14 DAY TRIAL // The Krita development team announced this past weekend that a second Beta pre-release version of the upcoming Krita 3.1 point release is now available for public testing.
The current stable release of the Krita 3.x branch is version 3.0.1, and the Krita 3.0.2 maintenance update was planned for this fall, but it looks like it gained so many cool new features and improvements that the development team decided to bump the version number to 3.1.
"We’re still fixing bugs like madmen, and working on some cool new features as well, but that’s for a later release," reads the announcement. "Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Originally, we had planned to use 3.0.2 as the version for this release, but there is so much news in it that it merits a bigger version bump."
The many features of Krita 3.1
Krita 3.1 promises to be the first major point release of the Krita 3.x series, adding a new brush engine that supports huge brushes, new animation features, soft proofing, support for high-channel depth color selectors, a stop-based gradient editor, as well as FFMpeg-based export to animated GIF image and video formats.
Moreover, it looks like Krita 3.1 will be the first version of the open-source and cross-platform digital painting software to be officially supported on the Mac OS X platform, which means that the OpenGL canvas will fully work. Lots of bugs will be fixed as well, so users are urged to test this second Beta release and report any issues.
You can download Krita 3.1 Beta 2 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, and it looks like the colorize mask/lazy brush plugin is still included, but it should be removed in the final release of Krita 3.1, which would hit the streets later this year, because the current algorithm is too slow for production use.