I started this blog a long ago to advertise the new features of Krita 1.5. I figured that it would be a good idea to do that again for 2.3 (and maybe later release). So I have picked six new features, among my favorites, or that could be other users favorites as well. I am saying that because I am going to start with a feature that I have hardly used so far. Color selection is a hot topic for krita, it is about as important as drawing itself. If you follow Krita development news, you will probably have heard about all experiment on the subject, between various color selectors, painterly mixing or recently digital mixing.

Personally I was very happy with a combination of the small color selector and the digital mixers. But many artists wanted something different, so we had a Google Summer of Code project last year by Adam Celarek to work on a new color selector, to rule them all. It took inspiration from other projects, especially mypaint.

The result of this project is a new docker, that looks like this by default:

It shows a rather classical color selector area, three shades selectors and a list of colors coming from the image. The docker was designed to make the best use of the available screen space, as well as being able to take as little space as possible:

The drawback of having a small color selector is that it might become tricky to select the color, this is solve by implementing a zoom feature, triggered by a middle click on the selector:

Different artists have different preferences on the shape of the color selector, between the triangle, the box, the whatever. So the docker is offering the choice:

The last two features of the docker is to provide two automatic palettes, the first one contains the history of the last color that the user selected, displayed in the column on the right:



The other one generates a list of colors from the current image, and display them at the bottom of the docker:



In the end, it gives a very flexible and power full color selector that will hopefully give satisfaction to many users. The drawback is that the number of options is a bit overwhelming, but this will probably evolve with user feedback.