus to mitigate accidental selections.
• Fix: The error message that's shown when Krita can't find FFMPEG now provides helpful information and a link to the official documentation.
• Change: The "Isolate Layer" feature is now called "Isolate Active Layer" to better reflect how it works.
• Check out the project page for all the details!

Along with many of these changes, our future plans for Krita's animation workflow have been informed by feedback and critiques from our community.

As such, we'd like to thank everybody who has taken time to file detailed bug reports, reach out with suggestions, help test patches and fill out our recent Animation Feedback Survey. Thanks!

Resources

• Ramon Miranda created a new set of watercolor effect brush presets.
• Bundles now properly handle timezones and show dates in the user's preferred format.
• There are a couple of new patterns by David Gowers that are good for usage with the new Palettize filter.

Filters

Gradient Map Color Mode Option

For the pixelart afficionado, there are two filter changes this release, both implemented by Carl Olsson.

The first is the Color Mode in the Gradient Map filter. This allows setting the intermediate colors to use a dithering pattern or to restrict the colors to the nearest stop color.

Palettize Filter

The second feature Carl Olsson created is the new Palettize filter which works similar to the Gradient Map filter, but uses a palette to determine the colors. The Palettize filter also supports dithering:

High Pass Filter

The high pass filter, contributed by Miguel Lopez is, among other things, good for making images sharper. It is best applied as a filter layer set to overlay. This filter is especially useful as a final step for images uploaded to social media; the extra sharpness offsets the terrible scaling algorithms used by image hosting sites that make images blurry.

Other Filter Improvements

• Memory leaks in the gradient map filter were fixed
• The edge detection and height to normal map filters no longer show staircase-like artifacts
• All convolution filters (like sharpen, blur) now work correctly on images with an opaque background
• The HSV filter now works more correctly on grayscale images
• The blur filter now calculates the aspect ratio correctly
• The motion blur filter now produces fewer artifacts

Layers

• The performance of layer styles has been improved
• The separate channels function works again
• The split image dialog now supports splitting along guides dragged out of the rulers and has a nice preview as well
• Clone layers now perform much better and are much more stable
• Dialog to change the source of clone layers: another contribution by Tusooa, you can now change the source of a clone layer, and have it point at a different layer. Clone layers act like an instance of the source layer, for use in a variety of interesting effects, but it was not until now that they could be pointed at a different source layer.

Python

• ManagedColor now can also be initialized with a QColor
• Added a setDocument method to the View class
• Actions creating in Python extensions are loaded before the menus and toolbars are constructed

Painting

• RGBA brushes: Krita now allows setting the opacity and lightness on colored brush tips separately. This allows for a number of new posibilities, amongst which the ability to get a texture remniscent of oil or acrylic impasto.
• The pixel brush engine is about 20% faster

Multi-dimension export for GIH

The GIMP image hose format (gih) supports multiple dimensions, so one can have several rows of brushes that can be set to randomness horizontally, and maybe increment vertically. And now Krita's exporter supports this too, thanks to the work by Ivan Yossi!

Window Handling

It's now possible to take the central canvas area out of the window and put it in its own window: the detached canvas mode is handy when you, for instance, have a big and a small screen, you can then put the image on the big screen and all the tools and dockers on the small screen.

Color Handling

• Rendering the Lab channels is now done correctly both in the channels docker and on the canvas, thanks to L.E. Segovia.
• The color chooser no longer loses contrast when adjusting the saturation of the the HSL slider, while changing the lightness compensates better for keeping the saturation correct.
• Krita now tries to recognize the broken ICC profiles that Photoshop installs and doesn't try to load them.
• Palettes with more than 4096 columns are now loaded and shown correctly.
• The color selectors not only perform much better but are also more correct and easier to use thanks to Mattias Wein's work:

Snapshot docker

Part of Tusooa's work rewriting Krita's undo system, the snap shot docker allows you to save certain states of progress into this docker and toggle between them.

