Krita 2.8 Beta 2 Released

Published    18th January, 2014

This week, we made a lot of progress on the road towards the 2.8 release of Krita, which is expected around the end of this month. There are still a number of bugs that we really want to address, of course, but Krita is getting very polished and stable now!

Important changes since the first beta, released in December are:

  • 19 crash fixes
  • Lovely new splash screen by Tyson Tan
  • The fill tool uses 75% less memory
  • The color palettes have been updated refined
  • New icon for the magic wand/contiguous selection tool
  • Support for non-zero fill rule in the experiment brush (thanks to David Gowers)
  • New icons by Jens Reuterberg, David Revoy and Vasco Basque
  • Fix Krita Gemini to find the QML files correctly on Linux
  • Improved out-of-memory handling
  • Fix the cursor when pressing CTRL to pick colors
  • Fix the cursor outline when hovering
  • Don’t show an error when the autosave fails because the user is still painting
  • When pressing backspace/shift backspace to fill a whole layer with the foreground or background color, disregard the global opacity setting
  • Don’t show garbage on the canvas when moving a rotated canvas around when OpenGL is disabled
  • Synchronize the color selectors with each other
  • New, more precise cursors by David Revoy
  • Fix calculation of the shape’s insets when it has Miter joining
  • Fix the initial size of the window
  • Fix the color smudge brush in dulling mode
  • Fix double cropping of the image when using the infinite-canvas feature
  • Make the text tool create a vector layer
  • Correctly initialize the mouse-pressure feature for the hairy brush
  • Save the Color As Mask setting to brush presets
  • Fix saving a single layer image where the layer is larger than the image
  • Fix the pixelize filter
  • Improve the desaturate filter and add two new types of desaturation
  • Many fixes to the shade selector
  • Show the selection outline when loading a selection from file
  • Fix the high quality scaling on some ATI cards. Patch by Paul Geraskin.
  • Fix performance issues caused by the overview docker
  • Updated brush presets
  • Fix the transform tool to not process locked layers
  • Make the crop tool handle the shift modifier to lock the aspect ratio
  • Add Qt plugins to load ORA and KRA files. This allows these file types to be shown in the reference images docker
  • Smoother thumbnails for KRA files
  • Many fixes to tablet and stylus handling and add preliminary support for evdev-based tablets
  • Fix the Lut docker to use the right OCIO display
  • Fix the COPY blending mode to handle the alpha channel correctly
  • Fix loading hatching brush presets
  • Fix the scaling and reloading of file-backed layers
  • Fix the channel docker getting confused when converting the image a new colorspace
  • Add a third brush option slider to the toolbar
  • Show newly created tags in the context menus for adding tags
  • Fix a deadlock when editing nodes. Thanks to Anton Saraev for the patch!
  • When opening the favourites palette with a keyboard shortcut, show it under the cursor position
  • Fix saving and loading the color-dodge blending mode in ORA files
  • Added a menu entry to open the file manager in the resources folder
  • Fix the autbrush size calculation

For Windows, there are new builds:

A build for Windows XP will follow.

Especially on Windows, we have many important improvements:

  • The x64 build now installs by default into the right folder
  • If the x86 version is started on a 64 bits windows a warning is displayed
  • The installer now allows custom install locations
  • The swapper now works on Windows, which means that crashes due to being out-of-memory shouldn’t happen anymore
  • The X86 build is much more stable — there was an interesting problem there with our memory management. We allowed 50% of the main memory of the system to be used for tiles. However, 32 bits Windows has a 2GB limit per process. If you’ve got 4GB of memory in your system, Krita would use the full 2GB for tiles, leaving no memory for the rest of Krita.
  • Fix the size and position of the window correctly
  • Fix the mapping of tablet buttons

There are some known regressions that will be fixed before the final release

  • On Intel GPU’s with OpenGL enabled, canvas-only mode only works if you disable hiding the titlebar
  • Using the color-to-alpha filter when painting is broken

Upcoming fixes include improved gaussian blur and unsharp mask filters.

 

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