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The Krita Foundation announced today the general availability for public testing of the first beta release of the upcoming Krita 5.0 open-source, free, and cross-platform digital painting software.
Development on Krita 5.0 kicked off a few months ago, and, as a major release, it promises numerous new features and improvements. The biggest change being an all-new resource system that has been in development for a few years now.
With the new resource system in place, Krita 5.0 will no longer load all brushes, gradients, patterns, etc. during start-up. Instead, it will cache all these information during the first run, which means that the app will be a bit faster when starting up, yet the first run will be slower as all the info needs to be cached.
Among other new features, Krita 5.0 promises an all-new MyPaint brush engine, a revamped animation timeline docker, a completely rewritten color smudge brush engine, a new painting recorder, a new two-point perspective assistant, along with a limit area feature for assistants, as well as a new story-boarding feature.
It will also come with support for AVIF, HEIF, and WebP file formats, in-stack transform tool preview, gradient dithering, support for wide-gamut gradients, the ability to clone frames for animation, updated animation curves docker, transform mask animation, the ability to paste into a layer instead of pasting the clip as a new layer, refreshed icons, and UI polish.
Of course, there will also be many performance improvements and bug fixes to make your Krita experience much faster and more reliable when creating your artwork. There’s a bit more work to make Krita 5.0 ready for the masses, but you can get it for a test drive right now by downloading the beta version.
Be aware though that this is a pre-release version, which means that some of the features are incomplete or missing. Also, when testing this beta release, keep in mind of the known issues listed on the release announcement page, and don’t use it for any production work!
Image credits: Tyson Tan (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 3 years ago
