14 DAY TRIAL // The Krita developers announced just a few moments ago the release and immediate availability for download of the Beta build of the upcoming Krita 3.0 open-source digital painting tool for all supported platforms.
Krita 3.0 Beta comes three weeks after the announcement of the Alpha build, which brought in a multitude of new features, as well as various improvements to existing tools, to fix the last remaining issues before the final release of the long-anticipated software lands in the stable channels.
"We have spent the last 20 days making over 80 fixes in Krita since the last Alpha build. We have decided it is time to enter the Beta phase! Furthermore, we’ve also spent time on improving our Windows builds. This should fix all the scary G’Mic crashes on Windows," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in Krita 3.0 Beta
The Beta release of Krita 3.0 adds multi-threading support to the G'Mic (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) component for both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms, which should offer a huge performance boost from the previous stable version of the software, Krita 2.9, which was single-threaded, fixes various issues with grids and guides, and patches bugs with updating the Mask.
Other than that, the transform masks also received improvements, some annoying problems that occurred during saving and loading of files were resolved, there are numerous fixes for the shortcuts, which should now be correctly saved, the UI theme colors and consistency was improved as well, animation should work better for tablets, and the tangent tilt and clone brushes will work much better now.
What's next for Krita 3.0? Well, at the beginning of the month, when we reported on the Alpha release, we told you that the final release of the open-source digital painting tool lands May 1, 2016, but now the project's maintainers are saying that Krita 3.0 launches in the coming weeks. If you can't wait, you can grab Krita 3.0 Beta right now via our website for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.