Krita 2.9 Beta 2 is Out!

Published 1/15/2015

Everyone has been working their fingers to the bone to get Krita 2.9 in tip-top shape. For Beta 2, there was a large focus on squishing bugs, fixing crashes, as well as finding memory leaks. There are way too many changes to include everything in the release notes, so here are some highlights from the past month (as well as some fresh builds to get your hands on!)

(Krita 2.9 beta 2, with a textured window background. Illustrations by David Revoy).

Boudewijn Rempt

Fixes and improvements with how actions and shortcuts are managed. This will help fix a lot of shortcut conflicts that existed in the past. Actions and functionality are smarter now as well. This means that buttons and menu items will be disabled/enabled when they are not available. (eg. You cannot change the canvas size if there is no documents open).

add drag and drop when there are no documents open

make the background configurable with a color or image (located in Settings > Configure Krita)

fixed a lot of multiple document bugs

rename “hairy” brush engine to “bristle” brush engine

add “flatten” action to layer context menu

PDF export – landscape and portrait now work correctly

initial tool when loaded is freehand brush

don’t show menu icons unless you are using KDE

added a lot of presets for color profiles from Elle Stone

fix handling of locked dockers behaves better when changing workspaces

make it possible to convert images using ‘krita –export bla.png –export-filename bla.jpg’

fix crash when mergine a multi-selection of layers that includes a group layer

Removed the selection brush; use the global selection mask and the regular brush tools instead

Make krita open new images in the current window

On Linux: use colord to get the system monitor profile, and make the system monitor profiles work in a multi-monitor setup

Fix the layout of the filter and filter layer dialogs.

Make it possible to use different OpenColorIO settings for each canvas

Improve startup speed on all platforms

Jouni Pentikainen

Mirror axis tools now follow the rotation of the canvas

fix rotation in brush preview

Wolthera van Hövell tot Westerflier

fixed loading assistants

fixed toggling of painting assistants

improve how the color slider widget is used

resource bundle fixes with paint operations, loading tags, and double loading resources

prevent loading corrupt resource bundles (added MD5 Checksums)

fix lockup with perspective assistants

improve the color smudge brush engine so it doesn’t darken too much

lots of fixes for working with resource bundles

Sven Langkamp

bug fixes when selecting shapes

fixed some computer systems that weren’t loading preset bundles correctly

fixed color selector crashes when no document open

fix switching between landscape and portrait orientation

lots of fixes with handling multiple open images and the dockers

Lukas Tvrdy (G’MIC)

update gmic to version 1.6.0.3

enable interactive filters like colorize [interactive]

implement progress reporting when applying filter

if gmic script fails, inform user about the error message

fixed lost filtering when you select filter and click ok

Dmitry Kazakov

fixed a bunch of multi-document specific issues

fixes when selecting colors with the advanced color selector

brush sizes are back to having 2 decimals to prevent issues

fixed a few bugs related to the crop tool with properties and resetting

fixed saving split alpha mask

fixed a lot of bugs in the dirty presets feature

fixed mirror tool working with shapes like circles and rectangles

fix shaky lines on 32-bit systems when using canvas rotation

fixes to the cage transform tool

Improve handles for the transform tool

fixes to the opacity slider

fixes to the tablet handling (make working with vector shapes with the tablet possible again)

make the liquify tool handle build-up/wash mode properly

Timothee Giet

new color smudge presets

Stefano Bonicatti

Fix a bunch memory leaks and double deletions

Fix crash when adding drop shadow effect

Fix crash when closing a document while moving the stylus

Fix the opengl canvas for some (notably AMD drivers). More fixes coming up!

Scott Petrovic (UI)

updated layout for resource manager

mirror tools have updated UI

G’MIC has been moved to filters in the menu

Resource manager has moved to settings

“Size Canvas to Size of Current Layer” is renamed to “Trim to Current Layer” and “Size Canvas to Size of Selection” is renamed to “Trim to Selection”

André Wöbbeking

Lots of warnings fixed that only show up with clang, quite a few of which unconvered real bugs.

Friedrich W. H. Kossebau

Fix thumbnailing for .kra and .ora files

Rishabh Saxena

Add a shortcut to toggle the assistants on and off

Thorsten Zachmann

Fix pasting text in a multi-line text shape

Downloads

There are still 222 bugs at the moment, but quite a lot are rather minor. Lots and lots and lots of thanks to all the beta testers who have been sending in report after report!

For Linux users, Krita Lime has been updated. Remember that launchpad is very strict about the versions of Ubuntu it supports. So the update is only available for 14.04 and up.

OpenSUSE users can use the new OBS repositories created by Leinir:

Windows users can choose between an installer and the zip file. You can unzip the zip file anywhere and start Krita by executing bin/krita.exe. The Surface Pro 3 tablet offset issue has been fixed! We only have 64 bits Windows builds at the moment, we’re working on fixing a problem with the 32 bits build.

OSX users can open the dmg and copy krita.app where they want. Note that OSX still is not supported. There are OSX-specific bugs and some features are missing.

There will be a third beta, and afterwards — the release!