Krita 5.0 You are here to continue the evolution of this popular drawing application that is also part of KDE. Without making much noise, little by little it has been making a niche in a sector that becomes demanding, and it has also done so by being published as free software.
Krita 5.0 is a very powerful release, which is good news because it means that the project is alive and well. When it comes to what’s new, we start with the fact that the way the app handles things like brushes, gradients, palettes, and labeling has been completely revamped.
Those responsible have explained that before they used a fragile model system to manage the resources, so Krita uses a SQLite database from this version as the nucleus to carry out this task. As a result, a large number of labeling bugs and user interface issues should have been fixed, as well as allowing faster application startup and a 200 megabyte reduction in RAM usage.
In previous versions the resources folder was fixed, but that is no longer the case in Krita 5, which allows you to configure the folder where the resources are located and the location of the cache. This allows, for example, to have the resources in a USB memory, thus offering much more flexibility to the user. All this has come together with a new resource manager, which allows you to label brushes en masse and delete and recover resources at will. On the other hand, layer styles are now resources, so you can tag, browse through layer styles, share them, and load multiple layer styles at once from an ASL file.
Changing the third, blurring has been incorporated for the gradients in 8-bit images, causing it to use a blue noise pattern to create a small offset at the edge of the colors to display the gradient in a way that is gentle to the human eye, preventing the bands from being visible.
For 16-bit and 32-bit images, the gradients generated by Krita will be able to use the full scale of gradients available as of this release. This is in addition to the fact that it is possible to store a wide gamut and unlimited colors thanks to the use of ICC SVG 1.1 color definitions, which opens the door to radial gradients that contain rec2020 green or that would only be possible in HDR images. The gradient editor has been revised to be more compact.
The speed of color management has been greatly improved thanks to the fast float plugin, especially when float is 32-bit. Color management through LittleCMS enables accurate color display and is required for professional functions such as soft proofing and color model support.
Continuing with more news from Krita 5, the app now supports the MyPaint 1.2 brush engine, something that was at least partially present a long time ago, but had to be removed. However, it has been recovered for Krita 5, who is able to make use of the brushes of MyPaint 1.2.
Apart from the subject of drawing, Krita also supports the creation of animations in two dimensions, and the tool that allows that has been renewed in this release. One of the biggest changes on this front is the removal of the old animation panel to integrate its functionalities directly into the timeline.
On the other hand, animations can be paused at any time, layering has been made easier, the playback range is automatically adapted as keyframes are added and other changes have been made to improve visual clarity and the experience with navigation, transportation and publishing. All of that is in addition to new features like frame cloning, mask animation transformation, and importing videos as animations.
And yes, Krita 5 has even more news and changes. The application now has a new storyboard panel that can be used to plan shots and narration of short films or complex movies. This is a docker that not only allows you to collect and annotate scenes, but also supports a wide variety of formats for export, including PDF and SVG.
In order to improve usability, from this version it is possible drag the colors from the corresponding panel onto the canvas, thus facilitating the task of coloring through filling. Layers can be filtered by name, pasting within a layer, and various Python plugins have been included.
As we can see, Krita 5 is a really powerful release that promises to be a leap forward for this raster graphics editor. All details can be consulted through the official announcement and the release notes, while the application is available from the corresponding download section from the official website of the project with versions for Linux, Windows and macOS. For those who don’t want to deal with dependencies on Linux, there are the options to use it in AppImage format, Flatpak Y Snap. At the distribution level, apart from the rolling release Y bleeding edgeIt should be coming to KDE neon soon if you haven’t already.
