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Krita 5.3 and 6.0 Release Notes
Previous Post | Thursday, 5 February 2026 | Reading time: 16 minutes | Next Post
Several years in the making, Krita 5.3 is a release filled with long anticipated features. The text tool and object has been completely rewritten, but even if text leaves you cold, there's a ton of improvements and useful tools across the board, like gap closing for the fill tool, a selection toolbar, an all new knife tool and much much more.
Video courtesy of David Revoy.
Krita 6
That's right, this is also a release of Krita 6!
Krita 6 is our Qt6 port of Krita, that is, when you build Krita 5.3 with Qt5, you get Krita 5.3, but when it is build with Qt6, you get Krita 6. We are doing this because several Linux distributions are already dropping support for Qt5. By switching to Qt6 we will have future proofed Krita for years to come.
But support for Qt6 isn't the only thing Krita 6 brings. It also comes with Linux Wayland support, in particular a full featured implementation of the Wayland Color Management protocol. This finally brings HDR support to the Linux version of Krita!
The Wayland Color Management Protocol is still very young. It was the key feature we have been waiting for all these years: where on the older X11 display servers we could always figure out on which monitor we were on and which color profile to associate with that monitor, Wayland's architecture is designed around not giving away that information so easily.
This is a problem for a painting application which core feature is fully integrated color management. Now, the Wayland Color Management Protocol will provide us with all the information we need to provide color managed views of images, including everything we need to know for HDR display. Because this part of Wayland is still very young, using it means you will need an up-to-date window manager that supports it. We ourselves recommend the manager the code has been written against: KWin 6.4.4 and above.
In addition to Color Management, Wayland support also means support for fractional scaling and 10 bit display.
Beyond the Wayland support, Krita 6 and 5.3 share all the same features.
Note that Krita 6 is not available for Android yet, and that Krita 6 on all platforms is considered early access.
There are also so many changes between Qt5 to Qt6 that it is inevitable that there will be bugs in Krita 6 that are not present in Krita 5. Our focus will from now on be on making Krita 6 as stable as possible.
Check the manual for more info on Wayland Color Management
The Krita mascot Kiki the cybersquirrel, is sitting in a boat. The boat is sailing over a tropical sea, with other sailboats in the distance. Kiki is looking at the viewer with a big smile, holding a stylus and a drawing pad. The image on the drawing pad is so realistic, the waves flow out of it.
'Kiki Paints Over the Waves' by Tyson Tan
Text Tool
The text tool has been fully overhauled for 5.3! The main attraction is of course that text can now be edited directly on canvas, with full support for the usual keyboard and mouse interactions, as well as IME support. But we did not stop there! Lets go over some of the highlights:
Wrapped Text, Text in shape and Text on Path
Krita now has the ability to make auto wrapped text. You can drag an area to create a simple inline wrapping area, or click on a shape to have the text flow inside. In conformance with SVG 2, the text flow area can be composed of multiple shapes, with some adding and others subtracting from the final flow area.
Aside from wrapped text, you can also set the text to follow a path, as well as control the start position.
Text Properties Docker
The text properties docker allows you to style the text. This separate docker allows not only editing the current text selected with the text tool, but also multiple texts when selected with the shape selection tools. To ensure you do not get lost inside the list of 50+ editable properties, Krita will by default hide properties that have not been set on the selected text or its paragraph. You can configure the visibility rules of each of these to your liking, allowing you to hide properties you never use, or show all properties regardless.
A large part of the work on this was the font selector, as this required special indexing of the fonts on your system. Due this work, you can now select all types of fonts, from obscure postscript to modern opentype variable fonts (all axes included) inside the font selector. Beyond that, fonts are now resources can be tagged, searched, and will show localized names (and samples) if these were present inside the font.
With 50+ properties, it can be hard to remember your favourites. To this end, Krita now also has style presets, which allow you to quickly apply a selection of properties to the current text, or use them as a base for new text.
