Krita is the digital painting and illustration software based on the KDE platform libraries and included in Calligra Suite
It was recently announced release of the new version of Krita 5.2, which arrives just after 1 year since the previous release (Krita 5.1). Krita 5.2 includes a variety of new features, ranging from changes to text handling, animation, audio and much more.
For those who do not know about Krita, you should know that This supports multi-layer image processing, provides tools to work with various color models and has a great set of tools for digital painting, sketches and texture formation.
Main new features of Krita 5.2
In this new version that is presented of Krita 5.2, text placement engine improvements, which has been completely rewritten and unlike past versions that allowed placing text along a guide, vertical display and surrounding objects with text, now It has additional features, such as emoji support and access to OpenType features.
Another Krita feature that has been redesigned is the undo function cumulative changes, which now allows combining typical undo operations; For example, you can undo a series of strokes at once.
Regarding the new features added in Krita 5.2, the following stand out: new options to expand a selected area to the Adjacent Selection tool, similar to the options for expanding the Fill tool, plus added support for setting opacity and taking DPI into account when creating a selection.
In Krita 5.2 they were also added new keyboard shortcuts to display layer selection menus on the canvas, change profiles, and select colors on the screen. Made the hotkey scheme compatible with Clip Studio Paint.
In addition to this, a panel to select a wide range of colors, which allows the user to select colors in the wide gamut color space, and not just in sRGB.
On the other hand, we can find a new fill mode to fill in areas of similar color, as well as new functions «Stop zooming in on the darkest and/or most transparent pixels” and “Fill all areas up to a certain boundary color”, along with the ability to use the same blending mode as the Brush tool.
In the Android edition, the interface for selecting a resource location has been simplified, as well as simplified multi-layer selection and improved display of color profile names.
While in support improvements, CMYK-based blend modes work closer to Photoshop to share PSD files more easily.
El Saving and loading have been improved for JPEG-XL images, added CMYK support for JPEG-XL, optimized color information compression, improved metadata processing and layer recording/saving, and optimized WebP image compression.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- Improved handling of multi-layer EXR files.
- Improved import of RAW images.
- The transform tool now supports transforming all selected layers at once.
- The home screen has been updated to show larger thumbnails of recently opened images.
- Improved layout of the horizontal version of the brushes panel.
- Added the ability to configure brush profile logging.
- Undo and redo operations have been added to the palette panel.
- The code for setting brushes has been rewritten to work with the Lager library, which in the future will allow us to modernize the design of the brush settings widget.
- In “Mosaic” mode, the ability to select the fill direction has been added.
- The “Recent Documents” list now supports deleting individual items.
- Improved tablet testing interface.
Si you want to know more about it about the complete list of the changes that were made in this new version of Krita 5.2.0, you can consult them In the following link.
How to install Krita 5.2 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you want to install the new version of this suite, you should know that at the moment the packages for installation are not yet available. And it is that the announcement was made not long ago, but the packages have not been made available.
As soon as they are available they can add the repository to your system, for it we are going to require the use of a terminal, we execute it by typing ctrl + alt + t at the same time, now only we must add the following lines:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kritalime/ppa sudo apt install krita
If you already have the repository the only thing you have to do is an upgrade:
sudo apt upgrade
In the same way, you have to wait a bit to have the AppImage package available, since if you do not want to fill your system with repositories, we also have the option to install the application from an appimage, the only thing we have to do is download the following file and give execution permissions to install it.
sudo chmod +x krita-5.2.0-x86_64.appimage ./krita-5.2.0-x86_64.appimage
And with that we have Krita installed in our system.