Krita 4 released: digital painting program

Krita is a well known digital painting program, available for Windows Mac and Linux, but is primarily known for its Linux side.

On March 22, Krita 4.0 was released, which features some pretty big (and in my opinion, overdue) changes.

Installation

Most major distributions carry Krita in their repositories, so installing it for your preferred system shouldn’t be too hard; no need to get too detailed on this part, although I will give some info from the Krita website, for Gentoo users:

“There is an overlay for Gentoo with the latest version of Krita, maintained by a volunteer in the Krita community: "layman -a bloody && emerge --sync && emerge krita"

Also, Krita is available as an AppImage, and also as a Flatpak, so again, installation should be no issue.

Krita 4 Features

One of the main features in this new release, is support for SVG filetype vector images. Previously, Krita had been using ODG files, which are not very widely compatible, and made using Krita a bit of a pain if you had intention of working with Inkscape as well.

On top of that, Krita 4.0 boasts a number of new features such as:

• UX Improvements
• New text tool
• Python Scripting
• Colourize Mask Tool
• Background Saving
• New Palette with significant better functionality
• Brush Editor Improvements & Live Preview
• Multithreaded Brushes
• Pixel Grid
• Isometric Grids

My experience

I found Krita 4 to be pretty awesome to work with actually, in conjunction with a new drawing tablet I got as a gift from a friend of mine.

Part of the issue with why I haven’t used Krita in the past, is the lack of proper SVG support, and so bringing that forward now with version 4.0, I’ve enjoyed messing around a fair bit, and may actually consider Krita a contender for my art needs.

It might just be placebo, but I did seem to notice Krita booting up faster, and overall functioning faster than I recall in the past, so that was positive to note as well.

The addition of background saving, was also absolutely critical, as Krita had a very annoying system before that left it unusable while it autosaved. This was long overdue, and I am extremely happy it’s been changed.

Now you: What are your thoughts on the new features? Will this entice you to use Krita more? Let us know in the comments!