First beta of Krita 4.4.2

Previous Post | Monday, 7 December 2020 | Reading time: 9 minutes | Next Post

The Krita team is releasing the first beta of Krita 4.4.2. With over 300 changes, this is mainly a bugfix release, though some key new features, too!

Note: this release also includes a possible fix for an issue where sometimes modifier shortcut keys stopped working. This fix has not yet been confirmed by the reporters, so please help us by testing this release thoroughly!

New Features

Mesh Gradients

Sharaf Zaman's Google Summer of Code project has landed in this release! Compatible with Inkscape, Krita now provides the second independent implementation of SVG Mesh Gradients. Mesh gradients are used on vector objects and can deliver really natural looking results:

Mesh Gradients
Mesh Gradients

Mesh Transform

Image showing how useful mesh transforms can be
Mesh transforms will greatly speed up your concept by allowing complex transformations, such as the half-rounded grate on this window!

But the gradients are not the only mesh related feature! This release also sees the first iteration of the mesh-transform. Like the gradient mesh, the mesh transform consists of bezier patches that can be individually shaped to create precise transforms, especially useful for rounded objects. Not shown in the above screenshot: you can optionally show the handles of each bezier curve making up the mesh for even more precision and control!

We're still tweaking this one, but currently the shortcuts are the following:

  1. Mesh node: - click+drag --- move node
  2. Border node: - click+drag --- move node - shift+click+drag --- move whole row/column - ctrl+alt+click+drag --- split/slide row/column - ctrl+alt+click+drag-away --- remove split
  3. Control point: - click+drag --- change control point symmetrically - shift+click+drag --- change control point non-symmetrically; this action will create angular texture artifacts
  4. Node or Control: - ctrl+click --- select multiple nodes
  5. Patch area: - click+drag --- free patch deform - shift+click+drag --- move whole mesh
  6. Empty area outside mesh: - click+drag --- rotate mesh or selection - ctrl+click+drag --- scale mesh or selection - shift+click+drag --- move mesh or selection

Gradient Fill Layer and new Gradient Editor

Showing the gradient fill layer and the new gradient editor.
The gradient fill layer and the new gradient editor in action.

Deif Lou added a new gradient fill layer type, this one will make it easy to quickly create a variety of gradients non-destructively. With it, he also made an important usability fix: Gradients in Krita could be either segment type, or stop type, with different features each, and different editors each. That could get quite annoying if you were working on a gradient, but you realized you had the wrong type! This is now fixed, as both gradient types can now be edited by the same editor, which also converts between the two.

Improved Halftone Filter

Deif Lou also created a new halftone filter. The old filter was slow and could not be used as a filter mask, and could only show dots.

Our splash screen as filtered by the half tone filter
The new halftone filter can do per-channel filtering, useful for vintag effects and maybe even printing!

The new filter can handle being applied as filter layer, per-channel filtering, and the pattern itself can be generated with any of the fill layer options, giving endless combinations.

Updated macOS integration plugins

Amyspark improved the quicklook plugin by adding thumbnailing support (needs macOS 10.15 or higher) and added metadata support for Spotlight.

A Paste Shape Style Action

A small feature that allows you to only paste the style of the copied vector shape onto other selected vector shapes. This feature can be found under the edit menu, or assigned a shortcut in the shortcut settings.

A Toolbar Button for Wraparound Mode

Originally, we had a shortcut, W, that enabled Krita's Wraparound mode, one of the features Adobe copied this year for the next release of Photoshop.

But too many people pressed the shortcut by accident and were then confused and thought Krita had gone crazy... So we removed the shortcut, but now nobody could find it anymore. That's why in this release, we have added a button to the toolbar that activates wraparound:

Please don't press it by accident!

HiDPI Support

This image shows the difference between the old popup palette and the new one on 4k display with 200% UI scaling. Note that it also shows a new button and custom UI text.
Agata Cacko improved HiDPI rendering (BUG:411118) of

Bug Fixes

File Handling

Painting

Animation

Most animation work is going in the master branch, which will become Krita 5.0.

Usability

Filters

Stability and Performance

MacOS

Android

Download

Windows

NOTE for Windows Users: Microsoft has changed the way applications signed with certificates are handled. Only Digicert certificates are automatically trusted, other certificates will only be trusted if enough people bypass smartscreen to run the signed application. If you see the "Windows protected your PC" screen, press "More Info", then select "Run anyway". The more people do this, the earlier Microsofts machine learning algorithm will learn Krita is perfectly fine.

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

Linux

(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: to download, right-click on the link.)

OSX

Note: the gmic-qt is not available on OSX.

Android

This time, the Android releases are made from the release tarball, so there are translations. We consider Krita on ChromeOS and Android still beta. There are many things that don't work and other things that are impossible without a real keyboard.

Source code

md5sum

For all downloads:

Key

The Linux appimage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key with gpg: "gpg --recv-key 7468332F". The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Like what we are doing? Help support us

Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.

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