Krita 5.1 Promises JPEG-XL Support, Improved Support for WebP and Photoshop Files

Krita 5.1

The Krita Foundation announced today the general availability of the beta version of the upcoming 5.1 version of their powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform Krita digital painting software.

Krita 5.1 promises to introduce lots of goodies for digital artists using this powerful software to create art. Highlights include support for the JPEG-XL file format, improved support for the WebP, OpenEXR, Photoshop layered TIFF, and Photoshop files, support for PSD fill layers and color labels, support for ASE and ACB color palettes, as well as improved painting performance through the use of XSIMD.

On top of that, Krita 5.1 adds support for more operations to handle multiple selected layers, extends the fill tools with continuous fill, as well as a new Enclose and Fill tool, adds support for configuring touch controls like “Tap to Undo” in the canvas input settings, improves the animation system, adds support for controlling how strongly layers indent when in a group, and adds support for painting on selection masks with blending modes.

There are also numerous usability improvements in Krita 5.1, including a new Zoom-to-fit (with margins) option, additional configuration for the pop-up palette, a dual-color selector shortcut, the ability to switch from predefined zoom levels to smooth zoom, and much more. Improved support for Android devices is there as well in the upcoming release, along with improvements to brushes and hundreds of bug fixes.

More details can be found in the release notes of Krita 5.1, which is now available for public beta testing if you want to take the new features for a test drive before the final release hits the streets. On GNU/Linux systems, you can try it by downloading the AppImage universal binary from here, which doesn’t require installation (just make the file executable and run it with a double mouse click on the file).

Last updated 2 years ago

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