14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the awesome Krita digital painting software for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms have announced the release of two new versions of the acclaimed open-source project.
Krita 2.9.11 was released on February 3 as part of the Calligra 2.9.11 office suite and promises to fix over ten issues reported by users since the previous maintenance release, Krita 2.9.10. According to the developers, however, it might just be the last one in the series, with the exception of the fact that there are some possible problems with the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system, so read the release notes for details.
"We are not planning more bug fix releases for 2.9, though it is possible that we’ll collect enough fixes to warrant one release more, because there are some problems with Windows 10 that we might be able to work around," said Krita devs. "For 3.0, we’ve got a bunch of new features and bug fixes. [...] We recommend building Krita from git, not from the source zip file. Krita for OSX is built from a separate branch."
What's new in Krita 3.0 Alpha 2
Now that the development cycle of the Krita 2.9 branch has almost come to an end, the devs can concentrate their efforts on more serious stuff. They can thus take their time implementing awesome new features of the upcoming Krita 3.0 massive release, which has just got a second Alpha build today for early adopters with a host of interesting new features and various bugfixes.
Among the most important changes implemented in Krita 3.0 Alpha 2, we can mention support for selecting multiple layers using the Shift+R+click combination onto canvas. Moreover, the pop-up palette got some visual improvements with more readable preset-icons, the color space browser has received a lot of improvements as well, and keyboard shortcuts have been added for various functions.
Additionally, there's also the addition of YCrCb, HSI, and HSY for the HSV/HSL adjustment filter, subpixel precision in dulling mode for the color smudge brush, progress reporting when saving files in the .KRA format, improved wheel events, better ordering of tag and resource loading, as well as some workaround for existing issues.
While existing Krita users can upgrade now to version 2.9.11, those who want to jump into Alpha testing can grab the latest version right now from Git for GNU/Linux operating systems, or download the Mac and Windows binaries from the official announcement. Please note that an Alpha build is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.
