Brief: Popular open source digital painting application Krita has a new release with improvement on the vector tools. Have a look at the new features and installation procedure of Krita 4.0.
Krita is one of the best design tools for digital artists, not only for Linux but for Windows and macOS as well. Krita has just released it’s version 4.0 with some new features and several improvements.
Let’s see the new main new features of Krita 4.0.
New Features in Krita 4.0
SVG Support: SVG can now be used on vector layers by default. Krita will also support most of the SVG 1.1 standards. SVG 2 support will be added in future. In addition to this, users can copy and paste shapes directly from and to Inkscape.
Python Scripting: With Krita 4.0, users can create scripts that will create and manipulate images, add menu entries etc.
Text Tool: One of the major improvements in Krita is the easy-to-use new text tool. The new text tool now uses SVG internally, can support most of the SVG 1.1 text fixtures with the exception of rotation and glyphs.
Colorize Mask Tool: Improvements have been made in the line art. It is now possible to fill a line art with a few strokes and let the application to figure out how to fill it in.
Improvement on Color Palette: There is a new color palette format file, KPL. With the new KPL file format, users can store any color handled by Krita. Pallete docker now supports drag and drop, color roaming and color grouping.
Masked Brushes: Creating and editing brushes has now been made easy with the improved brush preset editor. A preview area has been created for users to have a live update as they change the settings. Brush size can be increased up to 10,000px. A mask can be added to the brush tip in order to create different brushes. The mask brush also allows the user to select a second brush tip.
There are other improvements like the updated brush presets, pixel grid which is a new feature, painting assistant, thumbnail resizing, image filtering and many others. You can read about all those improvements, new features and bug fixes here. You can also watch this video to see the new features in action:
Install Krita 4.0 in Linux
Before you go on installing Krita 4.0, you should read the warning Krita team has for us:
“Krita 4 has a new file format for vector and text objects. Krita 4 tries to import Krita 3 and older files. Krita 3 and older will not be able to read vector and text objects saved by Krita 4. Because the new file format and the old file format are not 100% compatible, images with vector and text objects might look different in Krita 4.”
With the above warning, users are required to back up their Krita 3 files before working with them in Krita 4.0 and in certain cases, the user will need to convert vector and text layers to raster layers before they can work on their old files in Krita 4.0. It is also possible for users to run Krita 3.0 and 4.0 side by side.
64-bit Linux users can download the AppImage to run Krita 4.0. However, this format doesn’t have working translations yet.
Users of Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04 can use the Krita Lime PPA to install Krita 4.0.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kritalime/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install krita krita-l10nkrita-l10n installs the translation package.
Krita just gets better with each new release. Have you tested the Krita 4.0 already? Please leave a comment below to tell us your experience.
Great video and nice accent :-)
Very nice update, i like it.
Real good update