Tools

• Some tools come with "actions" -- like increasing/decreasing the brush tip size. These actions are now created before an image is loaded, so they can be put on the toolbar.

Magnetic Selection Tool

Kuntal Majumder's GSoC for 2019, the Magnetic Selection Tool, makes a free hand selection, but with a twist: it tries to align the selection to the edges it can find inside the image, simplifying the process tremendously.

New Modes for the Gradient Tool

Spiral, Reverse Spiral and Bilinear mode have been added by Miguel Lopez.

Fill Tool and Contiguous Selection Tool ("Magic Wand")

The Fill Tool and Contiguous Selection Tool ("magic wand") have been extended: you can choose between All Layers, Current Layer and Color Labeled Layers to indicate what area the tool needs to fill or select. This is particularly useful with complex multi-layer line art.

Other

• Creating selections is now much faster.
• Krita now tries much, much harder to make sure a file really is saved correctly: we check the size, the date, open the file, check the contents right after saving.
• A really nasty bug was fixed by Wolthera: selections that are entirely outside the image could be saved and on loading would make it seemingly impossible to paint.
• Saurabh Kumar added an option to open an image as a file layer in an already loaded image
• There is a new option to save images to .kra with all layers trimmed to the image size. This is off by default; enable it if you tend to move things outside the image boundaries and don't want to keep that image data around between sessions.

Original source Report a problem

Krita 4.2 has been released on May 29th, 2019. While the core team focused on stability and performance, this release also includes many new features and the performance work and the work on handling palettes done during the 2018 Google Summer of Code. Join us for the ride!

Updated Tablet Support for Windows, Linux and macOS

We finally managed to bring together the code we wrote for supporting tablets on Windows (both Wintab as Windows Ink), Linux and macOS with the existing code in our development platform, Qt. This has improved support for multi-monitor setups, more tablets are supported and a host of bugs with tablets have been resolved. This was a huge amount of work!

Note: we needed to patch Qt to make all of this work. The patches have been upstreamed but might not yet be integrated by your linux distribution. Until that happens, you might need to use the Linux AppImage instead of Krita as built by your distribution.

HDR Painting

HDR Animation created in Krita by Agata Cacko

Krita at CES2019

Krita has been able to work with HDR images since 2005, but it's now possible to view your HDR image in HDR, on supported hardware. You can now not only save your HDR image in .kra or OpenEXR files, but also extended PNG. With the right version of FFMPEG you can even create animations in HDR! Having the correct computer setup for this can be rather complicated, so head to the documentation to see what is involved.

HDR display is only available on Windows 10. If you have HDR enabled, the Small Color Selector Docker has an extra "nits" slider that allows you to change the brightness of a specfic color.

• Feature - https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/hdr_display.html
• Background Knowledge - https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_linear_painting.html

This work was possible through cooperating with Intel. The work also involved helping these HDR changes get pushed into the development framework Krita uses, Qt. This can allow other applications to take advantange of these features.

Improved brush speed performance with vectorization and lock-free programming

Two of our 2018 Google Summer of Code students sped up Krita with programming techniques called lock-free hashmap for managing the pixel data (Andrey Kamakin) and GPU vectorization (Ivan Yossi). The lock-free hashmap should improve Krita's speed with multithreading, the chart shows the performance gains based off your CPU core count. Vectorization for the Gaussian and Soft-brush tips optimizes Krita by taking advantage of your processor's ability to do similar calculations really quickly, the gif above showing the speed difference for the gaussian brush tip.

The left axis on the graph is time in milliseconds. You can see the painting operations go from 1.5 seconds down to about 1 second with the lock-free hashmap. The blue line shows how Krita previously worked.

