It's now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows

Sep 28, 2017 21:00 GMT  ·  By

Krita, the cross-platform, open-source and free digital painting tool used by hundreds of thousands of artists worldwide, has been updated today to version 3.3, a point release that adds better HiDPI support and many other improvements.

Prominent changes of Krita 3.3 include support for the Windows 8 event API to bring native support for the n-trig pen in the Surface line of laptops, as well as other similar notebooks from Acer, Dell or HP, refactored hardware-accelerated display functionality to make Krita use Direct3D indirectly instead of native OpenGL.

There's also better support for HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) displays on Linux and Windows systems, but the user needs to enable it in the settings dialog, titles are now supported for newly created images, the GMIC plugin was updated to the latest version, and your favorite brush presets and blending modes will now load correctly.

New command-line tools, better PNG support, and more

Krita 3.3 introduces a bunch of new command-line tools, such as "–nosplash" to start Krita without the splash screen, "–fullscreen" to start Krita in full-screen, "–workspace" to start Krita on a certain workspace, and "–canvasonly" to start Krita in canvas-only mode. It also updates file layers to correctly reload when they're modified.

Some PNG improvements were made as well in Krita 3.3, such as the ability to convert 16bit and 32bit floating point images to a 16bit integer when saving them in the PNG format, as well as support for saving the alpha channel even if there's no transparent or semi-transparent pixels in the respective PNG image.

Improvements were also brought to the system information dialog for bug reports, there are various performance enhancements, as well as some macOS specific changes. The reference images docker was updated to only start loading images when it is visible, not when Krita starts, but read below if you're using Deepin Linux.

"The reference images docker uses Qt’s imageio plugins to load images. If you are running on Linux, remove all Deepin desktop components. Deepin comes with severely broken qimageio plugins that will crash any Qt application that tries to display images," was noted in the release announcement.

Several other small improvements and bug fixes have been made in this release, so check out the full changelog for more details. Krita 3.3 is available for download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website. We recommend updating to this version as soon as possible.

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Krita now supports the n-trig pen in the Surface line of laptops
Better HiDPI support on Linux and Windows
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