Krita is a free and open-source digital painting application designed for illustrators, concept artists, comic book creators, animators, and other digital artists. It is widely recognized for its professional-level features.
Today, the app has rolled out its 5.2 version, bringing many new novelties and enhancements to elevate your creative journey.
From simplifying video export to completely rewriting the text layout engine and refining numerous tools, the new release redefines your digital painting experience. So, let’s delve into the exciting new offerings!
Krita 5.2 Highlights
Simplified Video Export
A significant part of the animation playback has been reworked in Krita 5.2 to use the MLT (Media Lovin’ Toolkit ) in the background – a flexible multimedia framework designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind.
But the thing most striking is how the app now uses another core component – FFmpeg, which is in charge of rendering and conversion of audio and video formats.
Previously, users had to manually point the app to an FFmpeg executable somewhere on their file system. Fortunately, this is now in the past. Krita 5.2 ships with built-in FFmpeg, which includes “out-of-the-box” support for every free and open container and codec format.
This game changer makes exporting to different video formats much more effortless. And, of course, the app continues to support using alternative FFmpeg binaries if you need additional features.
A Rewritten Text Layout Engine
Text integration is crucial in digital painting, especially for creators who blend imagery with typography. Krita 5.2 introduces a completely rewritten text layout engine, promising a smoother and more intuitive text-handling experience.
With the new layout engine, you can handle everything the old engine could: text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. But, on top of that, users can now also access OpenType features and render emoji.
Enhanced Tools for a Refined Artistic Process
Krita has always been celebrated for its extensive toolkit, catering to various artistic styles and techniques. With version 5.2, some of these tools have been meticulously enhanced to empower artists in their creative endeavors further.
In this regard, the Undo tool allows merging undo operations, which is useful when painting many strokes. At the same time, the Fill Tool has a new feature – a new mode, “Fill areas of similar color.”
Finally, the Contiguous Selection Tool was given the same selection extending feature as the Fill tool and the ability to adjust the selection decoration’s opacity.
Other Krita 5.2 Highlights
The brush settings code was rewritten to work with Lager – a C++ library to assist value-oriented design by implementing the unidirectional data-flow architecture. This was done to ease developers in the future to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget.
Moreover, the Krita 5.2’s ability to restrict the wrap-around mode to only vertical or horizontal directions makes it easier to create backgrounds that loop.
It is also important to mention that CMYK blending modes now align with how Photoshop handles blending modes, simplifying the exchange of PSD files with clients that require CMYK PSDs.
The application’s work with JPEG-XL files has also been improved by enhancing compression, providing the JXL library additional color space data, better metadata management, and the ability to save and load raster layers into JPEG-XL.
Visit the announcement or check out the release notes for detailed information about all the novelties that the Krita 5.2 painting app brings.
Linux users eager to try out the new features can download the application as an AppImage, as the link can be found in the announcement.
