Krita 5.0 Open-Source Digital Painting Software Officially Released, This Is What’s New

Krita 5.0

The Krita Foundation announced today the release and general availability of Krita 5.0 as a major update to this powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform digital painting software.

Krita 5.0 is a massive update that brings numerous new features and improvements, starting with a completely revamped and resource-friendly way to handle brushes, gradients, palettes, and tagging, a built-in storyboard editor, a built-in recorder so you can easily record your painting sessions, and support for the AVIF and WebP image file formats.

This new major Krita release also introduces a new brush engine based on MyPaint, completely revamps the smudge brush engine, improves gradients to make them smoother and handle wider gamuts, and overhauls the Animation system with new features like animated transform masks and clone frames.

Also new in Krita 5.0 are new options for exporting GIF, APNG, and WebP images, the ability to apply a filter on all selected frames, support for rendering animation from composition docker, a new animation workspace, as well as a new “AutoKey Blank” mode to speed up your animation workflow.

Furthermore, it comes with improved render settings behavior by storing animation export paths directly in each Krita document and settings, the ability to crop only the contents of the current frame, improved animation backend and caching, Brush Preset History improvements, and refactored sliders.

The user interface received a lot of attention during the development cycle of Krita 5.0, which took several years to complete. The new release lets you detach the brush editor from the toolbar, supports user-installed themes on Linux and widget style selection, adds support for theme color to the Color Selector for background, lets you lock docks, and adds an option to auto-hide the controls in the overview docker.

New tools are also present in this release, such as a 2-point perspective assistant, a limit area feature for assistants, and in-stack transform preview. Also, there’s a new rotation ability in the Rectangle and Ellipse tools, a much-improved pop-up palette, a new Crop Canvas option in the Crop tool, extra options for temporary tool invocation, and improvements to the Similar Color Selector tool.

Among other noteworthy changes, there’s the ability to drag and drop colors onto the canvas and layer tree, the ability to filter layers by name, the ability to paste directly into the active layer, a new “Isolate Active Group” isolation mode that makes the current group the only thing visible, non-destructive layer soloing, a GDQuest batch exporter add-on, photobash plugin, support for SIP 5 binding, single finger panning, automatic selection of an appropriate scaling filter, and much more.

You can download Krita 5.0 right now from the official website as an AppImage that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything on your personal computer. You can also install it as a Flatpak from Flathub or as a DEB binary on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, or any other Ubuntu derivative using the Krita Lime PPA. Of course, the source code is also available for download from the official website.

Image credits: Krita Foundation

Last updated 2 years ago

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