14 DAY TRIAL // If you're wondering what's going on with the development of the major Krita 4.0 release of the open-source and cross-platform digital painting app, the devs have a huge update for us today.
The Krita development team published earlier a detailed article on the new features and improvements that they implemented since the mid-June 2017 update, when they announced the availability of the very first development build of Krita 4.0.
A bunch of cool new features have been already implemented in the first Krita 4.0 development release, including Allan Marshall’s new airbrush system, Eugene Ingerman’s healing brush, Wolthera’s new and improved palette docker, and SVG-based vector layers.
To top that, the devs added an enormous amount of performance improvements to Krita 4.0, which fix all sort of issues from previous releases, such as lag problems, high CPU usage for pixel brush engines, brush rendering speed, and dab grouping for all brushes.
"The biggest item on the list was lag. Lag can have many meanings, and there will always be brushes or operations that are not instant. But we had the opportunity the past couple of months to work on an outside project to help improve the performance of Krita," said the devs.
Performance benchmarking, Pixel and Isometric grids
Krita 4.0 will also come with new performance benchmarking functionality to help you optimize your brushes better, live brush preview in the brush editor, new Pixel and Isometric grids, as well as new edge detection and height to normal map filter.
The gradient map filter was improved as well, and there's now a new ASC-CDL color balance filter that offers offset, slope, and power parameters. Moreover, Krita 4.0 promises a brand-new docker for touch screens, with big buttons and a familiar layout.
Other than that, the Krita devs implemented a "Convert layer to file layer" option that's been designed to save layers and replace them with a file layer that references them. Also, it's now possible to change the reference location of file layers.
Lots of bugs were squashed as well in this second development update to the major Krita 4.0 release, which you can download right now for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems from our website. Please keep in mind though that this is pre-alpha code.
Also note that all files created in Krita 4.0 cannot be modified at a later time in any of the stable releases, such as Krita 3.3.2, which is the latest maintenance update bringing a bunch of improvements and fixing regressions from previous builds. Check out the video and screenshot gallery below to see the new Krita 4.0 features in action.
