It's been some time since I last gave an update on what's happening with Krita. And that's not because nothing is going on, but rather because of extreme business. Well, that and some real life. But there are some pretty exciting developments that will hopefull result in a great 2.6 release!

Using the very cool Vc library by KDE hacker Matthias Kretz, Sven Langkamphas started to vectorize parts of Krita. That means that finally we've started to use the modern capabilities of CPU's to do several calculations at the same time: MMX, SSE, AltiVec, AVX and so on. Vc nicely abstracts this for us. In the first place, the calculation of the autobrush masks was optimized. This made painting a lot smoother already. Next up, Sven is looking into optimizing the color blending code.

LittleCMS 2.4 supports both 16 and 32 bits floating point now, in addition to 8 and 16 bit integer. This means that the HDR colorspaces Krita has had since 1.5 can now be handled by LittleCMS. Previously we were using the OpenCTL library created by Cyrille Berger for this. While this library is an amazing free software equivalent to the non-free CTL library used by movie studios, the colorspace implementations we wrote for Krita were not too complete, missing a lot of blending modes. Now that we are using LittleCMS instead, we get all these blending modes for free, plus a nice performance improvement. Next, I need to fix the the OpenColorIO integration which I somehow broke.

Dmitry Kazakovcame back from the summer camp and immediately got pushed a lot of fixes for zooming in Krita. There are still some issues left, but zooming in and out feels a lot more natural now. More fixes are upcoming. Dmitry also started his next period of sponsored work, and more about that in another post!

Torio Mlshi came back after a period of absence has started working on the animation plugin again! This is great news -- there's a lot of demand for a good, supported animation mode in paint applications. Just check the forum!

The summer came and went, with all the Krita Google Summer of Code students passing their final grading! There is some clean up work needed, but Carlos Licea's sand painting brush looks likely to be included in 2.6, as does the infinite canvas implemented by Shrikrishna Holla. Shivaraman Ayer's work on integrating the perspective grid into the perspective assistant is nearly done. The 3D model assistant needs more work -- but then, that was always an enormous amount of work! Joe Simon's printing dialog needs a number of new dependencies which most distributions don't pack yet. But his work is done, too, and we'll try to get it into 2.6.

In the meantime, work on Krita Sketch proceeds at a frenzied pace. The initial interaction design by Arjen Hiemstra was fleshed out with a full graphical design by Timothee Giet. Arjen is now implementing the core functionality: canvas, gestures, multi-touch, while Dan Jensen is implementing the design in Qt Quick. Me, I'm working on implementing the Deviant Artstash API, both for Krita Sketch and for Krita Desktop.

Also a subject for another post: KO GmbH is preparing itself to offer commercial support for professional users of Krita. We're still working on a website (with Timothee Giet) and trying to figure out how much to charge... But the goal is to give, for example, studios, access to a professional, high bit depth painting application in a way that gives them peace of mind. Simon Legrand has been helping us figure out how to go about it. Let's see where this leads!

Krita, the full-featured painting application for digital artists, is now better than ever. Krita 2.5 offers many compelling new features for the professional artist, such as textured painting, layer compositions management and smoother smudging.

Still in progress, the first results of the textured brush feature are now available. Artists can create livelier, more organic brush strokes by blending the effect of a pattern in with their brush stroke. Of course, it's also still possible to use a patter as the colors source for your brush stroke. The textured brush option is available for the pixel brush. To make it easier to select patterns, the pattern selector now has a scrollable preview.

The color smudge brush has been expanded with a "dulling" mode next to the "smearing" mode. Krita 2.5 ships with several presets that make use of this new feature to achieve soft and smooth effects that were hard to achieve before. In dulling mode, the brush will mix the color on the canvas with the base color of the stroke, while in smearing mode the the stroke is smudged to mix it with color on canvas.

Artist David Revoy (http://www.davidrevoy.com) has provided six out-of the box color themes for Krita, from light to dark, making it easy to let Krita blend in with the background and allow you to focus on your work. You can also use any color themes you can download for the KDE desktop environment.

The layer compositions docker makes it easy to create particular combinations of visible and invisible layers in the same image and switch between them. Check out how David Revoy demonstrates this feature, which is especially interesting when creating storyboards or alternative compositions.

