Krita Foundation released its most important update so far: the majority of new features were sponsored by the community via successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014, sales on Steam, and donations.

The highlights of the release are:

new Perspective transform tool with vanishing points highlight;

new Cage and Liquify transform tools;

non-destructive transformation via transform masks;

various improvements in deep painting;

better blending in the Mix brush and assorted improvements in brush engines;

new assistants to help drawing parallel and infinite lines, as well as objects in perspective;

updated port of G'MIC to provide all the new features including artwork colorization;

better support for PSD and EXR files, newly added loading of raw files, newly added support for r16 and r8 heightmaps;

the version of Krita for Linux now relies on colord to use unique ICC color profiles per display.

You can learn more about the new features in the detailed release notes.

Apart from bugfixing, immediate future plans include finishing Photoshop-like layer styles, as well as support for this feature in PSD files.

In early March, the team will also start completing the Qt4-to-Qt5 port and start moving towards KDE5 Frameworks which will help getting more stable and slim builds for OSX/Windows users with less dependencies.

There's also a new Kickstarter campaign in the planning. According to Boudewijn Rempt, two big topics of the campaign will be performance optimization and animation support, and stretch goals will be suggested by the community again.

Finally, Dmitry Kazakov isn't the only full-time developer now: Boudewijn is currently sponsored to work on Krita for two days a week, and he hopes to be able to spend even more time on the project after the next kickstarter.