Glyph Palette
Another new addition is the glyph palette. The glyph palette allows you to select alternate glyphs that may be present in the currently used font. While the text properties docker allows configuring all the OpenType features in a font, the glyph palette is far more convenient. Furthermore, it allows selecting unicode character variations, which will be doubly handy for those typesetting in CJK scripts.
Type Setting Mode
In addition to the Text Properties Docker, you can edit a number of properties on-canvas with the new Type Setting Mode. This separate mode in the text tool provides controls to edit Font Size, Baseline Shift, Line Height and Dominant Baseline directly on canvas. When text is not auto-wrapped, you can even edit the position of every single glyph in detail!
Miscellaneous:
All properties were given a bit of polish, which means that Krita has full support for CSS-Inline-3 Dominant and Alignment baseline. These properties are useful for configuring the alignment of text of different sizes when they are in scripts like Devanagari or Han script.
The new text widgets are in QML, our first foray into modern QML.
As a side effect of the text work, vector shape editing is now a little faster, and select all/deselect now work in all vector tools.
Similarly, we now support SVG 2 paint-order property, which allows the outlines to be drawn behind the text.
Manual pages: Working with Text, Text Tool, Text Properties Docker, Font Family Resource and Style Preset Resource.
A variety of technical blog posts were written on the topic: Fonts, Open Type, Font Metrics, various other properties, Text in Shape and Type Setting Mode.
Weird Meeting by Sad Tea
Community Spotlight: Weird Meeting by Sad_Tea
Tools
A new Comic Panel Editing tool was added (MR 2331, manual). With this tool, you can split and merge vector objects quickly, making it easy to set up panel layouts for comics.
Free transform bounding box rotation (MR 2113, manual) — Our transform tool draws a bounding box around the selected area. However, this was always in the direction of the pixels, which can be quite cumbersome when transforming a picture drawn at an angle. You can now rotate the transform bounding box with Ctrl + Alt to fit the visual angle of the selection you are transforming.
Liquify Transform Mode speedups (MR 2461 — The liquify mode in the transforms tool was greatly sped up.
Adjust smoothing based on stroke speed (MR 2192, manual) — This allows you to reduce smoothing of a stroke with the speed. The idea is that most jitters happen when drawing slowly, so naturally the smoothing needs to be higher when the brush stroke takes longer. Conversely, fast brush strokes need less smoothing.
Example of the pixel art smoothing mode. Left is regular, right is with pixel art smoothing enabled.
Pixelart smoothing mode (MR 2158, manual) — Ken Lo's 2024 Google Summer of Code project, the pixel art stablizer provides better results when drawing with a single pixel line.
Selection toolbar (MR 2422, manual — Ross Rosales' 2025 Google Summer of Code project, the selection toolbar provides a floating bar for when a selection is active.
Multibrush has gained a 'Copy Translate at Intervals' mode (MR 1968, manual) — This allows drawing multiple brushes at set intervals.
Improved number inputs in the shape selection tool (MR 2199) — You can now right-click these to set the units.
Three examples, first a line art with gaps, second without close gaps enabled, third with close gaps enabled. The second image is fully red, while the third only has red inside the perceived outline.
The fill tool also got some love, now sporting Close Gaps functionality (MR 2050 and MR 2079, manual), which allows it to close gaps in the line work when determining the area to fill.
Skeleton and Cat by ShangZhou0
Community Spotlight: Skeleton and Cat by ShangZhou0
Assistants
Sketch of a composition of blocks with the new curve linear perspective filter.
Configuration of the assistant widgets (MR 1966) — The on canvas widget for the assistants have been overhauled, and a duplication function has been added.
Curvelinear perspective assistant. (MR 1960 and MR 2055, manual) — The curve linear assistant is an alternative to the fish-eye point assistant, and uses arcs instead of ellipses.
