Welcome back! This monthly ‘zine is curated for you by the @Krita-promo team.
Jump to:
- Development report
- Community report
- Featured artwork
- Tutorial of the month
- Ways to help Krita
- Notable changes in code
Development report
Upcoming changes
Ability to transform multiple layers without having to put them in a group layer
This feature request had 51 votes – clearly it was among the most popular user requests.
Now merged and available in the nightly builds.
Improving the Bundle Creator — a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Project
Project description: “The project aims to improve the user interface of the current Bundle Creator, and allow the ability to edit bundles (which is currently not supported in Krita).”
Read @Srirupa_Datta’s first blog post about the project here. You may be interested to know that @Srirupa_Datta self describes as “a painter who’s interested in software development.”
Some things from this last month:
- The animation audio rewrite was merged and should be working on all platforms. There’s still some work to do before release, for instance making sure the audio support is only loaded when needed.
- Support for rendering text with CSS whitespace-preserving and SVG shape-wrapping features.
- Improved tracking of display color profiles.
- The behavior of CMYK blending modes has changed, which may change the appearance of files. The old behavior can be enabled under settings. Now CMYK files will not show blending modes in opposite (which was mathematically correct but visually not expected) way. So mulitply will behave like multiply of RGB and not like screen.
Community report
There’s a lot of excitement about @emilm’s Rotating Light Brushtips. Have you tried them out yet? The thread has some interesting variations and artwork examples.
The May 2023 Art Challenge was completed. We had 10 submissions under the theme “Vintage Toy.” Thank you to everyone who submitted artwork and thank you all for voting. This month’s art challenge topic is “Chimera.” Full description and rules here.
Still Life with Steam Engines (Winner of the May 2023 Art Challenge) by Mythmaker
Featured artwork
Please enjoy a sampling of artwork submitted over the last few weeks.
The new journey by @marcotal.art
Reference study for lighting by @JagiArts
Shantae by new member @Santiago_Garcia
Tutorial of the month
Gradient Brushes in Krita 5 – from @RamonM.
Creating gradient brushes in Krita 5 is easy following these simple steps. Rockets? Rosemåling flowers? Beautiful vegetation? Also don’t miss the section… How to create a superfast RGBA brushtip and more tips, as usual. (Excerpted from the YouTube video description)
Ways to help Krita
Krita is free and open source software (FOSS). Free doesn’t mean there are no costs. In addition to a small team of dedicated developers, Krita incurs all the usual costs of maintaining and running a legal entity and online services. You can help support Krita with a one-time donation, a subscription to the development fund or by purchasing Krita in one of the supported app stores!
Notable changes in code
This section has been compiled by @freyalupen.
April 26 - June 2, 2023
Unstable branch (5.2.0-prealpha):
Features:
- [Animation] Replace old QtMultimedia-based animation audio system with a new one based on the MLT framework. This aims to solve long-standing audio-video synchronization issues. [merge request; Eoin O’Neill, Emmet O’Neill, with assistance from Amy spark, Dmitry Kazakov, Ivan Yossi, Sharaf Zaman]
- [Text] Implement CSS-Text-3 whitespace and SVG 2 wrap-in-shape features. This means that duplicate spaces and hard linebreaks can be preserved, and text can be wrapped inside even complex shapes. [merge request, Wolthera van Hövell]
- [Tools] Allow the Transform Tool to operate on multiple selected layers at once. [merge request, Freya Lupen]
- [Usability] Improve Video Import/Export dialog layouts. [merge request, Amy spark]
- [Usability] Move the Reference Layer option higher in the Tool Options list for the Fill and Selection tools that use it. [merge request, Tom Tom]
Bugfixes:
- [Layer Stack] Fix behavior of CMYK blending modes. This may change the appearance of existing documents, but the old behavior can be enabled under ‘Settings->Configure Krita->General->Tools->CMYK blending mode’. (BUG:424525) [merge request, Dmitry Kazakov]
- [Layer Stack] Optimize layer thumbnail generation (BUG:459517) [commit, Dmitry Kazakov]
- [Layer Stack] Fix slow computation of mesh transform masks. (BUG:458475) [commit, Dmitry Kazakov]
- [Usability] Use display info to more accurately recognize a screen a color profile was assigned to, instead of screen index. (BUG:407498 CCBUG:412608 CCBUG:412943) [merge request, Agata Cacko, Dmitry Kazakov]
- [Brush Engines] Make brushstrokes smoother when brush size is less than 1px, by doubling supersampling. (BUG:453129) [merge request, Tom Tom]
- [Tools] Fix Transform Tool to update when using arrow keys with Fast mode. (BUG:457586) [merge request, Agata Cacko]
- [File Formats] Tiff: Fix loading IPTC metadata. (BUG:468601 CCBUG:413970) [commit, Amy spark
- [File Formats] PNG: Fix streaks when exporting 16-bit integer or floating point channel file. [merge request, killy |0veufOrever]
- [Dockers] Fix the appearance of the Comics Manager plugin docker’s setup wizard on Windows, as well as some type errors occuring in Nightly builds. [merge request, Freya Lupen]
Development build regression fixes (for bugs not present in Release builds):
- [Layer Stack] Fix layer thumbnails disappearing on layer move, and related crashes when the window is out of focus. (BUG:469618, BUG:469647) [commit, Dmitry Kazakov]
- [macOS: Canvas Input] Fix touch rotation on macOS. (BUG:468777) [merge request, Ivan Yossi]
- [Dockers] Fix type error using Mixer Slider plugin docker. (BUG:469035) [merge request, Astrid Lydia Johannsen]
- [Dockers] Fix type error using Comics Manager plugin docker. (BUG:469220) [commit, Halla Rempt]
The latest changes are made available for testing daily in the following development builds: