We're still only in beta phase, but LWN's Nathan Willis has published an overview of where we're going with Krita 2.4: "A quick sketch of Krita 2.4". It's a pretty good read! Also, check out David Revoy's overview of Krita 2.4: "KRITA 2.4 beta : screenshots , features and PPA".

Soon, we hope to have a real release candidate. There are still plenty of bugs to be fixed, more than one hundred that we know of. But please help us with finding the bugs we don't know of yet on Saturday, during the krita bug day on #krita on freenode!

This weekend, Animtim, Irina and I have been busy preparing the first batch of orders for the Comics With Krita DVD + Comic pack!

Check out the pictures of this event on valdyas.org! Animtim spent two full days drawing a dedication in every copy of the comic book we shipped:

But we're not out of stock, so don't hesitate to order a copy for yourself if you haven't done so!

DVD & Comic Book Pack: {source}
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[[input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" /]]
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And don't forget to vote for Krita in the  2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Any proceeds will go towards more bug squashing! You can vote until October 31st!

We still haven't released, and at the Calligra sprint we decided to have at least one more beta, but that hasn't prevented Linux Format to give Krita as their "hottest pick" award in their Christmas issue, issue 152, which you can get from good news agents everywhere!

Oh, oh -- it's already Thursday of Week 6... I'm horribly late, and it's all my own fault: this week was a very busy week in KOffice and I was too tired to do much in the evenings. And it's not as if nothing happened in week 5. As Lukáš blogged, in his second week, he has managed to make painting a lot faster, and even though his last optimization caused some weird artefacts when painting, and had to be reverted pending a better solution. It's now easy, even enjoyable, to paint with a 200 pixel brush on a big canvas. For optimal performance, check whether your system supports Krita's OpenGL canvas.

However, now that Krita can use big canvases and big brushes, one thing became painfully clear: we leak memory. In the running up to the 2.1 release, I fixed a lot of memory leaks, but this time it was Cyrille's turn.

Code

We had about 130 commits this week. That includes, however, a batch of more than 30 commits that were previously developed in a separate branch. More of that later! We're over 90 bugs again, at 92.

Adam Celarek fixed bugs in the tools, like Bug 217818 - "Select Area by Path" Outline is Drawing Unusually Thick and also cleaned up the painting of selections when switching between qpainter and opengl canvas, added selecting by painting and finally started cleaning up some cruft in the base libraries in KOffice.

Boudewijn got the paint mixing palette finally in a state where mixing makes marks on the palette: mixing itself isn't yet fixed.

As said earlier, Cyrille spent a lot of time on fixing memory leaks in Krita. He also worked on the openexr export filter, making it possible to save RGB16 files and improving memory usage. When that was done, Cyrille started to have real fun, as he said, with the recording feature, adding recording to lots of Krita tools. This is important for two reasons: action recording is a great feature for users, and we will be able to use to develop more complex performance benchmarks. Cyrille also helped Lukas out by implementing a fast atan2 function. Then I was wondering why I couldn't use the rotation of my Wacom Art pen to rotate the green bell peppers from one of the gimp brushes, and Cyrille rallied to add support for rotation input and fixed the gimp brushes to support rotation. Finally, Cyrille got annoyed by our long standing broken unittests and fixed a few of them.

Dmitry Kazakov had been working for months on fixing a structural issue in Krita: when recompositing an image that contains blur filter layers, weird things would happen. This was rather a big operation, so he developed it in a git branch and committed this week. There were a few follow-up commits needed to fix new bugs. And, here's a plea for help: if you can, please checkout Krita from svn, compile it and test it thoroughly with complex and large layer stacks. Come to #krita on irc.freenode.net or our forums and report issues with rendering the final image, whether you see artefacts, experience slowness or whatever. We need to get this tested really well and widely before we release 2.2!

Edward Apap, who was still busy with his fast-fourier-transform version of convolution, found time to fix a bug in the old tile engine. Dmitry's new tile engine is the default, but we keep the original engine around to test for regressions, and it had bitrotted a bit.