Filters and Layers
Animation showing the Propagate Colors filter
Propagate Colors Filter has been added. This filter makes it so that an image with colors and transparency is modified to have its colors expand into the transparent areas. Such a thing is very useful for 3D and game texture workflows. There transparency often needs to be handled as a separate texture, and when the colors have been prepared with this filter, it reduces the chance of alignment issues between the transparency and the colors. (MR 2161, manual)
Reset Transparent (MR 1860, manual — A filter related to the above. In the case that a transparent pixel has values, using reset transparent allows you to set all fully transparent pixels to be transparent black.
All our blending modes got double checked for HDR support. Previously, Krita would sometimes clip high range colors when doing compositing with a given blending mode, even if the blending mode supported it. Now, every blend mode that supports HDR will do so. (MR 2294)
Fast Color Overlay filter example, three images after another: first the plain sketch, second the normal overlay mode, which fills all colors with the overlay color, and finally the tint mode, which only tints the black and keeps the white.
Fast Color Overlay Mask. A filter that colorizes a sketch with a given color. This is different from the existing HSV filter, as it is optimized for speed and quick use, with a special button on the layer docker. This will be useful for artists preparing their sketch for inking. (MR 2285, 2318, 2303 and 2282, manual)
Transform shortcuts now work on multiple layers. When using the Mirror, Rotate, Scale, Shear and Offset layer shortcuts while multiple layers are selected, all layers will be transformed (MR 1811).
Curly Hair by Celes
Community Spotlight: Curly Hair by Celes
Dockers
Real Time Capture Mode for the Recorder Docker. Previously, the recorder docker would only capture once every few frames for performance reasons. Now, multi-threaded capturing has been added to the docker, allowing for real time recording (MR 2010).
Dockers can now be added to the pop-up palette. This replaces the on canvas brush editor, which in turn has been changed into a docker. As well, dockers can now also be added as a popup in the toolbar, by adding the "Docker Box" to the toolbar (MR 2062, MR 2104).
Various improvements have been made to the Grids and Guides. In particular a new Isometric mode, which is a little bit more predictable to use, and can be used for hexagonal grids. Grid and guides color configuration is now saved to the document. And finally, there's the ability to turn off either the horizontal or vertical lines in the rectangular grid, allowing for a grid that is a mere line pattern. (MR 2090, manual)
Brushes:
Two new improvements were added for working with textures in the brushes.
Soft texturing mode for the Pattern option (MR 2068, manual) — By default, Krita's texturing option uses the strength and pattern options together to limit the brush by the pattern, based on the strength. This gives a nice textured stroke, much like using a dry brush on a textured piece of paper in real life. The new Soft Texturing mode switches the behaviour of strength, making it instead control how much the pattern has effect on the brush, with at low values the pattern being invisible. This is more akin to switching between a wet and a dry brush over time.
Pattern 'Auto Invert For Eraser' (MR 2264) — When working with the texture option, you might want to keep the texture cohesive, even as you erase. For this reason, we've now added the "Auto Invert For Eraser", which'll invert the texture as you switch to erase mode.
'Kiki Paints Over the Waves' splash, with a filter dialog overlaid. The filter dialog has a curve with a sharp corner in the middle.
Corner mode for curves (MR 2191, manual) — Krita's brush engine uses curves extensively to configure the effects of various sensors on the brush. By default, the points on this curve are smooth cubic curves, which is useful in most cases. However, sometimes you want a little bit more control, so Krita 5.3 now comes with the ability to make sharp corners by Ctrl + clicking a given node. Filters using curves also benefit from this feature.
Example of Marker mode in use, left is Normal, right is Marker
Marker blend mode (MR 2375, manual) — a blend mode that prevents building up opacity across multiple strokes. When used with build-up painting mode, this gives the same effect as the same mode in Drawpile or the marker tool in other programs. Unlike Greater, Marker still blends colors normally even when it doesn't change the opacity of what's on the layer.
Time Keeper by Elixiah
Time Keeper by Elixiah
Files:
Radiance RGBE (.hdr) support (MR 1806) — Krita 5.3 now has support for loading and saving Radiance RGBE files. This is an older but fairly widely used HDR image format, and it should be a boon for people working with HDR images.
