Recently the painting tool for cartoonists, illustrators and artists, Krita has come up with a new version, which is Krita version 4.2 in which some improvements are added to the panels, brushes and especially a unified code for the tablet support.
Krita 4.2 is released with over 1000 bug fixes and new features. If you still don't know about Krita, you should know that this is an excellent digital painting and illustration software that has been gaining notoriety and preference for digital artists over the last few years.
Krita allows us to handle PSD files, it also has compatibility with OCIO and OpenEXR, it can manipulate the view to examine HDR images in addition to this it allows us to manage full color through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR.
What's new in Krita 4.2?
In the new version of Krita, fThe code was finally put together to support digitizing tablets on Windows (in both Wintab and Windows Ink), macOS and Linux.
As well Added functionality arrives, it was support for HDR monitors, which allows the use of brightness gradations in the image that cannot be displayed on a regular monitor due to technical limitations of the equipment that cannot transmit all the brightness ranges perceived by the eye.
Until now, Krita could load HDR images, but normalizing and processing like normal images. As of version 4.2, it is possible to view, create and edit such images in HDR mode with the right equipment. Per hour, this functionality is only present in the version for Windows 10.
HDR images can be saved in KRA formats (Krita), OpenEXR and PNG. If there are new versions of FFmpeg, you can also create animated images in HDR.
On the other hand Block settings added to manage backup file creation.
For example, you can define a separate directory for storing backups, adjust the automatic recording frequency, specify the number of copies stored, and enable advanced options for compressing very large files;
In Krita 4.2 comes a new panel with color masks (Color Gamut Mask), which allows you to limit the displayed colors. You can freely rotate the mask view, create new masks, and edit existing ones.
New options have also been added and the artistic color picker interface has been cleaned up. Continuous mode has been implemented, which is activated by clicking on the infinity symbol and allows you to get rid of the dramatic change of attributes. Added option to apply color masks;
A news widget from the Krita project site has been added to the home page.
Of the other improvements found in this new version that we can highlight in this non-exhaustive list, we find the following:
- Brush performance improvements
- color palette improvements (can now contain empty boxes to organize colors, can be saved as a .kra file)
- a Python API for animations
- an automatic backup file
- the news directly in the software
- improvements in color selection
- the history of the movement of objects
- Selection point editing
- better display of memory usage
- Improvements in the multi-brush tool (better visualization of the axes)
- performance improvements in paint masks
- a noise generator
- New blending modes
- Improved multibrush
For more details, the release notes can be found here . In addition, you can see the news in this video:
How to install Krita 4.2 on Linux?
For those who are interested in installing this new version of Krita, you should know that the developers provide us with self-sufficient images prepared for installation in AppImage and Flatpak formats for Linux, PPA for Ubuntu, as well as binary builds for macOS and Windows.
In this case we will use the AppImage. We can download and install this opening a terminal and in it we type the following commands:
wget https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/4.2.0/krita-4.2.0-x86_64.appimage
sudo chmod +x krita-4.2.0-x86_64.appimage
./krita-4.2.0-x86_64.appimage
And with that we have Krita installed in our system.