14 DAY TRIAL // The Krita Foundation has officially released today the Krita 4.2 open-source digital painting app for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows, a major release that adds numerous new features and improvements.
Krita 4.2 is the second major update of the open-source and cross-platform digital painting application since the release of the massive Krita 4.0 series back in 2018. It introduces numerous new features and enhancements, among which we can mention an improved color palette docker, color gamut masking, improved selection handling, support for HDR monitors on Windows, and much-improved support for drawing tablets.
"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," said the developers in the release notes. "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!"
Here's what's new in Krita 4.2
Krita 4.2 brings support for viewing HDR images in HDR (High Dynamic Range) on supported hardware, along with the ability to save HDR images as OpenEXR or .kra files, as well as to create animations in HDR. It also improves the speed performance of brushes with vectorization and lock-free programming, and introduces the ability to control and create customized workflows when working with animations.
A new color gamut docker that lets you limit the shown colors is also present in Krita 4.2, along with a much-improved Artistic Color Selector that now features a continuous mode for removing stepping and offers new options for the new gamut masking feature. Also new in Krita 4.2 is a News widget that will appear on the startup screen to show you the latest news about Krita, and new options to better control your backups.
Krita 4.2 also comes with new Blend modes, support for dynamically adding noise to documents, the ability to reset the origin of a clone brush after every brush stroke, the ability to undo multiple moves in a row with the Move tool, support for moving, rotating, and transforming your selections, the ability to resize the layer thumbnails, as well as improvements to Flow and Opacity, the Sharpness option, and the Select Opaque option.
The performance of the Painting mask was improved as well in Krita 4.2, and there's now a new "Copy Translate" mode that lets users specify multiple cursors on the screen to simultaneously paint and draw. Also improved is the display of memory usage that Krita consumes. You can download Krita 4.2.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems right now from our free software portal.
