Krita 5.1 Released with JPEG-XL Support, Full WebP Support, PSD Improvements, and More

Krita 5.1

The Krita Foundation released today Krita 5.1 as the first major update to the free, open-source, and cross-platform digital painting software since Krita 5.0.

Krita 5.1 arrives nearly eight months after Krita 5.0 and introduces a lot of cool and useful changes, starting with initial support for the JPEG-XL file format, which is an updated version of the classic JPEG image file format designed to bring wide color gamuts and HDR support to the Web.

“We haven’t yet enabled saving and loading of the HDR color spaces to JPEG-XL, but what we do have is saving and loading animations, making JPEG-XL the first file format that doesn’t require FFmpeg to allow exporting animations,” said the devs.

In addition to JPEG-XL support, Krita 5.1 brings full support for the WebP image format, support for Photoshop (PSD) layered TIFFs, support for PSD fill layers and color labels, support for OpenExr 2.3 and 3+ image formats, support for ASE and ACB color palettes, as well as improved retrieval of image data from the clipboard.

On top of that, Krita 5.1 introduces the ability for more operations to handle multiple selected layers, extends the fill tools with continuous fill, adds a new “Enclose and Fill” tool, and adds support for configuring touch controls like “Tap to Undo” in the canvas input settings.

It also improves the animation system, adds support for controlling how strongly layers indent when in a group, adds support for painting on selection masks with blending modes, adds support for YCbCr profiles, brings many improvements to brushes, and fixes hundreds of bugs.

There are also numerous usability improvements, including a new Zoom-to-fit (with margins) option, additional configuration for the pop-up palette, a dual-color selector shortcut, as well as the ability to switch from predefined zoom levels to smooth zoom.

For Android devices, Krita 5.1 brings OCIO support and a new GPU pipeline for VFX Platform CY2021. There’s also good news for RISC-V device owners as Krita now allows compiling with RISC-V support. For more details, don’t hesitate to check out the full release notes.

Now that Krita 5.1 is officially released, you can download it right now from the official website as an AppImage universal binary that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything. Of course, you can also install Krita as a Flatpak app from Flathub.

Last updated 2 years ago

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