Download Krita 2.9.4

A few days ago version 2.9.4 of Krita was released. Krita is a program for editing and creating digital drawings, and can handle both bitmap and verctor images. The program is part of Calligra Suite and is being developed by the KDE team, but also works fine under Gnome or XFCE. In addition, downloads for Windows and OS X are in development. New to this release are layer styles, which were made possible with the proceeds of a Kickstarter campaign. The complete release notes for this release can be found below.

Krita 2.9.4 released!

We’re not just keeping an eye on the kickstarter campaign (three days and almost at 50%! but go ahead and support us by all means, we’re not there yet!), we’re also working hard on Krita itself. Dmitry is busy with improving the performance of clone layers, adding PSD file support to the Layer Styles feature and fixing loading and saving masks to PSD files (we implemented that in October, but broke it subsequently…), and we’ve got a brand new release for you today.

Well, I made packages for Windows available already on Sunday, but here’s scoop — what’s in, what not! Layer styles, startup speed improvements, memory consumption improvements, bug fixes!

Big New Things
And we mean big. This is the first release with the layer styles feature sponsored by last year’s kickstarter†

• Implement Photoshop layer styles. Note: this is the first version. Some features are not implemented and we load and save only to Krita’s native file format and ASL style library files (not PSD files yet). There is also still a bug with masks and layer styles
• make start up faster by not waiting for the presets to be loaded (startup times are now 30-50% faster )
• Big speed improvement when using transform masks and filters. The move tool is about 20% faster.
• Reduced the download size of Krita for Windows by 33% (145MB to 97MB). This is the result of cleaning up unused files and fixing translations

And then there are the bug fixes…

• Fix the patch count of the color history
• Lots of fixes to the layout of docker panels, dialogs and other parts of Krita
• Lots of fixes for special widgets when using the Plastique style
• Fix issues with resizing the icon size in resource selectors
• Fix usability issues in the crop tool (reset size settings after doing cropping)
• Add a function to hide docker titlebars
• Fix issues with the default settings button
• Save memory by not loading or saving texture information for brush presets that don’t use textures
• Automatically add a tag based on the filename for all brush tips from Adobe ABR brush collections
• Make Export and Save as default to the folder the original file came from
• Make it possible to switch off compression for layers in kra files (bigger files, but faster saving)
• Disable opening 32 bit float grayscale TIFF files: we don’t support that yet
• Fix memory leak when using gradients
• Fix color serialization from user interface to GMIC (bug 345639)
• Fix crash when toggling GMIC preview checkbox (bug 344058)
• Make it possible to re-enable the splash screen
• Show the label for the sliders inside the slide, to save space.
• Fix HSV options for the grid and spray brush
• Don’t show the zoom on-canvas notification while loading an image
• Fix many memory leaks
• Fix the specific color selector docker so it doesn’t grow too big
• Allow the breeze theme to be used on platforms other than KDE
• Don’t crash when creating a pattern-filled shape if no pattern is selected (bug 346990)
• Fix loading floating point TIFF files (bug 344334)
• Fix loading tags for resources from installed bundles
• Make it possible to ship default tags for our default resources (bug 338134 — needs more work to create a good default definition)
• Remember the last chosen tag in the resource selectors (bug 346703)
• Fix bug 346355: don’t say “All presets” in the brush tip selector’s filter