Krita is a well known digital painting program, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but is primarily known for its Linux side. It’s a professional free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.
Today all digital artists and art lovers have reason to rejoice, because almost four years since the Krita 4.x branch first saw the light of day, Krita 5.0 has been released. So without further ado, let’s dive into what’s new in version 5.
Krita 5.0 Highlights
We start with the navigation. Now the color picker is available under Ctrl, not Alt. If this really bugs you, you can change the specific shortcut in the Canvas Input Settings of the Krita settings. In fact, you can even change the whole keyboard scheme instead to be compatible with Photoshop, for example.
Now let’s talk about the new features in Krita 5.0 for brush creation. This time both of the main brush engines got some serious stuff. Pixel engine, the one used by the majority of the brush presets used to have only two texturing modes for influencing the alpha. Multiply, that made some regions less apart, and Subtract, which was making them fully transparent.
Krita 5.0 brings 12 new texturing modes. Overlay and Height are the new equivalents of the current two patterns modes, but unlike their previous versions allowed to achieve the full texturing range mush easier than before.
The second main brush engine received even more love in Krita 5.0. The new smudging algorithm while creating the same outcome as before works up to 2 times faster. The biggest difference is that now RGBA brush tips known from the Pixel engine, can be used here as well.
The system responsible for holding all the resources like brushes, tips, textures and so on was rewritten from scratch. On top of that, Krita startup should also be a bit faster and the program itself should use less system memory.
Let’s move on the thing that we will notice much easier – the interface. The starting screen elements are now aligned better. The color wheel by default uses the background color of a docker, but of course can be changed to any color you like.
The toolbar’s white line is finally gone while buttons are now borderless, leaving the icons a bit bigger. The sliders allows you to drag vertically to influence it less without pressing any buttons. In addition, you can still hold Shift to get super precise selection though.
Gradient editor got reworked too. What’s best here though is that the image finally updates without confirmation. In addition, gradients in Krita 5.0 are much more smoothed and can handle wider gamuts.
Now let’s move on to the tweaks and changes in the existing tools in Krita 5.0. As a Transformation used to render as a semi-transparent image on top of the canvas, now you get the actual preview that takes into account layer position into layer stack. It means you can properly see transferred image behind other layers with proper clipping and blending. It works for all the transformation modes and transform masks.
Assistance tool received a new two-point perspective assistant that feels mush easier to manage than placing separate vanishing points.
Rectangle and Elliptical selection tools now enable the use of Ctrl+Alt at once to rotate the selection.
Among other noteworthy changes, Krita 5.0 brings a new file format called krz which is a Krita document that’s better suitable for archiving files. They take longer to save and open than the default kra format and don’t have a preview, but should take less space on a disk.
For full details of all changes, see the program’s release notes.
Install
Krita 5.0 painting program is available for download on Linux as an AppImage. AppImage requires no installation. Just download the AppImage file from the project’s website, right click on it to bring up the context menu, and choose Properties. Make the file executable as shown on the image below.
Next just double-click on the krita-5.0.0-x86_64.appimage file, and Krita 5.0 painting program will start.
