Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows

Nov 7, 2016 22:20 GMT  ·  By

Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the popular, open-source and cross-platform Krita digital painting software have released the third Beta milestone towards the major 3.1 update of the application.

Krita 3.1 Beta 3 is here exactly two weeks after the announcement of the second Beta development snapshot, in an attempt to polish the upcoming release by patching various annoyances and adding some minor improvements. For examples, several crashes were addressed and it's now possible to load swatch names in ACO files again.

Moreover, Krita can now load PNG images that contain a broken resolution tag, the Mirror mode was updated to support different axis center for each opened image, onion skins will no longer be joined when attempting to merge two layers, and it looks like the splash image was updated in preparation for Krita 3.1, which should arrive soon.

Loading of the Photoshop shortcut theme should work again

Among other improvements implemented in the third Beta release of Krita 3.1, we can mention that loading of the Photoshop shortcut theme should work again, which will also attempt to fix the empty menu entries you might have from the previous Beta build, and the shear cursor was restored in the transform tool. Users are informed that saving no longer waits until the image is done rendering.

"This means that if Krita is still busy and you want to save, you will be warned that the saved file might be incomplete. We’re still working on this, so it isn’t the final solution for the saving problem, and if you want to to be sure to not lose data, save your work often," explain the developers in today's release announcement.

As noted in the release notes of the second Beta of Krita 3.1, the colorize mask/lazy brush plugin is still included, but it will most probably be removed when Krita 3.1 hits the stable channel, as the current algorithm is too slow to be usable in production environments. The same goes for Krita 3.1 Beta 3, which you can download right now.