Improved Color Palette Docker

An improved color palette from one of our Google Summer of Code students for 2018 -- Michael Zhou. It is more stable as well as some of the following changes:

1. Instead of an entry-based docker, a rows and column based docker.
2. It can hold empty entries, which is useful for organizing.
3. Stable drag and dropping of colors.
4. Easy adding in entries by clicking them in the docker.
5. Right-clicking removes an entry.
6. Palettes can be put into the KRA file.
7. You can press the folder icon to open a palette editing dialog where you can set a palette to be stored in the document or resource-folder.

Animation Python API

Control and create customized workflows that deal with animations.

• Move to a specific frame
• Set the frame rate
• Set start and end frame playback length

A couple plugins have already been created that are using some of these functions. There was also another fix to the Node/Layer API where the "scaleNode" call was passing the wrong parameter

Animator Video Reference and importer - https://github.com/scottpetrovic/animator-video-reference

Sprite Sheet manager - https://github.com/Falano/kritaSpritesheetManager

Configure File backups

Options to control how your backups are done. You can even control if you want your backup files to be stored in a different location. These settings are found in the "Configure Krita" main menu under the General section.

If you have very large files and are have issues saving, you can enable the Zip64 options.

Color Gamut Masking

A new color gamut docker where you can limit your colors shown. New contributor Anna Medonosova has added this. This feature is available with the artistic color selector and the circle advanced color docker displays. Note: The default triangle selector doesn't allow this feature.

You can also rotate the gamut mask by using the slider. Create new masks and edit existing ones through the Gamut Mask docker. You can disable the mask with the selector icon at the top as shown to the left of the rotation slider.

News about Krita

A news widget has been added to the startup screen that allows Krita to fetch the latest news coming from krita.org. Now, if there's something interesting, like a new release, you'll be in the front row! Clicking on a news item will take you to the web page. This is off by default, so you will need to turn it on. Special thanks goes out to Alvin Wong on getting the OpenSSL library included to make this work.

Improved Artistic Color Selector

More options and cleaned up Artistic Color Selector. There is now a "continuous mode" (infinity symbol) that allows you to remove the stepping with certain attributes. Additional options for new gamut masking. Anna Medonosova has added this great feature.

Undo operations with move tool

Move tool operations are now part part of the undo history. This means you can undo multiple moves in a row while you are using the move tool.

Move and transform selections

Easily move, rotate, or transform the selection by itself. You can even edit the anchor points with how the selection is made to do things like rounding corners.

Improve display of memory usage

Give a better indication when your computer is running out of memory. This can be useful as well when making an animation and you won't have enough memory to actually render it. This bar already exists in the status bar, but should help warn people better.

Overview Docker improvements

Rotate and mirror canvas quickly from the docker. The Overview docker now also better preserves the aspect ratio and doesn't stretch when some layers are hidden.

Resize layer thumbnails

There is a new slider on the layers docker that allows you to resize the layer thumbnails to see them larger. The size is saved for when you return back to Krita the next time.

Multibrush improvements

Better preview when showing multiple axes.

There is also a new "Copy Translate" mode. This allows you to specify multiple cursors on the screen to paint or draw with at the same time. This is accessed and used through the Tool options like the other modes.

Painting mask performance improvement

You can create a selection with your normal brushes using the Global Selection option. This has previously been a slow area until now. They are now significantly faster. A small workflow change was made as well. If you show the Global Selection mask with no selection, everything will be selected by default.

Improvement to Select Opaque

Ctrl + clicking a layer's thumbnail in the layer docker makes a selection of the layers content. This is the same as the right click option Select Opaque. There are also new methods for making layer selections. "Select Opaque" has been renamed to "Select Opaque (replace)" now to account for the new functions.

• Ctrl+click = replace selection
• Ctrl+shift+click = add selection
• Ctrl+alt+click = subtract selection
• Ctrl+shift+alt+click = intersect selection

Sharpness Changes

The sharpness option, which sets a threshold filter on the current brushtip now allows controlling this threshold with pressure, making it easy to create bristle like brushes from any with the pixel brush.

