14 DAY TRIAL // Krita is an open-source digital painting software that is undergoing a big upgrade right now. Before the developers manage to get version 3.0 out the door, a new release was made available in the 2.9 branch.
The Krita 2.9 release was probably the biggest one in the history of the app, and the developers haven't stopped updating this branch, constantly adding all kinds of features and improvements. They are still working on this particular version, but they do plan to make a 3.0 release, which should be even more interesting.
In fact, the Krita devs have gone to Kickstarter for a new campaign that should bring them enough funds to transform version 3.0 of their software into a major competitor for similar solutions such as Photoshop. It's going to be a long road until that happens, but it will definitely happen.
Krita 2.9.4 is a great upgrade
"We’re not just keeping an eye on the Kickstarter campaign (three days and almost at 50%! but go ahead and support us by all means, we’re not there yet!), we’re also working hard on Krita itself. Dmitry is busy with improving the performance of clone layers, adding PSD file support to the Layer Styles feature and fixing loading and saving masks to PSD files (we implemented that in October, but broke it subsequently…), and we've got a brand new release for you today," reads the official website.
According to the changelog, Photoshop layer styles have been added, as well as a speed improvement when using transform masks and filters. Also, the patch count of the color history has been fixed, issues with resizing the icon size in resource selectors have been corrected, a function to hide docker titlebars has been implemented, while a tag based on the filename for all brush tips from Adobe ABR brush collections is now automatically added.
Krita 2.9.4 can be downloaded from Softpedia. It should also arrive on the main software repositories of mainstream distributions.