Krita Monthly Update - Edition 25
Welcome to the March 2025 development and community update.
Development Report
Text Tool Rework Progress
Wolthera is still buried in text work for 5.3.
- Add Language text property, which is important for font-shaping, line-break, word-break and text-transform. (Change)
- Better font unit conversion and other small fixes. (Change)
- Ensure alignment, dominant-baseline and baseline-shift follow CSS-inline-3 and SVG2. (Change)
- Rework text decorations so they are calculated as per css-text-decor-4. (Change)
Palettes
Several bugs in color palette editing have been fixed in the stable build, including failure to save group and number of rows, crash when adding a group to a palette in a document, and lag when adding a swatch. (bug 461521, bug 476589, bug 476607, bug 478715) (Change, by Mathias Wein)
In the unstable nightly builds, the Python Palette Docker has been re-added, which can manage palettes and export them to .gpl and .svg formats. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
Qt6 Port Progress
Krita 6.0.0-prealpha now supports PyQt6, and all built-in Python plugins have been updated to support it alongside PyQt5. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
User-made plugins will require updating by the author to work on Krita 6. Krita 6 will not be released any time soon, but for plugin authors who want to get a head start, see the change link for porting tips!
Wayland Testing
Krita doesn't yet support the Linux compositor Wayland, but it can now be enabled for testing purposes on the unstable nightly builds by setting the environment variable QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland. (Change, by Nicolas Fella)
Community Report
March 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results
For the "Virtual Plein Air Painting" theme, 19 forum members submitted 26 original artworks. And the winner is… multiple entries by @Elixiah. Black Bear Pass:
Also check out the other entry, Druid Arch, Colorado.
The April Art Challenge is Open Now
For the April Art Challenge, @Elixiah handed the winner's honor of choosing the theme to second-place @Mythmaker, who handed it to third-place-tie @Katamaheen, who has chosen illustrating "Fairy Tales and Bedtime Stories" as the theme. The optional challenge is to design the artwork as a book cover. See the full brief for more details, and paint a familiar story with a new brush.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - February/March 2025
Nine images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from February 14th to March 11th. When the poll closed on March 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Krozz Defender by @Yaroslavus_Artem
Gagarin Scientific Research Station by @Dima
The Anger That Breaks from Within by @ryanwc
Ways to Help Krita
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.
Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.
Other Notable Changes
Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from Mar. 17 - Apr. 17, 2025, that were not covered by the Development Report.
Stable branch (5.2.10-prealpha):
- Brush Editor: Don't apply active mirror tool to the brushstroke preview. (bug report) (Change, by Scott Petrovic)
- ACB Palette: Use title for the palette name. (Change, by Halla Rempt)
Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Bug fixes:
- Tools: Fix tool opacity being reset when switching brushes. (bug report) (Change, by D Kang)
- Tools: Fix sampling screen color when using multiple screens with different screen scaling. (Change, by killy |0veufOrever)
- Tools: Keep brush rotation during brush resize action. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
- Layer Stack: When transforming a filter mask or its parent layer, show the content's bounds instead of the mask's entire canvas bounds. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
- Animation Export: Fix failure to overwrite existing animation sequence. (bug report) (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
- Animation: Make changing animation settings such as framerate and start/end frame undoable, and affect the document modified state. (bug report) (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
- Usability: Make bundle activation/deactivation clearer, using a checkbox. (bug report) (Change, by Scott Petrovic)
- Canvas: Speed up canvas panning with rulers, by reducing the rate of ruler updates. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
Features:
- Animation/Recorder: Update built-in FFmpeg to version 7.1. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Batch Export Plugin: Add Bilinear filtering option. (Change, by Austin Anderson)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.10-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64
Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64