Wednesday, August 7th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Krita 2.7 released


Krita 2.7’s Offset tool in action: one of a range of new features in the open-source paint package likely to appeal to CG pros. The latest update also adds a new transform tool and support for greyscale masks.

Open-source paint package Krita continues to evolve in directions that many professional CG artists will find interesting, following the recent addition of support for OpenColorIO in version 2.6.

New tools for both 2D and 3D artists
The headline features in Krita 2.7, released this week, include a rewritten transform tool, a new smoothing method for inking, and support for greyscale masks and selections.

Equally important to CG artists, however, will be a new Photoshop-style Offset tool for creating seamlessly tileable textures, and updates to the colour correction and PSD import tools, including the option to import a PSD file into an existing image as layers.

There’s a lot more, besides: it’s worth checking out concept artist David Revoy’s tour of all the new features, which includes screenshots or demo videos for each.

System requirements
Krita is packaged by many Linux distros: you can find a guide to which are considered stable and which are not on the download page of the Krita website, along with information on compiling the source code yourself.

Since the last update, the Windows installer has been pronounced “stable enough to use for real work”; and there is also a new version of the software specifically designed for Windows tablets, Krita Sketch 1.0.

Read a full list of features in Krita 2.7

Read concept artist David Revoy’s tour of the new features