Krita Monthly Update – Edition 09

Develop Development news
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Welcome back! This monthly ‘zine is curated for you by the @Krita-promo team.

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Development report

5.2 released

We had a big release of 5.2 on October 11 and, as expected, the bug reports for things which were missed during the testing phase started coming in. That was followed by a 5.2.1 bugfix released on November 2nd containing over fifty fixes. Forum members are asked to help fellow Krita artists who update and have issues.

Krita on Apple Store

Krita has been made available on the Apple store. According to @halla:

“It will be a bit more expensive than in other stores… because it costs a lot of time and money to develop for the MacOS store. @IvanYossi spent months just working on the sandbox integration.”

It will cost something around $15. Meanwhile the price on Windows and Steam stores is lowered close to $10.

Text from PSD

@Wolthera has shared an update to the text tool development work. On the sidelines she is investigating and working towards importing Photoshop text properties into Krita. She would need some Photoshop test files to check how various text properties are stored in it. You can help her in this work by providing the required test files. Read more about this here. Update: @wolthera reports that she does not need any further test files.

Animated Transform Masks Rewritten

@dkazakov spent a couple of weeks rewriting this feature to eliminate bugs and crashes. You can test this in the 5.3 nightly. Kindly report any bugs directly on bugzilla (and ping @dkazakov in this thread, too, if you don’t mind).

Assistant improvements

  • @Arc_Mantis implemented a way to add and remove buttons from the assistant on-canvas bar making it dynamic. You can check out the discussion for this feature here

  • And then Isaac Fleetwood added a new curvilinear perspective assistant with this merge request

What more is happening in the nightly builds?

  • The 5.2 release introduced a new welcome screen design in which dockers were not visible at startup. This meant that some plugins which provided functionality to open a new document needed a new document to be usable. Now a new flag has been added – ShowOnWelcomePage – which can be used to make the plugin docker available on the startup screen.
  • Layer transform actions like offset layer, mirror layer, etc. can be now performed on multiple selected layers
  • Tomtom contributed eraser cursors for non-brush tools. You can see this was discussed here on the forum as a feature request - Beta 5.1: feature request: erase cursor not just for brush tool - #5 by tom
  • The developer of Drawpile (a collaborative drawing program that lets multiple people draw, sketch and paint on the same canvas simultaneously) added a way for alpha inheritance in ORA files to be interoperable between Krita and Drawpile. You can read about it here: Layer Alpha Preserve in ORA Files | Drawpile
  • There is now a fix for merging down a non-animated layer to an animated one. This addresses the issue for which @hulmanen had made a thread here on the forum. There was also a similar bug reported here.
  • Feature Request for Rotate Brush Shortcut and Add Brush Rotation Angle Selector to Toolbar was fulfilled by @YRH.
  • Liquidex Woźniak contributed an improvement in the cursors that are shown when editing vector nodes. This solves the bug reported by @TheTwo here

  • You can read more exciting things that are happening in the nightly build below in the detailed section compiled by @freyalupen.

Community report

@lehko won the October Monthly Art Challenge with their rendition of a country pumpkin relaxing in front of a cottage. The theme was Halloween / Autumn, chosen by @Bobrowsdower, winner of the September Challenge. Many of us found it quite challenging to pick only two from among the fabulous entries.

The theme for this month’s art challenge is Solarpunk. @lehko tells us that Solarpunk “is a relatively recent movement in science fiction, so anything is possible, from a small scenery to a complete environment.” Here is the thread containing all the challenge details.

We also started a topic for questions, sharing WIPs, or asking for help with the challenge.

Featured artwork

Lara Croft walk cycle animation by @Soso_Illu.

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My Daughter’s Portrait by @The_Nguyen_Nguyen

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Rei – Grab those pills! by @multiorange
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Noteworthy plugin

This month’s plugin news is for members who saw plugins break when they updated to Krita 5.2. The new release uses an updated version of Python that requires plugin creators to rewrite portions of their tool to accommodate this change.

Two of the most-commented and active plugins on K-A, Pigment.O by @EyeOdin and Shortcut Composer by @wojtryb, have already been updated. If you see an error message when starting Krita 5.2, look for the name of a plugin in the message, then go to the plugin’s github site to see if there is an update.

Tutorial of the month

5.2 Tutorial: Layers Update! By JustCallMeInsane

Ways to help Krita

  • Join the Krita Development Fund and help us achieve our goal to support 10+ full-time developers.
  • It would be great if you would take a few minutes to help others in the forum who may be struggling with their Krita setup or in need of help with one of Krita’s features.

Notable changes in code

This section has been compiled by @freyalupen.

October 3- November 6, 2023

Stable release (5.2.1):
Bugfixes:

Features:

  • [Measure Tool] Add the ability to set the Measure Tool’s angle baseline by holding the Ctrl key.(WISHBUG:417813) (merge request, Bip Boop)
  • [Tools] Add eraser cursors to the painting tools other than Freehand Brush, where it may be less obvious that eraser mode is supported. (Specifically: the Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Polyline, Bezier Curve, Freehand Path, Gradient, Fill, and Enclose and Fill tools.) (merge request, Tom Tom)

Stable branch (5.2.1+):
Bugfixes:

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Features:

Bugfixes:

  • [Animation] Animated transform mask rewrite; fixes crashes when pasting animated transform masks, fractionally interpolated translation, extra undo step when transforming, artifacts when flattening animated transform masks, and more. (BUG:475385, BUG:475334, BUG:444791, BUG:456731) (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov)
  • [Animation] Fix an offset when opening files with animated transform masks. (BUG:476317) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
  • [Canvas Input] Fix canvas input shortcuts breaking due to inconsistent modifier key state when switching window focus. (BUG:451424) (merge request, Simon Ra, Dmitry Kazakov)
  • [General] Ensure pen preset mode uses correct brush after closing Krita while in eraser preset mode. (merge request, Tom Tom)
  • [Usability] Fixes to the Brush Editor window sizing; fix the initial size, fix a bug where selecting presets would resize the hidden Scratchpad, restore toggling the side panels changing the window size, and save the window size to the config. (merge request, Freya Lupen)
  • [Usability] Fix the Menu Bar not being properly hidden in Canvas-Only Mode. (BUG:475973) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
  • [Layers Docker] Add the “Convert to animated layer” and “Convert Layer Color Space” actions to the Layers Docker’s Convert menu, matching the Layer menu. (merge request, killy |0veufOrever)

The latest changes are made available for testing daily in the following development builds:

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Just a heads up, I don’t need the PSD test files anymore, I can load most things now.

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