New Bundle Creator (MR 1802) — Srirupa Datta's GSoC project, which consisted of overhauling the bundle creator. It now tries to guide you through the bundle creation process, with a new feature being the ability to store tags into bundles as well.
Jpeg-XL: You can now use CICP instead of ICC color profiles to store the color space, as well as save alpha in lossless mode (MR 2077).
Jpeg-XL: Support was added for Multi-Layered and Multi-Pages JXL files in addition to animated JXL files (MR 2411).
Support for Text, Shapes and Guides for PSD (MR 1954) — Krita can now load and save shapes, vector masks and guides from and to PSD. In addition, it can load text from PSD, including the advanced text information, like text on path and open type features. Saving text to PSD is possible, but unfortunately more limited due the complexity of the format.
Python Plugins:
This release contains several python API improvements. Most notable is that we now have an API for painting brushstrokes (MR 2195, MR 2198 and MR 2211).
Wrappers were added for the following qt widgets:
AngleSelector (MR 1979)
SliderSpinboxes (MR 1991)
FileDialog (MR 2402)
And finally we added more methods to...
Scratchpad (MR 2087)
Grids and Guides (MR 2087)
Document autosave state (MR 2160)
Canvas panning (MR 2338)
Finally, the following bundled python plugins were added:
Mutator Brush Plugin (MR 2322) — A python extension for Krita which adds brush variation through action-invoked settings randomization.
Python Palette Docker re-added (MR 2374) — The python palette docker was ree-nabled. This docker is largely meant for palette editing experiments, having support for export to gpl and svg.
Workflow buttons docker (MR 2210) — The workflow buttons docker allows you to configure your own little docker with all sorts of buttons, with a highlight being the ability to order and resize them to your choosing.
First Painting of 2025 by Montie
First of 2025 by Montie (@carlomontie, @carlo_montie)
Other
Separate eraser cursors for non-brush tools (MR 1624) — When drawing it can sometimes be hard to remember whether you are in eraser mode, so there's an update for all the tool cursors with an eraser icon.
Pen tilt tweaks (MR 2314, MR 2337, manual) — Krita has support for the tilt direction reported by some models of drawing tablets. However, not all tablets support tilt, and furthermore, if you create a brush as a left-handed user, it can feel very different for a right handed user. To that end controls were added to allow adding extra pen tilt offset for different handedness, as well as the ability to set a default pen tilt when the tablet does not support tilt.
Soft Proofing overhaul (MR 2279, manual) — Previously, our softproofing did not allow black point compensation on both transforms, leading to a difference in looks compared to converting the document to said profile directly. We've overhauled the softproofing settings to allow configuring both transforms, with defaults to use either the current monitor profile configuration or simulate paper white and black (Note: Wayland users, due the newness of the Wayland protocol, softproofing will behave a little differently in Absolute Colormetric mode, check the manual for more details).
CSS palette support (MR 2119) — The palette docker can now load .css files with classes representing the swatches.
More actions available in Canvas Input Settings (MR 1801) — This adds a variety of actions, like color sampler, deselect, layer activation and some tool activation to the canvas input settings so they can be activated by touch gestures.
Save global color history, option to save per document (MR 1424) — Color history can now be saved either globally or per document.
Zoom shortcuts now have the ability to zoom to mouse or zoom to canvas center separately (MR 2152) — Before Krita would use the mouse to zoom to cursor and the keyboard keys to zoom to center of the canvas. This split up makes it explicit to which of the two a shortcut will zoom. The default will now zoom to canvas center.
Krita 5.2 Release Notes
Previous Post | Monday, 9 January 2023
After 5.0's big resource rewrite and 5.1's general improvements, we decided that Krita 5.2 should focus on tackling some of the biggest pain points in Krita. As such, this release contains a lot of background work that we hope to build future improvements on top of, as well as a healthy assortment of new features and fixes!
