Krita 5.2.0, a capable free and open source painting program, has received its first beta release for testing.
First Beta for Krita 5.2.0 Released
Krita 5.2.0 is a major new release, and the first of the Krita 5.2 series of releases. Especially internally, there have been huge changes and improvements. While there are a lot of important user-visible changes that will make artists’ workflow smoother, most work has been inside Krita, preparing Krita for the future.
The release notes will give you all the details, but here are some highlights:
- For animation, audio playback has been rewritten completely using the MLT framework.
- Also for animation, video export has been made much easier: you no longer need to separately download ffmpeg, since ffmpeg now built into Krita.
- As the first part of a two-part rewrite of text handling in Krita, the text shape has been rewritten completely. This provides support for text-on-path, vertical text, wrapped text, text-in=-shape, opentype, emoji and more. HOWEVER: this was step one. Step two is rewriting the actual tool you use to work with text. If you want to access the new features, you will need to use SVG source code editor from the text tool.
- The transform tool can now transform all selected layers
- There is a whole new color selector that supports wide-gamut color spaces.
- There have been many improvements to the JPEG-XL file format handling. NOTE: because of problems updating to the latest version of the jpegxl library on Windows, not all improvements are already available in Beta1
- The brush engine settings backend, which stores all the settings has been rewritten to be more robust and maintainable, as well as preparing it for a user interface redesign.
And of, course, there are countless bug fixes, smaller and larger workflow improvements and user interface polish.