Flow/Opacity Changes

Flow and Opacity now interact more like in other programs. The above gif shows how to adapt a brush which uses the new behaviour to go back to the old behaviour. The new behaviour should make it a lot easier to make delicate strokes. For now you can still go back to using the old behaviour globally by going to Configure Krita → General → Tools → Flow Mode

Clone Brush - Reset Origin

A new option was added to the clone brush that allows you to reset the origin after every brush stroke.

Simplex Noise Generator

Add ability to dynamically add noise to your document. There are also options to make the noise tileable.

New Blend modes

New categories of the blend modes were added to create interesting effects.

Other Changes and bug fixes

• Fix: Allow changing layer name to set document as modified (bug 380437)
• Fix: Allow undoing when changing layer names (bug 380437)
• Fix: Update the undo limit if we change it
• Fix: Handling of modified document notification in sub-window mode (bug 386488)
• Fix: Fix when holding right-click over layer's color settings (bug 392815)
• Fix: Do not show language switch warning when going back to the default (bug 362961)
• Fix: Gradient map color mapping issues (bug 388976)
• Fix: Layout improvements and showing levels for histogram filter (bug 376048)
• Improvement: Add warning when adding shape to clone layer (bug 406730)
• Usability: Make default background for text editor white for readability
• Fix: Activation of FFTW convolution worker (bug 407062)
• Fix: Crash in halftone filter (bug 407045)
• Fix: remove notification for unused keyboard short for wrap-around (bug 407119)
• Fix: Safe assert triggered while drawing (bug 404552)
• Improvement: Warn artists if they try to render an animated GIF with over 50 FPS (bug 403873)
• Improvement: Handle calculation better for grayscale images in high bit depth (bug 405693)
• Usability: Make tabs and table headers and text translatable (bug 406943, bug 406944)
• Improvement: Make zoom mode persistent when moving across screens
• Fix: Exporting animation frames into EXR format (bug 406830)
• Improvement: Load broken TGA files that have bad alpha data (bug 354791)
• Python: Allow selecting boundary limits on export (bug 404615)
• Fix: Unable to set minimal shade selector (bug 368587)
• Improvement: Add pixel snap mode for canvas (bug 390952)
• Fix: Load pre-Krita 4.0 transform masks (bug 396815)
• Fix: TIFF export filter flatten images with group layers (bug 404204)
• Fix: Do not activate already running app instance when exporting image sequence
• Fix: Memory leak with GIFs when saving and line length (bug 404160)
• Improvement: Better calculate SVG document size and loading omitted commands (bug 406124)
• Usability: Hide pattern fill option in vector tools until it is fully implemented
• Fix: Artifacts when saving vector layers as PNG (bug 404976)
• Fix: Crash when merging back split alpha function
• Fix: Address sanitizer (ASAN) crash when creating a guide (bug 405732)
• Fix: Hard to select color in vector objects (bug 404975)
• Fix: Undo merging a layer that is cloned (bug 397836)
• Improvement: Add fractional DPI scaling (found in settings)
• Improvement: Allow clone brush to have an option to reset origin after every stroke
• Fix: Canvas input cursor updates when it has no input focus (bug 369305)
• Fix: Hiccups when using wheel on Wacom's tablet (bug 381452)
• Fix: Clone brush should use the last layer the source was placed on (bug 401919)
• Fix: Tilt elevation curve corrections (bug 399846)
• Fix: Do not focus on tag search line edit in the show event (bug 404131)
• Usability: Only show layer styles contour and texture when Bevel and Emboss is checked (bug 396015)
• Python: Comics plugin improvements to file saving and creating documents
• Fix: Pop-up palette color fix when changing themes
• Usability: Improve control point size for brush editor curves (bug 406233)
• Feature: Add option in settings to disable AVX optimizations on Windows (bug 406209)
• Fix: Make font size consistent (bug 406386)
• Fix: Unable to select new view item with OSX long path names (bug 403639)
• Usability: Theme change fixes for overview docker, rulers, and subwindows
• Fix: Memory leak caused by converting function
• Fix: Wrong position of the merged layer (bug 405686)
• Fix: Right clicking on popup-palette color selector hides it (bug 402990)
• Fix: rulers showing pixels no matter what unit (bug 406181)
• Fix: Crash in Split Alpha function (bug 406241)
• Fix: wrong bounding box on gradient map (bug 406234)
• Fix: page orientation switch in new dialog (bug 374493)
• Improvement: Do a better job when finding ffmpeg for flatpak (bug 405146)
• Improvement: Do a better job when calculating nearest neighbor filters (bug 401788)
• Usability: Improve contrast with checkboxes on pen settings and brush favorites
• Fix: Allow group layers to be transformed and improve logic for layers that cannot be transformed (bug 406036)
• Fix: Background color being lost after merging (bug 405230)
• Improvement: Remember last used directory for shortcut import/export (bug 368360)
• Improvement: Improve canvas refresh rate when moving vector objects (bug 403340, bug 405698)
• Improvement: Intel OpenGL detection for newer drivers
• Fix crash on quick brush engine because of calculations (bug 404179)
• Fix: splash screen on some high DPI screens
• Improvement: Move color filters on onion skin out of combo box for easier toggling
• Usability: Improve contrast with checkboxes on brush settings, pen sensors, and blending modes (bug 404190)
• Fix: hangup when starting painting too quickly after changing opacity (bug 405879)
• Fix: Data loss when adding multiple hold frames through right-click menu (bug 404246)
• Fix: Copy correct image cache when cloning a layer (bug 387698)
• Fix: Only show Intel graphics card warning on Windows
• Text: changed "Launch Bug Report Wizard" to "Submit Bug Report" from main menu (bug 406152)
• Usability: Add tooltip to eraser button in toolbar
• Fix activation of isolate mode when merging layers down (bug 295981)
• Improvement: Add ability for shape brushes to use patterns for filling
• Fix: Transform tool crash on layers with pass-through mode
• Improvement: Add more information like HighDPI and language to usage logger
• Fix: Make sure a masked painter knows about outlines (bug 404963)
• Fix: Make sure polyline takes into account the no-stroke setting
• Feature: Add ability to export animation to PNG sequence using commandline
• Fix: Better handle loading recent files (bug 405364)
• Improvement: Better show/hide progress bars when loading an unsupported image (bug 402625)
• Feature: Add mirroring capability for Quick brush (bug 372636)
• Usability: Add a second row to pop-up palette presets if the number gets above 20 so they are easier to see
• Fix: Color smudge might not have an image for tip (bug 405336)
• Fix: Prevent crash with mirror manager decorations
• Fix: When no outline is selected, outline doesn't use brush width (bug 398509)
• Fix: Low pixel size limit in Scale to New Size dialog
• Feature: Simplex Noise Generator can now be used from a fill layer
• Usability: Make disabled icons in animation docker semi-transparent to be like other disabled icons
• Fix: creating vector shapes with pattern fills (bug 405037)
• Fix: minimum animation cell grid size on windows
• Fix: conversion errors in Scale new image dialog (bug 400177)
• Improve UI for Arrange docker to make it easier to understand (bug 399984, bug 394084)
• Fix: Only load a thumbnail for a recent file that still exists (bug 401939)
• Improve angle selection on layer effects (bug 372169)
• Fix: Restore broken fonts (bug 402092)
• Add a few new options for fill type when creating new documents
• Fix: Remove the default shortcut for text tool. We just don't have any good available keys left (bug 402270)
• Improve animation export dialog: Add warning when dimensions are not divisible by 2 for MP4 and MKV. Make sure the default dialog uses the encoder config for the format
• Fix opening templates from the command line (bug 402342)
• Inserting a layer when on a group layer adds it above the layer, not inside it now (bug 399103)
• Feature: Advanced Color Selector - Add option to hide the color selector in the configure menu (bug 337328)
• Remove old Karbon gradient files that weren't being used
• Fix: Restore the UI after crashing in canvas only mode (bug 402710)
• Fix: Added safe assert to prevent Krita from crashing when a toolbar gets accidentally enabled
• Improvement: Add more information to the bug reporter with memory, CPU cores, and swap location
• Usability: Update the layer box to better to support RTL languages
• Feature: Add Python plugin importer to make importing plugins easier
• Improvement: Add direction choice for the Image Split feature
• Fix: Actions on Move Tool only being executed after changing current node in move tool (bug 403048)
• Fix: Python API. Fix crash when trying to access projection pixel data on transform mask (bug 402382)
• Fix: Return colorspace of projection before returning the colorspace of the node (bug 402382)
• Improvement: Enable automatic docstring generation for python (commit e7fe83c9)
• Fix: Loading KRA files with image names starting with a "/" symbol
• Fix: Enabling the selection mode shortcuts (bug 403587)
• Improvement: Generator Layers. Added real-time preview when changing layer properties
• Improvement: Polygonal Selection: Add ability to undo these operations
• Fix: File layers: Use the mergedimage preview when opening ORA or KRA files
• Improvement: Transform Tool: Added Granularity to tool options
• Back-end: Update Qt programming framework to Qt 5.12
• Improvement: Update GMIC filters plugin to version 2.4.5
• Back-end: Update PDF library (Poppler) to version 0.74.0
• Back-end: Update Python API libraries (PyQt and SIP) to version 5.12
• Improvement: Added new blending modes: Reflect, Glow, Freeze, Heat, Glow-Heat, Heat-Glow, Reflect-Freeze, Freeze-Reflect, Heat-Glow & Freeze-Reflect Hybrid
• Fix: Save mirror tool state to KRA file (bug 339515)
• Usability: Make it easier to select lower values for stabilizer sliders
• Fix: Saving reference images z-order (bug 403974)
• Fix: Disable use of Always Use Template in the New File Window (bug 399796)
• Fix: Be the top handler of applications on some Linux distributions (bug 337272)
• Usability: Add a tooltip to the composition docker
• Fix: Bug where mirroring canvas would get out of sync with the main menu action
• Fix: Check if animation config exists before accessing its contents (bug 404521)

