Krita 5.2 has been released
Originally posted on 24 December 2021. Scroll down for news of the Krita 5.2 update.
Krita Foundation has begun its new cycle of releases for the open-source digital painting app.
Krita 5.0 overhauls many of the software’s core toolsets, adding a new MyPaint brush engine, and improving the software’s resource system and handling of colour gradients.
New features include a storyboard editor, a timelapse video recorder, two-point perspective guides, and support for tweening and frame cloning in Krita’s animation toolset.
New MyPaint brush engine, and improvements to smudge brushes and brush textures
Krita 5.0 overhauls many of the software’s core toolsets, including its brush engines.
The release adds a new MyPaint brush engine, which makes it possible to load brushes created in the open-source painting software in Krita. It supports brushes created in MyPaint 1.2.
In addition, the Color Smudge Brush engine has been rewritten to improve performance.
Brush textures now support new blend modes, including Hard Mix, Color Dodge, Color Burn and Overlay.
Krita’s handling of colour gradients has also been improved, with support for blue noise dithering in 8-bit gradients to generate smoother results, and support for wide colour gamuts in 16- and 32-bit gradients.
Rewritten resource manager cuts memory usage and start-up times
Under the hood, handling of resources like gradients, brush presets and palettes has been rewritten, reducing memory usage: in the Krita Foundation’s tests, RAM usage was reduced by 200MB.
The new resource manager supports layer styles as well as the existing resource types; and makes it possible to mass-tag and mass-delete resources.
Animation: support for tweening and cloning keyframes
Krita’s animation toolset also gets an update, including the much-requested option to clone and reuse keyframes.
Krita 5.0 also introduces support for tweening, with animators now able to animate the position, rotation, scale and shear of any animation layer.
Other changes include the option to import video files as animated paint layers.
The UX of the animation tools has been improved, with a new, more space-efficient animation workspace; more functionality available directly from the timeline; and a redesigned Animation Curves docker.
New storyboard editor, timelapse recorder and two-point perspective guide generator
Entirely new features include the Recorder Docker, which makes it possible to record and export timelapse videos of painting sessions for use on social media.
A new Storyboard Docker makes it possible to generate simple storyboards inside Krita, and export them in PDF or SVG format.
Krita’s Assistants system, which generates customisable painting guides, gets a dedicated new feature for setting up two-point perspective, speeding up the previous workflow.
Workflow improvements and format support
Other changes include support for the new AVIF format for still images and image sequences, intended to provide better compression and fewer artefacts than JPEG.
There are also a lot of UI and workflow improvements, including the option to detach the brush editor into its own window, and to drag and drop colours onto the canvas or layer tree.
Outside the core application, Krita gets two free plugins aimed at concept art and game development pipelines: a manager for photobashing assets, and a batch export plugin.
Updated 19 August 2022: The Krita Foundation has released Krita 5.1.
The update reworks the Fill and Contiguous Selection Tools for colouring line art, with users now able to fill regions of a line drawing by marquee-selecting or mouse-dragging over them.
In addition, it is now possible to perform cut, copy and paste operations on multiple layers in an image at once.
Krita also now supports JPEG XL (.jxl), the next-gen version of the JPEG image specification. The initial implenentation supports animation, although not HDR colour spaces.
Other changes include support for ASE and ACB colour palettes, used in Adobe applications.
Updated 23 October 2023: The Krita Foundation has released Krita 5.2.
Key changes include a new Wide Color Gamut Color Selector, and a rewritten text engine with support for wrapped text, vertical text and text on paths.
The new text features are currently only accessible via the SVG code editor, but will be implemented in the Text tool itself in Krita 5.3.
Other changes include further updates to the Fill and Contiguous Selection Tools, support for merging Undo operations, and frame-accurate audio sync when playing back animation.
The update also brings CMYK blending modes in line with Photoshop; and adds CMYK support and improves image compression when exporting JPEG XL files.
You can find a full list of changes via the links at the foot of the story.
Availability and system requirements
Krita 5.2 is available for Windows 8.1+, macOS 10.13+ and Linux. Krita for Android is in early access.
You can download compiled binaries for free via the link below, or support future development by paying for Krita on the Windows, Steam or Epic Games stores. All cost under $15.
Read a full list of new features in Krita 5.2 in the online release notes
Read a full list of new features in Krita 5.1 in the online release notes
Read a full list of new features in Krita 5.0 in the online release notes
Download Krita for Windows, Linux or macOS
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.