Lukáš Tvrdý was busy improving the performance of the pixel brush, with great results.. And when he was bored writing his thesis (on brush engines in Krita) in the evenings, he worked on a new brush engine: the particle brush engine, which creates strokes from travelling particles according to physical laws (Euler integration, Verlet integration, etc.). Let nobody say anymore that free software doesn't innovate!

Finally, Sven Langkamp went on porting brush engines to the new preset system. We're not done yet, but close. Though the filter brush engine proves to be very obstinate!

See you next week, hopefully a bit earlier!

Last week was hugely exciting for us developers, because Lukáš, having finished the last of his exams, could get started on our action plan! Lukáš first week was very, very intensive. His poor laptop hardly managed to keep up with the production of callgrind output, so we had to distribute that task a bit. What he did was in the first place, using QTestLib's new benchmarking feature, write a bunch of performance tests for common things like composing two images, fetching and writing pixels, painting strokes. Then he ran these benchmarks under callgrind, so he could see where the hotspots were.

The good news: there are plenty of places where we can optimize so Krita will get a lot faster. The bad news: there's a lot of work to do! You can read all about Lukáš ' work in his weekly blog and in the report on our wiki. Today, Lukáš spent most of his time investigating Krita's brush rendering code. During an animated discussion with Øyvind Kolås (aka Pippin), Dmitry, Cyrille and me, we formulated an approach that might combine flexibility, performance and low memory consumption for Krita's autobrush feature. Maybe we'll see the first commits tomorrow!

Even better: Thomas Thym showed that Krita is gaining a userbase: 

Yay for budding artists everywhere!

Code

Again, lots of commits: 96. And that doesn't count the work in pigment or KOffice. The bug count is creeping up again, to 90...

Adrian Page made sure Krita's png filter also works with libpng 1.4, did a bit of make-it-compile-on-windows work, and then on Saturday settled down to unify as far as possible Krita's two canvases: the opengl and qpainter canvas. Lots of duplicated code removed, and even better: the start of work to fix Bug 148207: Pixel Pencil lines are messy.

Boudewijn helped Lukáš here and there with the benchmarking code, but =because he switched jobs, didn't do much coding, except for some token work on the mixer canvas. Cyrille promptly fixed a bug in there!

Cyrille Berger was going strong: trying to figure out how much of a perfomance hit Krita would suffer if we using a 0 - 1.0 scale for opacity instead of 0-255. Turns out that currently, that's a bit much, but there now is nice api in pigment to use opacity with the extra precision. He then added a grayscale 32 bits float/channel colorspace and set out to achieve a hugely important milestone: we can now load a multilayer .exr file, with different colorspaces for different layers, and save it in a .kra file without losing any information! Cyrille was elated enough that he decided to go and do some painting in Krita instead of implementing the .exr export right away.

Having refreshed his mind by creating a spot of art, Cyrille went on (I'm giving him two paragraphs, since his work won't fit in one) to improve our curve handling code, fix replaying of the spray brush in the recorder, add a build mode that makes it possible to both have debug messages and optimized code, fixed some bugs in the metadata handling, fixing the saving of XMP, made it possible to store non-icc color profiles in .kra files, fixed loading layers that have a different colorspace than the image, updated the collection of shiva filters and generators, and started to really hunt for memory leaks. Krita now has a built-in memory leak detector.

Edward Apap cleaned up the user interface of brush engine settings tabs and then set out to replace the convolution code with an FFTW-based approach. We've seen no code yet, except when he posted a snippet to the #krita irc channel... FFTW-based convolution should be much faster than the current approach.

Sven Langkamp fixed a crash in the sumi-e brush engine, helped Lukáš with some benchmarking code and optimized the startup of Krita a bit more.

Finally, Vera Lukman integrated her recent color palette with the color selection system of Krita, which means it really works now. This sparked an interesting discussion on the mailing list on what kinds of color selection mechanism would be useful in the palette. I am sure we will be discussing that a lot in Deventer, in three weeks!

We just finished our splash screen selection meeting and can give you the results!

In the first place comes Enrico Guarnieri with his "Genesis". From all the entries, Genesis was most clearly about Krita itself. He will receive a DVD and Comic pack.

