After 5.0’s big resource rewrite and 5.1’s general improvements, we decided that Krita 5.2 should focus on tackling some of the biggest pain points in Krita. As such, this release contains a lot of background work that we hope to build future improvements on top of, as well as a healthy assortment of new features and fixes!
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Published on krita.org 11th October, 2023
We’re happy to share that two major pain points for animation got tackled: synchronized playback of audio (MR 1323) and simplifying video export (MR 1599).
https://krita.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/animatic_waiting.mp4
In order to fix various audio-visual sync issues when playing animations with attached audio, Emmet and Eoin reworked much of the animation playback to use the MLT framework behind the scenes. MLT is a proven and flexible framework used by video editing programs like Kdenlive and designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind, and should help Krita animators feel confident that their key frames will stay lined up with their voice work or background music, both inside of the program and in their exported animation videos.
Speaking of the video export option, FFmpeg is a massively important program that manages (among other things) rendering and conversion of audio and video formats. Previously, Krita required users to point to an FFmpeg executable somewhere on their system in order to use many of the features pertaining to video, such as animation video export, video import as animation, and the Recorder Docker for recording your painting sessions. This was mostly good enough for studio use, but it was still difficult to set up for users who aren’t that technical, and almost impossible to do on locked down systems like Android or even a school computer. To make this better for almost everyone, we spent some time to include a basic build of FFmpeg into Krita itself, which should include “out-of-the-box” support for every free and open container and codec format under the sun. (Along with Emmet and Eoin, big thanks to Amyspark, Ivan, Sharaf and Dmitry who put in a lot of effort to help get every possible format building and working across various platforms.) Oh, and by the way, Krita continues to support the use of alternative FFmpeg binaries in the rare case that you need to additional features that we aren’t able to provide.
Note: As of the writing this, animation export via FFmpeg is sadly still not working on Krita for Android due to restrictions of the platform itself, but we are looking for solutions to this going forward.
Because our original one didn’t give artists enough control over the underlying text (making it hard to use and extend, as well as write a better text tool on top of), Wolthera completely rewrote Krita’s text layout engine.
Demonstration of some new text layout features include (but are not limited to): text-in-shape, text-on-path and color font support.
With the new layout engine, we can handle everything the old engine could, as well as text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. We can now also access OpenType features as well as render emoji (bitmap and colrV0 types) (MR 1607, MR 1767).
This was no small feat and is only just laying the foundation for more improvements to come! For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.
Dmitry Kazakov overhauled the cumulative undo feature (MR 1780), this feature allows merging undo operations, which is useful when painting many strokes. We’ve simplified the code and made the options more intuitive to use.
The ability to anti-alias the results of the Sketch Brush Engine has been added by Przemysław Gołąb (MR 1425).
Freya Lupen added the ability to transform all selected layers at once with the transform tool (MR 1792).
Deif Lou has added a new mode to the fill tool: Fill areas of similar color (MR 1577). In addition, both the fill tool and the enclose fill tool have gained Stop growing at the darkest and/or most opaque pixels and Fill all regions until a specific boundary color (MR 1549, 1560), as well as a toggle to use the same blending mode as the brush tool, or to have its own (MR 1749).
From the manual, filling the example in image A at the red dot will result in B for regular fill, in C with expanding the fill with a number of pixels and in D with the ‘fill to boundary color’ enabled.
The Contiguous Selection Tool also received the same selection extending option as the Fill tool (MR 1549), and the ability to set the opacity of the selection decoration (MR 1697). Furthermore, the selection decoration has been made DPI-aware (MR 1774).
Several new actions have been added:
Demonstrating the “Select Layers Menu” option, this menu shows the layers under the cursor.
Pardon the interruption but did you know that, as a free and open source project, Krita relies on your help! Please consider supporting the project by becoming a member of the development fund. We have no shortage of plans for how to make things better, but only with stable community contributions can we keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.
