Krita Monthly Update – Edition 13

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

Changes to KDE Binary Factory - Krita Next and Krita Plus builds

Nightly builds for Windows and Linux have been moved to GitLab. Binary Factory is decommissioned. Due to this change the nightly build service is temporarily discontinued. The developers are working on getting the build up again.

New Krita website is released.

The work for the new website was ongoing for some time so we are glad to announce that it is live now. The new website offers a light and dark theme. It is cleaner and the translation to other languages is much easier now. We are always working to improve the website so if you find any rough edges please let us know.

Internal Roadmap for Krita

The developers had an online meeting on 26th February to discuss the future path for Krita development. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post. In the meantime, enjoy these meeting highlights.

The agenda for the meeting was:

How to handle Social networks and having a social media strategy.

Krita’s social media presence was handled by the developers earlier, but since they are busy with Krita’s development, we can request volunteers to help us. Krita-Artists group of volunteers can be asked to handle social media posting and any volunteers are welcome to join the group.

Challenges and feasibility of keeping the support for Android version.

The person who was handling the support for the Android version has gotten busy with life so currently there is no one to look after it. The builds are also stopped due to our build server getting decommissioned. @dkazakov is looking into the automated build issue but the team needs a way to keep the support up. There may be close to 500,000 users of Krita on this platform. Volunteers are more than welcome to join us in this endeavour.

Various other aspects related to development

  • There were some features discussed that can be implemented such as audio waveform support in the animation timeline and the future path for creating a mobile UI.
  • Strategy for porting Krita to the next version of Qt (Qt is the underlying base that is used to build Krita).
  • Areas where GPU computation can help. Artists who joined the meeting said that filters and transform masks were slow in krita. Our Liquify tool also needs a performance boost. So GPU utilisation in this area is welcome.
  • @Tiar will be investigating how to do AI assisted Inking. Disclaimer - this doesn’t mean we will be using the popular AI models out there. We intend to do this ethically and there is still ongoing discussion during this initial investigation stage.
  • How to handle PS style clipping mask - @Deif_Lou has done an awesome job in researching and investigating the clipping mask, layer effects and blending mode technicalities. The team intends to look into this and tackle this feature together.

New features that got merged this month

Close Gap in fill tool is finally here!

@YRH created a gap-closing patch for the fill tool and that patch has been accepted to master. In this post, @YRH points out that @dkazakov and Krita users on this forum were instrumental in getting this done. You can read these latest comments and get the test builds from this post.

(Video by @deevad)

Text tool on-canvas basic rich text editing

@wolthera has been busy with text tool for some time now. You can tell by the text tool update thread that she is merging really exciting things one after the other. This month, Krita got support for on-canvas text editing with basic rich text support. As @kaichi1342 reports on the forum, currently common shortcuts like Ctrl B, I, U for bold italics and underline are working, full and partial color change of text works on canvas.

(Video by @wolthera)

Docker support added to popup palette

@freyalupen implemented docker support in the right click popup palette which can be of immense help for people who work on minimal canvas-only mode or for people using Krita on tablets. You can now use various dockers like the layer docker, brush preset history, etc., right from the right click popup palette.

(Video by @freyalupen)

Community report

Monthly Art Challenge

Krita-Artists’ Monthly Art Challenge is a great way to stretch your skills and learn more about Krita.

February’s Art Challenge theme was Architectural/Urban, designed by @Elixiah. We had a full slate of submissions to vote on at the end of the month. @Mythmaker won the challenge with this image:

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The challenge for this month is Marvellous Metal. Why not join in? It’s a friendly competition where we even share tips and help each other with challenge submissions on the WIP thread.

YouTube Growth

The Krita YouTube channel has reached 80,000 subscribers. That’s a gain of 17,000 subs in just over a year. Ramon’s most recent video, 5.2.2 New Features, has already had more than 86,000 views over the last month.

Featured artwork

Introducing “Best of Krita-Artists” Featured Artwork Nomination Process

Great news: Members Hall and the nomination process is now open to all Krita-Artists members. Everyone has the opportunity to nominate artwork for the featured gallery. Monthly submission threads will open on the 15th of each month. We’ll use your submissions to create a poll which will determine the top four. The winning images will be added to the featured gallery.

featured
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The current instructions and submission thread explains everything you need to know in order to nominate artwork that you feel represents the best of Krita-Artists. In January, we’ll create an annual poll to vote for the very best from 2024.

