Wrapping up a year of work, the Krita team has announced the release of Krita 3.0, 'the Animation Release'. Before development began on the new version, a Kickstarter campaign was launched to help cover development costs. With Krita 3.0 the main animation support feature was included, as well as some, but not all, of the stretch goal features offered in the Kickstarter. The remaining stretch goal features will come with a 3.1 release later this year.

Krita 3.0 comes with a massive set of new features and changes, including:

Animation support integrated into the Krita core

Instant Preview for better performance painting and drawing with big brushes on big canvases

Ported over to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, to keep Krita easy to maintain in future

Multi-layer functionality improved since Krita 2.9

Improved GUI; the crop tool, assistant editing tool, and the straight line tool got an improved UI

Krita has no plans to stop with 3.0. With seven days to go its next Kickstarter campaign has already reached €30,404 out of the required €30,000. The newest Kickstarter campaign is titled 'Krita 2016: Let's make text and vector art awesome!'. As the title suggests, the developers feel that text tools need improving, and say “text editing is ok for simple tasks, but not good for creating poster layouts, comics, or game cards.”

For those with Krita 2.9 installed who want to give Krita 3.0 a trial run, you can, with confidence that your configuration won't be altered. According to a note in the announcement, “Krita 3.0 loads and saves its configuration and resources in a different place than 2.9, so it's possible to use both versions together without conflicts.”

Krita 3.0 is available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Unfortunately, OS X users will have to wait until 3.1 is released until Instant Preview and High-Quality Canvas scaling is available. The Krita team also recommends that OS X users disable OpenGL when using Krita for production work due to issues caused by Apple dropping support for the OpenGL 3.0 compatibility profile in their display drivers.

You can find the full list of changes on Krita's website.

Source: Krita