Mathias Wein brought us a ‘Wide Gamut Color Selector’. This selector almost the same as the advanced color selector, except it’s capable of selecting colors in wide-gamuts instead of just sRGB. We eventually want to remove the Advanced Color Selector in favor of this one, when we’re sure we haven’t lost any functionality (MR 1600).
The new wide gamut selector allows for new selector shapes as well as colors outside the sRGB gamut.
The Layers docker got some extra display options:
We changed how CMYK blending modes work (with a toggle in the config), (MR 1796), this aligns the blending modes to the way Photoshop handles blending modes in CMYK, simplifying exchange of PSD files with clients that require CMYK PSDs.
Rasyuqa A. H. has been improving the JPEG-XL saving and loading code, implementing CMYK for JPEG-XL, improving compression by giving the JXL library more color space information, better metadata handling and support for saving and loading raster layers to JPEG-XL, (MR 1656, 1693, 1673, 1722, 1795). He also improved WebP compression (MR 1785), as well improving ICC transfer characteristic code (MR 1667 and 1690).
By using JPEG’s XYB color space instead of the original profile, the JPEG-XL encoder is able to give much better results both in terms of artifacts and compression on images with extreme highlights, like those that are 40 times as bright as regular white.
One of the other big technical updates we did was to rewrite the brush settings code to work with the library Lager. Our old code had the brush presets and the widgets entangled in increasingly convoluted ways, which made it hard to extend the settings. We hope to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget (MR 1334).
https://krita.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2022-09-07_wrap-around-mode-direction.mp4
Wrap around mode can now be limited to vertical or Horizontal direction, making it simpler to creating looping backgrounds.
The following fixes were made in response to all your bug reports for the first release candidate:
There is also an updated welcome screen with larger thumbnails for recent images:
And that’s it! We hope that Krita 5.2 has a little something to help everyone make art.
Finally, a massive thank you to the everybody involved, including all of our contributors, development fund members and, of course, our community of artists. As an open source and community-driven project, Krita simply wouldn’t be what it is today without an entire community of people testing, coding, writing documentation, creating brushes, translating, chipping in, spreading the word, and generally supporting the project however they can.
And if you’re reading that wondering if you can help too, don’t hesitate to get in touch–because there’s always more to be done on our mission to make a better tool for every human artist.
If you’re using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.
Note that we are not making 32 bits Windows builds anymore.
The separate gmic-qt AppImage is no longer needed.
(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: to download, right-click on the link.)
Note: if you use macOS Sierra or High Sierra, please check this video to learn how to enable starting developer-signed binaries, instead of just Apple Store binaries.
We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen. RC1 packages for Android are signed as usual.
For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.0/ and click on Details to get the hashes.
The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. This particular release is signed with a non-standard key, you can retrieve is here or download from the public server:
gpg --recv-keys E9FB29E74ADEACC5E3035B8AB69EB4CF7468332F
The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).
One can only say thank you and congratulations on the completion of the next milestone on Krita’s way into the future!
: 
Thanks to all those who made this possible!
And since I’ve been able to test Krita 5.2.0 since October 3rd, albeit currently only with the mouse, I can also say here that I’m thrilled!
And even of its much larger size, 200 MB for the portable version for instance, it feels a lot faster than before. It seems I have found a new love!
Michelist
Many well deserved thanks and congratulations to the entire team of developers and the small army of testers who helped to make this possible 
(As I type, it’s not ‘live’ on the official website but that should happen soon.)
(Edit:Add: It’s now live and free to run around the world.)
Looks like Michelist used up all the emojis so I’ll have to resort to Monty Python!
Cheers devs - consider yourselves officially awesome! 
WOW… So much stuff
I wanted to read about MR 1766 but the link seems malformed ? Can’t click it.
Very curious about that Lager-based brush editor as well
Thanks !
Hi, Congrats for the hard work. I know a bit about your battles with code and these moments must be nervious but relaxing at the same time like when i release a new bundle. You are doing a great job and I think Krita deserve to be in the top.