Original source Report a problem

There are numerous bug fixes and some very cool new features since Krita 3.1.4. Check out GDQuest's overview video below with all the changes:

G'MIC Plugin

Krita 3.2 uses the gmic-qt plugin created and maintained by the authors of G'Mic. This plugin replaces completely the older gmic plugin. On Windows and Linux, the plugin is bundled with Krita and should work out of the box. It's still rather experimental, though it's considerably more up to date and stable than the previous gmic integration.

On OSX, we cannot for now provide the plugin for a number of reasons: the underlying g'mic library needs X11 to show dialogs for e.g. interactive colorize, we have trouble actually compiling the binary and have it run and once that hurdle is taken, OSX breaks the plugin by limiting shared memory to chunks of 40 megabytes.

Touch Painting

You can now paint with your fingers. This was in Krita 2.8, but was lost when we did our Qt5 port. It's back! If you don't want this, you can disable touch painting support in the settings dialog.

Smart Patch Tool

Clean up and remove elements you don't want. This was previously going to be in Krita 4.0, but we managed to get it in this release! Check out the demo below. The tool is in the toolbox with its own set of tool options.

New Brush Presets

We added Radian's brush set to Krita's default brushes. These brushes are good for create a strong painterly look.

Other Features

• There are now shortcuts for changing layer states like visibility and lock.
• There is a new dialog from where you can copy and paste relevant information about your system for bug reports.
• The Gaussian Blur filter now can use kernels up to 1000 pixels in diameter
• There is a new blending mode: Hard Overlay

Bug Fixes

• There have been many fixes to the clone brush
• If previously you suffered from the "green brush outline" syndrome, that should be fixed now, too. Though we cannot guarantee the fix works on all OpenGL systems.
• There have been a number of performancei mprovements as well
• The interaction with the file dialog has been improved: it should be better at guessing which folder you want to open, which filename to suggest and which file type to use.
• Some cleanups when handling OpenGL
• Show a clearer error when loading the wintab32.dll file fails on Windows
• Fix a regression where bezier tools couldn’t close the curve and couldn’t create a second curve
• Fixes for working with multiple windows in subwindow mode where one of the documents is set to "stays on top"
• Fix resetting the Level of Detail cache when changing the visibility of a layer: this fixes an issue where after changing the visibility of a layer, the color picker would pick from an older version of the layer.
• Save the last used folder in the Reference Images Docker
• Don’t create nested autosave documents.
• Add recognizing uc-logic tablets on Linux
• Improve the stabilizer
• Fix loading a custom brush preset that uses the text brush
• Fixes to saving jpg or png images without a transparency channel

Original source Report a problem

Krita 3.1.3 is mainly a bug fix release with some new features. Every user is strongly recommended to update.

New Features

• implement context menu actions for default tool (cut, copy, paste, object ordering)
• added option to allow multiple instances of krita (BUG 377199)
• scale around pivot point added

Changes/Fixes

• Fix eraser switching back to the brush after flipping the stylus (BUG 375878)
• Fix the OpenGL crash detection and show Intel warning earlier
• Fix the High DPI switch
• Improve how you select brush spacing so it is easier to slide to a value
