After eight months of hard work, the final release of famous and powerful Krita 2.9 open-source digital painting software is now available for download on all supported computer operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The release brings a number of new features, numerous enhancements, as well as bugfixes.

Key features of Krita 2.9 include support for opening and working with multiple documents at the same time, brand-new transformation masks and modes, addition of HDR color selection tool in color selectors, HSI support in the advanced color selector, experimental Color Slider docker, better blending, anti-aliased brush-tips, and an enhanced pop-up palette.

“The culmination of over eight months of work, Krita 2.9 is the biggest Krita release until now! [...] Last year, 2014, was a huge year for Krita. We published Krita on Steam, we showed off Krita at SIGGRAPH, we got Krita reviewed in ImagineFX, gaining the Artist’s choice accolade — and we got our first Kickstarter campaign more than funded, too!” was stated in the official announcement.

Krita 2.9 is now the biggest release ever of the acclaimed digital painting app

In addition to the above, Krita 2.9 also comes with an overview docker that allows users to quickly zoom and navigate the canvas, automatic brush-tip, standalone eraser size, smudge radius, support for separating flow from opacity, locked brush settings, dirty presets, support for direct transforming and painting on the global selection mask, and a colored overlay display option.

Furthermore, the brand-new Krita 2.9 release improves the transparency mask, now allows users to save and load masks, improves the Line, Grid and Fill tools, introduces a new assistant, improves the Ruler Assistant, improves G’MIC, adds Posterize and Index Colors filters, adds Split Layer and Auto Levels, implements random texture offset, supports saving of merged images, and improves support for the OpenEXR image format.

Krita 2.9 finally supports importing of RAW images

Last but not least, Krita 2.9 lets users save 16-bit grayscale images to the JPEG, TIFF, and PPM formats. It also supports r16 and r8 heightmaps. Krita 2.9 can be downloaded today for the GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X computer operating systems. It should also arrive on the main software repositories of mainstream distributions. Supported computer platforms include 32 and 64-bit.