The long-awaited massive update of the Krita 5.0 release is finally here. This release has come as a huge improvement and feature-packed Christmas gift for digital artists in the Krita community.
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program ideal for concept art, texture, and matte painters,
illustrations and comics, photo editing, 2D animation, storyboarding, etc.
A lot of the components have been completely rewritten resulting in a new system that is much faster and uses much less memory (about as much as 200 MB less RAM), as well as being much more stable.
Krita 5.0 Release Highlights
Krita now comes with a new built-in storyboard editor courtesy of the 2020 Google Summer of Code students, Saurabh “Confifu” Kumar that can be used to plan the shots and storytelling of complex shorts or films.
The internals of the brushes presets, gradients and palettes, tagging systems, and more have been completely revamped making for a more reliable and stable system overall. SQLite database is now the core of the Krita resource handling
With improved gradient tools, gradients are now much more blended, smoothed out, and can now handle wider gamuts making for better artworks.
The much faster smudge brushes engine has been completely rewritten. Also included is a new MyPaint brush engine. This allows for MyPaint 1.2 brushes to be loaded into Krita and used for producing artworks.
The Animation system has been overhauled, with both user interface improvements with the Timeline Docker having a new look and new features, such as clone frames and animated transform masks. The Animation Curves Docker has also been redesigned with an emphasis on improving the overall look and feel of navigation and editing. A complete list of animation improvements can be found in the release notes.
The Krita user interface has several improvements, most notably is the revamping of the icons that haven’t seen an update since version 2.9.
Heif and Avif file formats are now supported as well as improved Tiff and WebP image files support.
With the new Recorder, Docker artists can now record a time-lapse video of their creative sessions. This feature comes courtesy of community contributors Dmitrii Utkin and Shi Yan.
Krita 5.0 Release’s Compatibility with Krita 4.x and Krita 3.x Files
- Krita 5.0 cannot load vector layers created before Krita 3.0 due to its completely reworked resource system.
- Krita 5.0 has an updated brush preset file format (.kpp) that Krita 4 and earlier cannot use.
- Krita 5.0 has a fixed bug related to an issue with text size in documents. This means older releases may require changing a setting to get the originally expected text size.
Conclusion
Artists are encouraged to download a copy of the Krita 5.0 Release and get creative with the new tools and features so as to enjoy the improvements and performance benefits gained from this release. Meanwhile, check out the release notes to get the full details.
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