I am testing all the features. And the new features are really cool. Sample screen color and sample screen color (real canvas) are great. I don’t see any difference in behaviour but being able to sample colors from pure ref is really cool. pure gold @raghukamath do you know the difference (documentation please)?
And Select from menu … i don’t understand how to make it work yet. I have modified my input canvas several times. (with Mouse wheel, keyboard shortcut, with modifiers and click…Ideas?. am i doing something wrong?
This is all so great! I’m so excited to test the new text tool, I was really hoping someone one day would improve it. Thank you! 
Congrats to the devs and a big thank you for all the work that was put in.
Once again the amount of features that made it in is astounding, and especially animation functionality should improve much, really happy about both the ffmpeg inclusion and the audio fix.
Not yet sure what to make of the text tool, the whole SVG code thing is new to me? I’ll experiment I guess…
The wide gamut color selector is also very interesting, definitely going to dive deeper into that!
hmm, I am sure I am using Krita 5.2 @raghukamath .But there is no option for selecting the direction and no icon. (at least in win11 and win10)
So excited! You guys are tearing it up! Thank you so much for all the hardwork that went into getting is release out.
as a side note - is the android version for 64 bits ARM CPU APK not working, or am I just not that bright? 
Excellent! Thank You!!
First of all thank you very much for this great software and for all your work, so immensely appreciated, believe me, you are fantastic.
I use Windows portable version.
Seems there are issues with pre-existing settings folder ([user]/AppData/Roaming/krita).
When I launched new 5.2.0 with pre-existing settings folder I noticed there weren’t 5.2.0 options in Edit menu, they appeared only after renaming the old one and letting Krita generate a new settings folder.
I don’t know if there are other things not working if krita settings folder is not newly generated.
5.2.0 with preceding krita settings folder:
5.2.0 with new krita settings folder:
Thank you! The devs of this fantastic program are truly loved! Krita has opened up a new world for me!
I also have the same problem in Fedora 38
I deleted my configuration files and the resources folder, but still does not work.
Edit: I resolved it, when I copy my brushes I also copy this file that apparently was the problem, although now it does not appear anymore.
About the missing menu items, it could be that there’s an old krita5.xmlgui file in the resource folder without them that’s overriding it, if its version number got incremented somehow. Try removing that file (will remove any toolbar customizations), or changing the “version=” tag near the top of the file to less than 505, which seems to cause Krita to merge it with the default one. (I remember having that problem when I was implementing the Wrap Around Directions…)
While I’m in this thread, I guess I could take the opportunity to show appreciation for everyone who made this release possible (including myself, even? I made a few contributions, but I couldn’t have done that without other people’s feature suggestions and bug reports, and of course the developers giving me advice and code review! Thanks!). Now that all these new features of 5.2 are finally officially out, I look forward to development starting on 5.3.x.
Yes, thanks guys, the culprit seems to be krita5.xmlgui, the previous version does not contain the new entries and has something else different, it is created when you edit the toolbar.
I also renamed KRITA_RESOURCE_VERSION which kept containing the old version, then it is recreated by Krita with the new version. I hope I am not doing any damage 
Hello, @RamonM!
Regarding the sampler, there is often no difference between Sample screen color and Sample screen color (real canvas) , but when the color displayed on the screen does not match the actual color of the image, they are different functions. For example, when an HDR document is opened in Krita and OCIO is enabled, the color we see on the screen does not match the actual color of the image. If we want to obtain the color we see on the screen, we need to use Sample screen color, If we want to obtain colors that are realistic but cannot be accurately displayed on the screen, we need to use Sample screen color (real canvas) or the color picker tool of Krita, just like the following example:
Regarding Select from menu, it can be found in the screenshot below for the setting method:
This is my recommended setting:
Then we can find the desired layer in the pop-up menu:
I’m not sure if this is connected but on the release client as well as the current version the installation didn’t generate the ffmpeg file for me.
@Michelist kindly provided one for me, so I am covered, however there may be others experiencing this issue
Also good to note because someone may not usually animate, and may discover this later on.