• Fix right-button popup menus in tools when using Tablet Stylus (BUG 344878)
• Added layer thumbnail on the animation timeline while hovering
• Improvements to undo and the swap operation save memory
• Fix when sometimes layer says "group not editable" (BUG 376214)
• Fix slow down when changing of the smoothing options (BUG 375882)
• Fix crash when closing an image right during the transformation operation
• Fix a crash when switching tools while running the color picker (BUG 373883)
• Update to Spriter plugin
• Fix resetting the paint device cache (BUG 374142)
• Upgrade the layer to an animated one when the first frame is added (BUG 377176)
• Warn the artist when saving a read-only file (BUG 376098)
• All file layers to be merged (BUG376613)
• Add user feedback when locking for drag and drop between images (BUG 376382)
• Fix potential crash when dragging and dragging large layers between images (BUG 376382)
• Don't crash if there is no proofing color space (BUG 376311)
• Fix a crash when the layer gets changed to quickly during moving animation (BUG 377614)
• Fix loading of some animation files
• Port animation frames to use strokes (BUG 37696)
• Update calligraphy tool icon
• Fix removing color labels from multiple frames (BUG 374746)
• Add a warning dialog when a person is potentially saving a corrupted image (BUG 361883 BUG 378681)
• Fix updates to assistants when the brush outline is disabled (BUG 377952)
• Fix for loading the display settings
• Fixed a potential crash when merging layers with pass-through mode
• Fixed flattening and merging of pass-through lode layers
• Fix crash when double clicking on a polyline object (BUG 376497)
• Fix frame offset when dragging and dropping between layers
• Updated default settings for liquify tool (thanks David Revoy)
• Fix issues with saving layer styles and vector layers.
• Fix rending a sequence of one animation frame
• Show the on-canvas message by default since mirror view needs it (BUG 346014)
• Fix for converting floating point channel depth to 8 bit integers with PNG format (BUG 375217)
• Fix crash when a file layer is deleted (BUG 376993)
• Make lens blur work when using Krita in another language than English (BUG 376262)
• Fix memory leak in PNG converter (BUG 378134)
• Update tooltips for play and stop in animation docker
• Convert the pasted clip color space when the option is set (T5367)
• Fixes for loading ORA file types
• Fix for updating title of document when changing document title (BUG 374389)
• Fix activating next/previous layer shortcut for layer groups which are invisible
• New icon for transform from pivot point
• Show layer color labels in timeline docker
• Use the name of the filter when creating a filter mask from the filter dialog instead of "effect"
• Don’t cover startup dialogs (for instance, for the pdf import filter) with the splash screen
• Fix a race condition that made the a transform mask with a liquify transformation unreliable
• Fix canvas blackouts when using the liquify tool at a high zoom level
• Fix loading the playback cache
• fix with dragging when shift is selected (BUG 373067)
• Use the native color selector on OSX: Krita’s custom color selector cannot pick screen colors on OSX
• Set the default PNG compression to 3 instead of 9: this makes saving png’s much faster and the resulting size is the same.
• Fix a crash when pressing the V shortcut to draw straight lines
• Fix a warning when the installation is incomplete that still mentioned Calligra
• Make dragging the guides with a tablet work correctly
• Pressing and releasing a modifier key now updates the cursor instantly

