After more than two years of restructuring, the Krita's development team has simultaneously released the versions of «Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0"Both versions They share exactly the same source code and new featuresYes, with one critical difference: the version 5.3 is compiled under the proven Qt5 library, being the recommended option for production environments, while version 6.0 makes the leap to Qt6.
This move towards Qt6 in Krita 6.0 unlocks several features for Linux systems, such as native support for Wayland, perfect fractional scaling, 10-bit color depth and true HDR (High Dynamic Range) content rendering, powered by the color-management-v1 protocol.
Typographic revolution and tools for comics
El Krita's text engine has been rewritten from scratchthus eliminating the need to open a cumbersome floating dialog box: The text is now edited directly on the canvas., in the same way as in a word processor or Adobe Illustrator.
In addition, the following has been introduced: Full support for the OpenType standard, accompanied by a dedicated palette for selecting alternative glyphs. The new text style panel offers over 50 editable properties simultaneously across multiple objects, allowing you to save style presets. At the layout level, the options are professional-grade: text can now flow and automatically adjust around complex vector shapes, fill bounded areas, or align along a specific contour.
The workflow for comic book artists also received improvements with the new comic book editing tool. This vector utility is designed specifically for page layout, allowing you to divide, cut and merge panels geometrically and ultra-fast, eliminating the need to use third-party software for page structuring.
Smart brushes and advanced manipulation
The brush engine and transformation tools have received optimizations that directly affect the drawing experience:
- Adaptive Smoothing: The stroke stabilizer is now dynamic, automatically increasing the smoothing level during slow movements to mitigate natural hand shake and decreasing it during fast movements to avoid introducing latency. For pixel artists, a dedicated stabilizer has been added to ensure crisp, single-pixel lines without artifacts.
- Transformation and Liquefaction: The transformation tool now allows you to rotate the bounding box (frame) independently of the actual pixel orientation. This greatly simplifies the manipulation of objects that are already tilted. Furthermore, the Liquify mode algorithm has been optimized to operate at significantly higher speeds.
- New Fill Filters: The "Color Propagate" filter allows you to extend colors into transparent areas, ideal for cleaning up jagged edges, while the "Reset Transparency" filter purges residual color (RGB) channels from pixels that have an alpha channel of zero, reducing file size and preventing artifacts when exporting.
Moreover, the The Fill tool debuts the long-awaited "Close Gaps" option (Close gaps), that It seals the small discontinuities in the ink lines. When filling an area, the color is prevented from "flooding" the entire canvas. Additionally, the "Marker" blending mode has been added for brushes, simulating the behavior of physical markers where opacity does not accumulate aggressively when overlapping strokes in a single pass.
Interface, recording and supported formats
The user interface has incorporated quick accessibility features, and now When you make a selection, a floating toolbar with the most common actions instantly appears.This streamlines the workflow. Additionally, Dockers can now be integrated into the iconic circular Pop-up Palette that appears when you right-click on the canvas.
For content creators, The recording panel (Docker Recorder) has taken a leap forward by implementing multi-threaded capture. This allows you to record high-quality timelapses and export video of the painting session in real time without stopping or slowing down the drawing engine.
Finally, Krita's interoperability continues to expand. The update integrates image support high dynamic range Radiance RGBE (.hdr), the modern JPEG-XL format (supporting both multi-layer and multi-page) and a monumental advance in reading Photoshop PSD filesKrita is now able to correctly import shapes, text objects, guides, and vector masks contained in Adobe documents.
Si you want to know more about it about the complete list You can check out the changes that were made in this new version. In the following link.
How to install Krita on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you want to install the new version of this suite, you should know that at the moment the packages for installation are not yet available. And it is that the announcement was made not long ago, but the packages have not been made available.
As soon as they are available they can add the repository to your system, for it we are going to require the use of a terminal, we execute it by typing ctrl + alt + t at the same time, now only we must add the following lines:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kritalime/ppa sudo apt install krita
If you already have the repository the only thing you have to do is an upgrade:
sudo apt upgrade
In the same way, you have to wait a bit to have the AppImage package available, since if you do not want to fill your system with repositories, we also have the option to install the application from an appimage, the only thing we have to do is download the following file and give execution permissions to install it.
sudo chmod +x krita-5.3.0-x86_64.AppImage ./krita-5.2.0-x86_64.appimage
Whereas for version 6.0 the file they have to download is next.
sudo chmod +x krita-6.0.0-x86_64.AppImage ./krita-6.0.0-x86_64.AppImage
And with that we have Krita installed in our system.