14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform Krita digital painting software have announced the release of the eighth maintenance version for the Krita 2.9 series.
Just a few days ago we reported on some news regarding the future of the Krita software in the Calligra office suite, as the developers decided to move the software's source code out of the Calligra's one into a separate Git repository that anyone can fork or contribute to.
According to the release notes published on October 14 by the application's developers, Krita 2.9.8 is mainly a bugfix release that addresses many of the issues reported by users since the previous version of the software, Krita 2.9.7, but it includes various under-the-hood improvements as well.
"We’re still fixing bugs and adding improvements, but a lot of work has gone into the Kickstarter goals and the Krita 3.0 porting work, too. Ubuntu Linux users can use the 'krita-lod-unstable' packages from the Krita Lime repository to test-drive the first version of the animation support and the 'LOD' performance improvements," reads today's announcement.
What's new in Krita 2.9.8
Among the changes implemented in Krita 2.9.8, we can mention a bunch of important fixes to the Photoshop-style Layer Styles feature, multiple performance improvements when adding new layers, various enhancements to the OpenEXR, JPEG, PNG and TIFF import and export filters, and more consistent rotation terminology in the Rotate Layer and Rotate Image plugins.
Additionally, the smoothing options are now stored only once per session, the rendering speed has been improved when using invisible layers, and several crashes were patched, related to the cage transform worker, to the shape and vector layers, and to various types of graphics tablets. Download Krita 2.9.8 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia.