An early peek at Krita 3.0

The Krita project has made the first "pre-alpha" builds of its upcoming 3.0 release available for download. The release of 3.0 will mark a significant milestone in the project's history, bringing a new set of features, a port to Qt 5, and a commitment to supporting a new platform.

The alpha release was announced on January 17. For now, the post contains direct links to the binary packages, which are not available through the normal Krita download channels. As maintainer Boudewijn Rempt said in the post: "Right now, Krita is in the 'may eat your cat'-stage...". There are standard Mac OS X and 64-bit Windows installers provided. The Linux builds are provided as AppImage packages. The AppImage format includes an ISO 9660 filesystem that bundles all necessary files to launch the application, plus a small launcher binary that mounts the filesystem with FUSE and runs the application within. The upshot is that, like the Windows and OS X downloads, the Linux package should be portable (or at least portable enough to run on almost any desktop Linux distribution).

Improved OS X support is one of the key goals for Krita 3.0; Rempt said in the announcement: "We fully intend to make Krita 3.0 as supported on OSX as on Windows and Linux". Since OS X is disproportionately popular within the digital-artist community, emphasizing support for the platform will, hopefully, gain Krita quite a few new users.

Whatever operating system one uses, though, the new release packs in a lot of features. Under the hood, the big news is that Krita 3.0 marks the completion of a port from Qt 4 to Qt 5. Bumping the Qt version used was not a minor undertaking; it entailed substantial rewrites of the graphics-display subsystem and the tablet-computer support.

It also meant reworking the major new user-visible feature: animation support. The animation code was added in 2015 (two betas based on the 2.9 series were released: one in November and another in December), with the work supported by a Kickstarter campaign.

Krita's animation mode adds a timeline to the bottom edge of the screen and lets the user draw or paint every frame with the full complement of Krita's "natural-media" painting-and-drawing tools. The user can set the frame rate and there is a set of playback controls to advance and rewind through the timeline. However, Krita does not save or export animations as video files. Instead, it exports each frame of a document as a separate still image—automatically numbered to preserve the correct sequence—for use later in a video-editing application.

Because free-software animation programs are few and far between, Krita's animation support is a significant addition. The other active open-source 2D-animation tools (Synfig Studio and Tupi) may offer more control over timeline manipulation and animation features (e.g., effects, transitions, loops, and so on), but they cannot boast Krita's variety of painting tools, filters, and image-manipulation options.

Animation in Krita is rather easy to get started with. From a new or opened document, one only needs to click on the "Animation" option in the workspace menu in the top-right corner. That pops open the timeline as well as the animation controls. Down in the timeline, one then needs to right-click to create a new frame (which will be frame zero to start with). Subsequently, there is no need to manually create additional frames: just click on a square in the timeline and begin drawing.

The user can drag frames in the timeline to rearrange them, select multiple frames (by holding down the Control key) to draw on several frames simultaneously, and delete frames at will. It is about as intuitive as one could imagine. Furthermore, each frame can contain multiple layers (just like any other Krita document) that can be hidden or shown on screen as needed. There is also support for advancing or rewinding through the timeline using only the keyboard, and it is possible to open a set of several image files as an animation project (which is no doubt useful for those who have already worked on their animations in Krita).

Another nice touch is support for "onion skinning," a visualization that shows a faint rendering of previous and subsequent frames beneath the current one to help the user keep everything lined up. It is similar to drawing in a translucent notebook. Krita also lets the user tint previous and subsequent frames in different colors (red and green, respectively, by default). The new release also adds a feature called "drop-frame support" that drops frames from playback if the graphics card cannot keep up; that allows playback to keep time rather than slowing to a crawl. Statistics are available to let the user know how many frames are being dropped.

But animation support is not the only new feature to be found in the new release. Working with multi-layer documents is now easier. It is possible to select multiple layers and operate on them all together—such as duplicating several layers at once, merging several layers, or rearranging several layers in the layer stack like a single unit. It is even possible to edit certain aspects of a selected set of layers all at once: opacity, visibility, lock status, active image channels, and blend mode can all be changed for multiple layers together.

There are a couple of new features likely to be of interest to professional users. The first is instant-preview mode, which makes Krita more responsive when editing extremely high-resolution images. With instant-preview mode enabled, the canvas shown on screen will show a low-resolution approximation of the image, rather than Krita attempting to redraw and rescale the full-resolution image with every stroke. The second is a time tracker that records how much time is actively spent working on an image. The timer pauses when it detects no activity for 60 seconds, and the resolution is only at the one-minute level, but it should still be useful for illustrators who need to track their time on a per-project basis.

So far, there has been no schedule announced for the final release of this new Krita edition, but it is shaping up to be a release that will attract significant attention for the project—and perhaps many new users from the animation and OS X communities.