Improving the artist's productivity is always important to the Krita team, and we have added several new shortcuts to increase/decrease opacity and lightness, duplicate layers, as well as inserting new layers. Check the shortcuts configuration menu for all shortcuts, and customize Krita to fit your hands. Shortcuts are now saved and will be kept between upgrades.

Krita 2.5 has smoother canvas interaction in many ways, too: color picking, canvas rotation, zoom and pan now work always the same way, no matter which tool is selected.

Interoperability with MyPaint and GIMP has improved through extending the OpenRaster file format: layer locks and the currently active layer are now stored in ORA (and KRA) files. On the topic of files, you can feel safe about your work. No longer will the autosave file be clobbered when you run two instances of Krita at the same time, and besides, you can now visually select which autosave file to restore when Krita was killed by a power cut or a toddler with an affinity for pressing reset buttons.

There are also many bug fixes, for instance in the PDF importer, where resolution and anti-aliasing is now correctly handled, the pressure curve settings page has been improved, brush rotation now works seamlessly together with canvas rotation, the color selectors are much improved and compatibility issues with metadata saved by some camera manufacturers were resolved.

The inspiring new splash screen for Krita 2.5 was painted by Kargall Lefou (http://www.kargall-lefou.com/). See his "making of" on the Krita forums!

Most Linux distributions will update their experimental/testing repositories to contain Krita 2.5 packages. We will update the Download page as news of packages arrives. A windows installer is being created.

The contract signed, Arjen Hiemstra and I have started good and well on Krita Sketch, the touch-enabled version of Krita. We're developing mostly on Windows, for Windows. All our code is in the krita-sketch-rempt branch in the projects.kde.org/calligra git repository. Arjen created a mockup for the touch gui, and this week the real work begins: coding on the QML gui, the new canvas, the multi-touch interaction system, the psd import/export. The works!

There is one skill badly missing in our team, though, and that is graphics design. We, that is KO GmbH, is looking for a graphics designer to work with us to create the look of Krita Sketch. That's icons, welcome page, buttons, everything that's needed to make Krita Sketch look right. This is QML, so we're hardly bound to any platform standards. This is the goal:

Krita Sketch is going to be the touch paint application for people who want to really create, not a gimmick like Microsoft's FreshPaint. It has to have a cool, inviting, understated, professional, productive, smooth look and feel. There will be lots of stuff happening, since we will allow people to work with layers, filters, selections, transform tool and so on.

If you want to work with us on this, please mail an application with your ideas, some examples of previous work, your rate and so on to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Experience with QML would be a good thing, but is not an absolute necessity. It's a freelance job. Working remotely is no problem at all, though a modicum of timezone compatibility with CEST would be nice.

(In other news, Sven Langkamp is an absolute big fixing hero, while I've found time to fix some rather bad bugs in our color management, thanks to the work of Elle Stone, who figured out some discrepancies in the results of Krita and other applications. That work will soon be merged to master, in time for the Krita 2.6 release, as well as work done on the OpenColorIO integration.)

We have a guest at krita.org today. Dread Knight from Freezing Moon is a regular visitor to the irc channels of several free paint application projects. He has been working on a really cool game project for quite some time now, called Ancient Beast. I wanted to give him a chance to his promising project to you!

Greetings! I’m Dread Knight from FreezingMoon.org and I would like to tell you a bit about the project we’re working on for quite a while now:


Ancient Beast is a free open source browser based player-vs-player, turn-based strategy game project. To put it in other words, card games meet battle chess, with creatures! The gameplay is rather similar to Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but focused only on the combat aspect: match based, playable 1vs1 or 2vs2 on pretty much any device when it will be ready.


Earlier combat mock-up

The game takes places several hundred years in the future, when humans, empowered by advanced 3d rep-rap printers, are able to play God, by having the power to create beasts as they please within a matter of seconds, in order to fight each other for survival or pure entertainment.


Ancient Beast is an open project and the reason I'm writing here is to invite you all to become involved in the project! There are plenty of ways you can have fun doing stuff for the project!

