Friday, September 4th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

The Krita Foundation releases Krita 2.9.7

The Krita Foundation has released Krita 2.9.7, the latest release of the open-source digital paint package, adding a new tangent normal brush engine for painting normal maps, and updating Krita’s wraparound mode.

The update will be the last to add new features before Krita 3.0 is released, with a further major new set of Kickstarter-funded functionality to follow in Krita 3.1.

New tools for 3D artists
The main new feature in the 2.9.7 update is the tangent normal brush engine, developed as part of the Google Summer of Code program, which provides a “more painterly way of creating normal maps”, as shown above.

You need a tilt-enabled tablet stylus to make use of it, but the output can now be used in Krita’s bump map filter.

Also of interest to 3D artists, Krita’s Wraparound Tool, used to create seamlessly tileable textures, now enables users to pick colours from outside the original central selection, and also to fill from anywhere.

Revamped UI, better PSD compatibility
Other features include a new UI icon set designed to work with the software’s light and dark themes, and to scale to HiDPI displays; and an improved dialog for picking ICC color space profiles, with more inline help.

In addition, support for Photoshop PSD files has been further extended with the ability to load bit/channel CMYK and grayscale images and ZIP-compressed PSD files; and save single-layer images with transparency to PSD.

There are also a number of smaller workflow improvements, including the option to right-click when creating a path to undo the last point. You can read a full list via the link below.

Availability
Krita 2.9.4 is available now for most popular flavours of Linux or Windows Vista and above. There is a “very experimental and unstable” Mac build, which has only been reported to work on OS X 10.9.

Read a full list of new features in Krita 2.9.7

Download Krita 2.9.7