In the second place, Ramon Miranda, who entered six proposals. The one that came closest to winning was "Gwap":

Third place goes to Alvaro Dopazo, for his whimsical and funny "Cat Lover":

We had so much fun and pleasure with all the entries for the splash screens that we dediced to give all the entrants a Krita DVD! (And if you don't have your copy yet, you can still order the DVD + Comic pack by pressing the button!)

DVD & Comic Book Pack: {source}
[[form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="EYVHSEGYF7GE4"]]
[[input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_cart_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - We're only using it until BitCoin catches on!"]]
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[[/form]]
{/source}

It is with a certain amount of trepidation that I hereby announce and unveil the first Calligra installer package for Windows. It includes Krita... Thanks to the generous sponsorship by NLNet and KO GmbH! The foundation for the work was laid by the KDE-Windows people. The package also includes other Calligra applications. A dedicated Krita-only will be prepared later on.

Now before everything else please note: this is experimental. Very experimental. There definitely are problems. I have managed to paint for about half an hour on Windows and didn't experience a crash or a lock-up. But Krita on Windows still uses LCMS1, not LCMS2 which does mean there will be problems with filters. There might also be performance problems because of this. Krita on windows also misses support for floating point colorspaces because OpenGTL hasn't been ported yet.

Please do report any bugs you find in bugs.kde.org!

You can download the installer from www.kogmbh.com/download.html -- have fun testing and report back your findings!

Over at linux.com, Nathan Willis reviews the "Comics with Krita" DVD. It's a good, thorough review, well worth a read! And then, of course, you might want to get your very own copy, which is still for sale here!

Mango!

This week we heard from David Revoy that he's back in Amsterdam to work on the concept art for the Blender Institute's latest open movie project, Mango. And he's using mostly Krita to produce his artwork! We also heard from Nicolò Zubbini who will give Krita's OpenEXR and HDR support a workout in this project.  This will be plenty exciting for the Krita team, since 16/32 bit floating point channel support hasn't been really tested in any sort of real workflow yet.

Blender Foundation | Artwork by David Revoy | CC BY 3.0

So cool... You can get the hi-res version in Mango's press pack, together with other cool concept art!

Too long ago...

It's been a really long time since I last gave everyone an update on the state of Krita development -- so let's do that now...

The long road to victory^W2.4

The Krita team is working really hard on the last things that need to be fixed before we can release Krita 2.4. It's been seven beta releases now! To be fair, that's also because Krita is part of a larger package, and every app needs to be ready to release the whole.

Given the long wait for the release, it's really great to see more and more artists discovering Krita, going to the extreme lengths of compiling it themselves from our source code repositories. Hardly a day goes by without some cool new image showing up on the forum, or somewhere on the web

But there are bugs!

We're at under 120 known bugs...That's a lot more than the 42 we had as a goal for the 2.3 release, but then, more users means more reports!

I regularly need most of my Saturday to triage new bugs and check progress on existing bugs and am happy if I can fix one or two myself! So if you want to help out with Krita development, one thing you could do is become the official Krita Bug triager. It's not an easy job, but we can help anyone get started. And it's really important: we try to have all new bugs triaged by the Saturday after they were reported the very latest, and that the Krita team really loves everyone who makes the effort of reporting a bug.

Libre Graphics Meeting

Some members of the Krita team will try to visit the 2012 edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, which is being held in Vienna this year. Me, Lukas and Animtim have already signed up! As usual, the LGM needs help from anyone who wants to support free and open source graphics software development and communities. Check out their pledgie if you want to help! This is the yearly conference that means most for the Krita team!

And for the future...

The Krita team has been discussing what we'd like to do for 2.5 already. We're closely looking at what artists want from Krita, but we're also quite limited in manpower these days -- some of us have left university for their first real, full-time job, gotten married or are now in a bad crunch to finish up at university. But there's plenty of interesting stuff left to work on -- if you read this and think, "hm... wow, I want to work on that" -- contact us!

So, obvious, OpenEXR/HDR support in Krita (which uses OpenGTL) needs to be improved for Mango. For painters, textured brushes  (http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article107/textured-brush-in-floss-digtial-painting and smooth strokes as in Gimp Painter (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281267) are essential. The action recorder needs to be extended (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245295), and we might want to integrate the G'Mic library for a second time (http://gmic.sourceforge.net/index.shtml).

The mixing brush saga should continue: there's still more to be gained here. We really want to improve the painting assistants -- that could be a cool Summer of Code project! The transform tool should be extended to make it easier to paint patterns in perspective. There is a cool project brewing for the color adjustment filter, which needs extending. And much, much more, like the tablet version of Krita -- Krita Touch Cyrille Berger has started hacking on!. No screenshots yet, but you can follow the progress for this in our git repository.

Summer of Code

Yes, it's that time of the year again. If you're a student and you have good coding skills and knowledge of graphics, consider submitting a proposal for Krita. Check out our current set of ideas, or come up with your own!

And there's still the Comics with Krita DVD + Comic pack to be had!

The price is 27,50€ + 10€ for worldwide shipping.

Paypal order - DVD & Comic Book Pack:

(Or contact  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.   to arrange an alternative payment method)

Krita 2.4 is dedicated to the memory of Jean Giraud - Mœbius, whose work will always be inspiration

The Krita team is proud, happy, elated and relieved to release today the first release candidate of Krita 2.4! This is as close to Krita 2.4 goodness as you can get before we will tag and release Krita 2.4 final three weeks from now, and might very well be identical...

With Krita 2.4, we are releasing something that has been called a "production beast" -- a dependable painting application that you can use all day long, and can use to create many, many images a day with. There's a splash screen that never gets boring by Enrico Guarneri. There is a great set of default brush presets by Timothee Giet, Ramon Miranda's GPS resources are integrated -- everything is ready out of the box to start painting. Show us your art!

Image by David Revoy

Krita already has received rave reviews in Linux Weekly News and Linux Format -- before we even managed to release it.  And also check out David Revoy's introduction to Krita and its features.

About Krita

Krita is a powerful painting application for digital artists who want to be able to do all their work inside one application. Krita supports many different brush engines that range from expressive sketch brushes to serendipity-inducing experimental brushes, but the even the ordinary digital brush is really powerful. That's why we also deliver a great set of brush presets. Krita allows you to group your layers and to have dynamic filters in your layer stack. There is support for several bit depths and colorspaces, including CMYK -- which makes it possible to follow your publisher's guidelines and deliver production ready TIFF files. Krita is built upon the Qt, KDE and Calligra platforms, leveraging the enormous effort invested in those platforms. Krita's interface is very configurable, and you can put the gui elements such as the palettes and toolbox pretty much wherever you want. It's up to you how cluttered your workspace is!

Get it

The windows version of Krita 2.4 is still very experimental and is packaged together with the other applications in the Calligra suite. You can get it from http://www.kogmbh.com/download.html. There are a number of issues fixed, and it looks likely that the final release will have even more fixes, thanks to Patrick Spendrin's work porting libraries needed for faster blurring and opengl support.

For Linux, most distributions have experimental repositories ready. Please check our download page!

What Next?

There are many bug fixes in the release candidate of Krita 2.4 following on the series of beta releases. Krita 2.4 will be released in three weeks, unless unforeseen problems crop up -- that is always a possibility! After that, Krita 2.4 will be maintained until we release 2.5.

The Krita team is already working on new features for Krita 2.5. After page size presets, textured painting is the first feature that looks likely to be finished, but we're ambitious and want to have strong line smoothing for comics inking, improved action recoding, an improved mixing brush, extending painting assistants and much more.

As always -- we welcome people who want to start contributing to Krita. The beginning of a new release cycle is a great moment for that! Lots of fun stuff. We are especially looking for someone who just loves working in Windows, so we can get the Windows version of Krita on the same level as the Linux version!

The best way to learn Krita is...

With the Comics + DVD pack -- which you can still order. When Krita 2.4 will be released, the DVD will be made available for download as well, but the Comics + DVD pack will remain available. The proceeds from selling the DVD will be used to sponsor Krita development.

The price is 27,50€ + 10€ for worldwide shipping.

Paypal order - DVD & Comic Book Pack:

(Or contact  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.   to arrange an alternative payment method)