We’re planning on about 50 collectible creatures that players will be able to summon during matches. That means really coud use extra hands from artists who want to help coloring creature line-arts, redrawing some of the creatures in different poses, making sketches for new combat layouts, creating new items -- and even completely new creatures! Also all creatures that make it into the game need to be modeled (using blender), textured, rigged and animated.

For this kind of stuff we’re using Wuala. You can sign up using this referral link and then join our Wuala group. (Wuala is kinda like dropbox, but way better!)

Some examples of project artwork where Krita was used:

Sarcophag by Katarzyna Zalecka and Ramon Miranda (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Vulcan by Katarzyna Zalecka and David Revoy  (CC-BY-SA 3.0)


Another sarcophag by Katarzyna Zalecka and Ramon Miranda (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

And here are some blender samples of what finished creatures look like

Swampler by Katarzyna Zalecka and Jeepster  (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Vulcan by Katarzyna Zalecka and Roberto Roch (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

So you see, plenty of scope for showing off with high-quality artwork done with open source software! But I could also use an extra hand with coding (HTML5/canvas/javascript/php), since it’s no secret that I’m not an excellent coder and that I struggle with even the most basic things... And since this game will be web-based, that means doing proper work on the actual gameplay is a bit out of my reach right now, and I have to rely on other people who don’t have much free time. The game is highly integrated into the website since it’s a web game; you can find the code in our github repository.

And now you can even support the project financially! I’ve created a donation page where you can do one time donations or even subscribe and you can get credited/linked for doing so. By donating, you’ll get rewarded with game coins and beta keys, while allowing us to commission coders and artists, reward current contributors and better market the project. It would mean a lot if some of the people reading this would decide to donate since I’m working on this project full time for several years now, so a bit of money goes a long way for the project.

For now we’re focusing on a 2d version with 3d prerendered models, but hopefully in 2 years from now we’ll also release a 3d version playable from the browser as well and maybe in 4 years, Augmented Reality version using Google Glasses, so you would just grab creatures and move them around with your hand. Or just hang around on your living room couch along with 3 other mates, playing Ancient Beast together on your smartTV (just connect a cheap ARM linux device) and have fun while using smart-phones as controllers.

You can find our IRC channel on Freenode server, #AncientBeast channel, or you can just join using the chat page of our official website:  www.AncientBeast.com. I’m around there most of the day along with fans and other contributors, so drop by and poke me if you want to talk about the project or even get briefed with a task in case you wish to contribute.

Let’s work together and make this game really awesome and worldwide known!

A milestone in development: this weekend, Cyrille Berger created a branch for Krita 2.5. And that means that 2.5 is around the corner already -- and we've barely recovered from the excitement of the 2.4 release! Still, plenty to be excited about in Krita 2.5.

Krita 2.5 will bring:

• the first version of textured brushes,
• the composition docker,
• the dulling mode in the color smudge brush,
• improved openraster compatility,
• more 32 bit floating point (HDR) colorspaces through lcms2 (and more blending modes and filters for 32 bit float rgba),
• improvements to the transform tool (use alt or meta to enable perspective transform!),
• updated paintop presets, with more presets for the hairy brush,
• support for selecting units in the rulers,
• shortcuts can now be set for tools and will be remembered after closing krita,
• brush rotation now is absolute to the canvas rotation,
• pdf import at high resolution is improved,
• visual improvements in rendering the image both in the normal and in the opengl canvas,
• assistants are saved in .kra files,
• on saving jpeg images with transparent parts, you get to chose which color will be used by default,
• all file filter dialogs remember their settings,
• the collapsed state of layers is saved to .kra,
• the full-screen setting is back and much improved (tab is the shortcut),
• improvements to the recovering of autosave files,
• lots and lots of usability and polish improvements thanks to the reporting by Antoine and Tom Hall,
• improved performance all around
• and much, much more...

Under heavy bug fixing development right now is a new interaction frameworks. Sounds abstract, I know, but it will make a huge difference: interactions like color picking, zooming, panning, rotating, brush resizing will now be uniformly available no matter which tool is selected, whether it's a vector tool or a paint tool. Cool work, done by Arjen Hiemstra and sponsored by KO GmbH.

Time to select a new splash screen!

You will be able to upgrade to 2.5 beta1 using the usual experimental repositories of your distribution. More news when I've got more detailed instructions.