Krita, a free art software for digital painting, has just been updated this month to the newest version. Krita 3.3.2 was released on November 3, and is a bug-fix for several issues that existed with Krita 3.0.

If you aren’t familiar with Krita, you may want to visit the developer’s website. Krita is a free open-source painting tool for concept artists, illustrators, VFX artists, and anyone else who wants to digitally paint. The company believes that everyone should have access to high-quality software whether they’re a seasoned professional or just starting out. After 10 years of development, Krita was born, and gets better with each new update.

 

Some of Krita features include a customized user interface that can move in and out as you please, brush stabilizers for those artists who have a shaky hand, a pop-up palette to access colors easily, over 9 different brush engines, a wrap-around mode for seamless patterns, a resource manager and more.

The new fixed and improvements in Krita 3.3.2 are outlined below:

  • Animation: make it possible to export empty frames after the end of the animation.
  • Animation: make it possible to render up to a 10,000 frames
  • Add a command-line option to start Krita with a new, empty image: krita –new-image RGBA,8,5000,3000
  • Performance: improved caching for effect and selection masks
  • Performance: Fix a leak in the smudge brush
  • Performance: Improve performance when using the hardware-accelerated canvas
  • Performance, Windows: improve the performance when loading icons
  • macOS: render the frames-per-second overlay widget correctly
  • Filters: it’s now possible to edit the filter’s settings directly in the xml that is used to save filter definitions to .krita files.
  • Filters: a new ASC_CDL color balance filter was added, with Slope, Offset and Power options.
  • Crashes: fix a crash that happened when closing a second document with infinite canvas active
  • Layers: Make it possible to copy group layers
  • UI: make it possible to use the scroll-wheel to scroll through patterns when the patterns palette is very narrow.
  • UI: Improve drag and drop feedback in the layer panel
  • UI: Hide the lock and collapse titlebar icons when a panel is floating
  • G’Mic: the included G’Mic is updated to the latest release.

That’s not all, as there’s news of Krita 4.0 on the horizon. The website posted a development update just a few days after 3.3.2, and shared some tidbits about the software. You can expect to see Allan Marshall’s new airbrush system, Eugene Ingerman’s healing brush, a new export system function, a better palette docker, improved autosave that runs in the background, new Python scripting, and more. Developers are tweaking the performance and features based on survey results from demo users, and have focused on the number one complaint: lag. The brush editor, grid features, and more have also received an update. If you want to see videos of some of these things in action, you’ll find them on the Krita update page. There’s even more promised features as well, such as new text tools, stacked brushes and other needed options to streamline your digital work.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can download and test 4.0 now. It’s only available for 64-bit, Linux and OS X, though some features are absent on the OS X build.