Noteworthy plugin

Shortcut Composer v1.5.0 Released (this update requires Krita 5.2.2 or higher)

Highlights of new features:

  • New action: Rotate brush which rotates the brush tip of the current preset
  • New action: Rotate canvas
  • Tooltips with additional info that appear when hovering over settings

Tutorial of the month

From @Deevad: Grayscale to Color – Character Design
“A commented step-by-step guide and advice on how to paint an original fantasy character design from scratch in Krita.”

Ways to help Krita

Krita is a Free and Open Source application, mostly developed by an international team of enthusiastic volunteers. Donations from Krita users to support maintenance and development is appreciated.

Join the Development Fund with a monthly donation. Or make a one-time donation here.

Notable changes in code

This section has been compiled by @freyalupen.
(Feb 5 - Mar 5, 2024)

Stable branch (5.2.2+):
Bugfixes:

Stable branch (5.2.2+) backports from Unstable:
Bugfixes:

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Features:

  • [Text Tool] Implement basic rich text editing in the on-canvas text tool. This includes changing the color with the color selectors, setting bold/italic/underline with keyboard shortcuts, and rich text copy/paste. (merge request, Wolthera van Hövell)
  • [Fill Tool] Implement ‘Close Gap’ option in the Fill Tool and Contiguous Selection Tool. This allows the unleaked filling of gapped lineart by treating gaps of a configured size as if they were closed. (merge request, Maciej Jesionowski)
  • [Popup Palette, Dockers] Add ability to show dockers, such as the Layers docker, in the Popup Palette’s side panel. The On-Canvas Brush Editor that was in this panel is now a docker. (merge request, Freya Lupen)
  • [Brush Engines] Add Photoshop-like brush texturing modes where Strength affects the texture instead of the dab, enabled with the ‘Soft texturing’ checkbox in the brush Pattern Options. (merge request, Deif Lou)
  • [File Formats: JPEG-XL] Update libjxl and add options to export JPEG-XL with CICP profile and lossless alpha. (merge request, Rasyuqa A H (Kampidh))
  • [Grids and Guides Docker] Add button to delete all guides. (merge request, reinold rojas)
  • [Animation: Onion Skins Docker] Add Reset option for Onion Skins’ opacity in a right-click menu, to reset them to the default values. (WISHBUG:466977) (commit, Emmet O’Neill)

Bugfixes:

These changes are made available for testing in the latest development builds:

(macOS and Android builds will be available in the future.)

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This is a significant update for sure, thank you to all who contributed!

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Thanks for the update! Very useful to stay informed about the latest features.

AI-assisted inking sounds very interesting. I’m hopeful that another good use case could be the gap detection, assuming that it could be computed faster than the current expensive algorithm.

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As an android Krita user I am kind of worried after this monthly update. I hope someone will continue the task of creating builds for Android version of Krita. Though I am happy about the transparency of these conversations and all the wonderful work of the community.

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The developer of Paintstorm Studio has been (and still is) focusing on utilizing GPU computation to solve its slow performance(especially for brush) afaik, and I remember using Paintstorm Studio literally broke my old GPU card(everything started to glitch/malfunction that I had to buy a new one). :laughing:
I always turn gpu optimization off when I use Paintstorm Studio since then, but the performance is much much worse than Krita. It’s probably one of the slowest painting tool out there without relying on the experimental gpu optimization feature.
It’s probably because I don’t have a powerful and expensive GPU card to run it, but I hope it’s implemented cautiously if the dev is trying to bring GPU computation into Krita.

Aside from that, thanks always for developing. keep up the good work :+1:

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currently the GPU optimization are considered for the liquify transform, transform masks and filter masks.

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I know. I’m just generally feeling complex about gpu computation as an end user.

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I agree! I’m an avid android user and love promoting krita as an incredible android option. Makes me wish i was smart enough to be of any help to push along the android progression.