Original source Report a problem

Krita 3.1.2, released on January 31st 2017, is a bugfix release with a few extra features thrown in for good measure.

Audio Support for Animations

Import audio files to help with syncing voices and music. In the demo on the left, Timothée Giet shows how scrubbing and playback work when working with audio.

• Available audio formats are WAV, MP3, OGG, and FLAC
• A checkbox was added in the Render animation dialog to include the audio while exporting
• See the documentation for more information on how to set it up and use the audio import feature.

Audio is not yet available in the Linux appimages. It is an experimental feature, with no guarantee that it works correctly yet -- we need your feedback! See Phabricator for the development discussion.

Other Changes

• Ctrl key continue mode for Outline Selection tool: if you press ctrl while drawing an outline selection, the selection isn't completed when you lift the stylus from the tablet. You can continue drawing the selection from an arbitrary point.
• Allow deselection by clicking with a selection tool: you can now deselect with a single click with any selection tool.
• Added a checkbox for enabling HiDPI to the settings dialog.
• remove the export to PDF functionality. It is having too many issues right now. (BUG:372439)

Bug Fixes

• fix a number of bugs with creating and editing bundles (BUG:352151)
• fix loading presets with embedded patterns (BUG:374745)
• Fix to the erase mode button so it keeps track of the blending mode (BUG:348290)
• Fix creating a brush from a stamp (BUG:373846)
• Load 16-bit RGBA TIFF files that have no embedded ICC profile as gamma corrected sRGB (BUG:375479)
• Make it possible to use the same language for translations as the desktop (BUG:374928)
• Fix a possible crash in the brush engine when using older Wacom tablets on Windows 10 and a stylus that does not support rotation (BUG:375253)
• Add extra precision to the gray slider in the levels filter (BUG:375201)
• Fix settings for cumulative undo
• Hide text for buttons with an icon in the toolbar
• Restore the default favorite blending modes
• Make it possible to delete system tags (BUG:347607)
• Restore a step of 0.1 for the crop tool ratio spinbox (BUG:374021)
• Fix saving the name of a local selection mask (BUG:374383)
• Fix crash when creating a document after closing it with opacity keyframes (BUG:374381)
• Icon updates for redo, mirror view, rotation, smoothing modes, merging layers, rotating canvas, split layer, color to alpha
• fix crash when attempting to use a document that has a 16-bit float XYZ color space
• Fixed making the fullscreen action checkable again (BUG:373906)
• Don't reset the OCIO settings when moving the window (BUG:373481)
• Fix saving pass-through mode for group layers
• Make user visible color space names in color models consistent
• Fix a crash when using two windows (BUG:371124)
• Fix a possible crash with the undo stack (BUG:374524)
• Fix confusion when saving per-stylus presets between sessions (BUG:374957)
• Don't generate thumbnails without a height or width (BUG:373835)
• Fix a potential crash when switching to the tool options in the toolbar (BUG:374497)
• Fix exporting animation that doesn't start with the first frame
• Don't reset the animation export range every time when exporting an animation

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