Krita is one of the best image applications for Linux and with the latest release of version 3.0, it’s got even better.

Krita is an open source software for sketching, drawing and painting. It’s a complete painting tool, full of essential features that make it a hit among digital artists. Pepper & Carrot webcomic series is entirely developed using Krita.

You can further guess its popularity and usefulness from the fact that a French University has chosen it a replacement of Adobe Photoshop for its art students. Below is an example of a digital painting made using Krita. Isn’t it beautiful?

Made on Krita

Krita was initially developed by KDE and was part of its office suite, KOffice. From 2009 onwards, Krita has been developed separately and it now has its own Krita foundation to support and look after its development. They also had a successful KickStarter campaign for the development of version 3.0.

Krita 3.0 features

You can guess from the version number that it is a major release. Krita version 3.0 brings a huge number of improvements and features to it. The main focus in this release has been on animation. If I have to list of the major features in Krita 3.0, these will be:

Frame by frame animation with multiple layers, all sorts of playback speeds, onion skinning, importing and exporting image sequences etc

Caching for Animation playback

Instant Preview for Big canvases

Frame dropping

More layered features such as mass editing layer, group multiple layers with hotkeys

Filter layers by color, color code a layer

Plenty of shortcut improvements

Improved GUI

Better touch device handling

Faster startup time

You can read all the changes in version 3.0 here.

If you want to see the features of Krita 3.0 in details, you can watch this video review of Krita 3.0. It was for the beta version but it covers most of the new features.

Installing Krita 3.0

Krita has opted for AppImage for packaging their latest version. The official PPA doesn’t include Krita 3.0 for now. AppImage is really easy to use. Just download the file, give it execute permission and run the application.

You can download the AppImage for Krita 3.0 from the link below:

The major release has been a huge achievement for the Krita team. I would like to congratulate them. I made a little financial contribution to Krita as part of It’s FOSS monthly donation campaign. If you want to do the same, please visit their donation page.