This makes me one sad panda :panda_face:

Of course, that being said, it’s amazing to see the progress the team is, and has been making! Y’all are the best!

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Screenshot_20240307_105433
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Hello, until Krita’s simple tablet mode came out, I made an arrangement as shown in the picture on my Android tablet. I use it this way on my tablet. I hope there will be a well-optimized and simple-looking Android version for the tablet.

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That’s a great setup, @Mahir.

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Is this update is for testing?

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This is a monthly ‘newsletter’ that tells us what’s happening with Krita overall and gives us an update of the status of development and other activities.

If you want to download and use the latest development builds then you can but remember to backup your config/settings files and your resources folder, in case there is a problem so that you can restore them later.
For Windows, it’s a good idea to use the portable .zip package so you don’t disturb your existing installation.

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It means that this update will be officially uploaded anytime???

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No, this newsletter is published monthly and reports on the important things that have happened that month and also announces when there is something new (upcoming) to report.

The download links to the development builds are constantly updated for my understanding, but I am not sure if all builds of one day will be offered, for example I still have the following Windows builds in my cloud (I can not tell if the all downloads from yesterday were offered here, as they arrived, too, please compare with the build numbers you downloaded from March 15, but I got 5 Builds from March 15 from which one is found above):

krita-5.3.0-prealpha-4d6e1b73 - haiku-patches.zip:

krita-5.3.0-prealpha-e6c14fc0 - haiku-patches.zip:

krita-5.3.0-prealpha-f1cdc285.zip:

krita-5.3.0-prealpha-3f482b15.zip:

Please don’t ask me what these “haiku patches” are, I have yet to figure that out myself, I just downloaded all of these Krita portable builds for Windows from March 15 and 16, along with the builds “krita-5.2.2-106afc8b.zip” and “krita-5.3.0-prealpha-a59c6a77.zip” from the links you find above in the newsletter.

To be up-to-date, you have to monitor Artifacts · Graphics / Krita · GitLab and download each working build for your OS. That site may be overwhelming, but it is not so hard once you have figured out how it works.

Michelist

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Haiku is an operating system:

Those patches are from the Haiku port of Krita, located here: haikuports/media-gfx/krita at master · haikuports/haikuports · GitHub

About the development build links, there is a new location for hosting KDE’s Nightly builds, which Krita’s builds are not yet connected to but will be eventually: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/

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Off-Topic:

Then my first thoughts were right, maybe I should try it in a VM, or maybe even in my ZETA VM, because I own the last published version of ZETA, but that will probably not work because of the timely difference, the last ZETA release was in 2007.

I find it interesting that Haiku is codewise so near to Windows, never had thought that such an extensive software like Krita only need “a few” :wink: patches to run on another OS.

Michelist

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How to handle Social networks and having a social media strategy.

I also agree Krita should do something about Social Media Account. Having an account without posting for years might imply that program is stagnant or dead.

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I didn’t understand anything…

{I know everyone has tired to understand me,
Please see this with forgiveness, as I’m not only a beginner in Krita, Digital Painting but also in the world of Internet}

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The initial post from @sooz is a monthly issued newsletter.

At the end of that newsletter you can find links to current builds of Krita, so called nightlies, the Stable “Krita Plus” (5.2.2+) are bug fix-versions, and the Unstable “Krita Next” (5.3.0-prealpha) are (very early) preview versions of Krita these preview versions showcase what Krita will have in the future.
These links to the current builds at the end of the initial post are usually updated daily.
So if you want to try new features of Krita, want to see what you can expect in the future, you can download and try the Unstable “Krita Next” (5.3.0-prealpha) versions.
Or if a bug has been fixed in the current Krita version 5.2.2 and you don’t want to wait for the next Krita version because you need this fixed feature, then you can download the stable version “Krita Plus” (5.2.2+) for now, because this is Krita 5.2.2 plus the fixed (repaired) bugs that Krita had. This way you don’t have to wait until the next version.

The Krita versions I linked above are just more of these “intermediate versions”, and the Haiku versions are for a different operating system, so not Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, but Haiku.

Michelist

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That I understand is, this links are a preview version that what will come in next update.
Am I right?
Please answer in Yes or No