Free Raster Graphics Editor Krita 4.2.0 Released With Numerous Improvements

Krita, a free and open source painting program, was updated to version 4.2.0. This new major release includes updated support for drawing tablets, scripting API for animations, support for HDR displays on Windows, and much more.

Krita is primarily aimed at concept art, illustrations, as well as the VFX industry. The application is developed using Qt 5 and the KDE Frameworks 5, and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The latest Krita 4.2.0 includes updated tablet support for Windows, Linux and macOS. This includes improved support for multi-monitor setups, more supported tablets, and bug fixes. For this, Qt was patched, and the patches have been included upstream, but until your Linux distribution receives this updated Qt5, it's recommended you use the Krita AppImage binary, which includes this patched Qt.

Another important change in Krita 4.2.0 is support for HDR displays. This feature is only available on Windows 10, and it allows viewing your HDR image in HDR on supported hardware.

Krita 4.2.0 also includes improved brush speed performance. This is thanks to two 2018 Google Summer of Code students, who have implemented lock-free hashmap for managing the pixel data and GPU vectorization, which should speed up Krita with multithreading.

Other important improvements in Krita 4.2.0:

Animation Python API: control and create customized workflows that deal with animations.
Improved Color Palette Docker: the docker is now row and column based, it can hold empty entries (useful for organizing), supports drag and drop of colors, right click to remove an entry, and more
Color Gamut Masking: a new color gamut docker where you can limit your colors shown
Artistic Color Selector was cleaned up and it now has more options. It now has a "continuous mode" that you can use to remove the stepping with certain attributes
Undo operations with Move tool: Move tool operations are now part of the undo history, so you can undo multiple moves in a row while using the move tool
Added new blending modes: Reflect, Glow, Freeze, Heat, Glow-Heat, Heat-Glow, Reflect-Freeze, Freeze-Reflect, Heat-Glow & Freeze-Reflect Hybrid
Added fractional DPI scaling
Easily move, rotate, or transform the selection by itself
Configurable file backups
Much much more.

This video shows new features in the latest Krita 4.2:

Download Krita

For Linux, the Krita download page includes AppImage and Flatpak (Krita is available on FlatHub) binaries as well as an Ubuntu PPA (also works on Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.), and Gentoo community packages.

You can run the AppImage binary by making it executable (right click it, select Properties, then enable Allow executing file as program or similar), and then double clicking it to launch the application.

It's worth noting that Krita depends on some KDE libraries. If you want to avoid installing them on non-KDE Linux desktop environments, install the latest version from FlatHub, or by downloading the AppImage binary.

From / read more: Krita 4.2.0 release announcement.