Animation
We're happy to share that two major pain points for animation got tackled: synchronized playback of audio (MR 1323) and simplifying video export (MR 1599).
In order to fix various audio-visual sync issues when playing animations with attached audio, Emmet and Eoin reworked much of the animation playback to use the MLT framework behind the scenes. MLT is a proven and flexible framework used by video editing programs like Kdenlive and designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind, and should help Krita animators feel confident that their key frames will stay lined up with their voice work or background music, both inside of the program and in their exported animation videos.
Speaking of the video export option, FFmpeg is a massively important program that manages (among other things) rendering and conversion of audio and video formats. Previously, Krita required users to point to an FFmpeg executable somewhere on their system in order to use many of the features pertaining to video, such as animation video export, video import as animation, and the Recorder Docker for recording your painting sessions. This was mostly good enough for studio use, but it was still difficult to set up for users who aren't that technical, and almost impossible to do on locked down systems like Android or even a school computer. To make this better for almost everyone, we spent some time to include a basic build of FFmpeg into Krita itself, which should include "out-of-the-box" support for every free and open container and codec format under the sun. (Along with Emmet and Eoin, big thanks to Amyspark, Ivan, Sharaf and Dmitry who put in a lot of effort to help get every possible format building and working across various platforms.) Oh, and by the way, Krita continues to support the use of alternative FFmpeg binaries in the rare case that you need to additional features that we aren't able to provide.
Note: As of the writing this, animation export via FFmpeg is sadly still not working on Krita for Android due to restrictions of the platform itself, but we are looking for solutions to this going forward.
Text
Because our original one didn't give artists enough control over the underlying text (making it hard to use and extend, as well as write a better text tool on top of), Wolthera completely rewrote Krita's text layout engine.
Demonstration of some new text layout features include (but are not limited to): text-in-shape, text-on-path and color font support.
With the new layout engine, we can handle everything the old engine could, as well as text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. We can now also access OpenType features as well as render emoji (bitmap and colrV0 types) (MR 1607, MR 1767).
This was no small feat and is only just laying the foundation for more improvements to come! For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.
Tools
Dmitry Kazakov overhauled the cumulative undo feature (MR 1780), this feature allows merging undo operations, which is useful when painting many strokes. We’ve simplified the code and made the options more intuitive to use.
The ability to anti-alias the results of the Sketch Brush Engine has been added by Przemysaw Gob (MR 1425).
Freya Lupen added the ability to transform all selected layers at once with the transform tool (MR 1792).
Fill Tool
Deif Lou has added a new mode to the fill tool: Fill areas of similar color (MR 1577). In addition, both the fill tool and the enclose fill tool have gained Stop growing at the darkest and/or most opaque pixels and Fill all regions until a specific boundary color (MR 1549, 1560), as well as a toggle to use the same blending mode as the brush tool, or to have its own (MR 1749).
Four images next to one another, the first only shows a dot, the rest show how starting a fill at that dot will have different fill results with different options.
From the manual, filling the example in image A at the red dot will result in B for regular fill, in C with expanding the fill with a number of pixels and in D with the 'fill to boundary color' enabled.
Selection Tool
The Contiguous Selection Tool also received the same selection extending option as the Fill tool (MR 1549), and the ability to set the opacity of the selection decoration (MR 1697). Furthermore, the selection decoration has been made DPI-aware (MR 1774).
Shortcuts
Several new actions have been added:
Showing select-layers-menu in action: An on-canvas menu with the layers of the image shown, stating 'rain_shining, rain_simple, clouds and select all layers
Demonstrating the “Select Layers Menu” option, this menu shows the layers under the cursor.
Toggle Eraser Preset by Freya Lupen, (MR 1689) allows you to switch to the preset that would otherwise be stored for the ‘eraser’ end of the tablet stylus. Not all stylii have an eraser side, and some people really prefer to activate it by hotkey.
Sample Screen Color by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1720) allows you to select a color anywhere on the screen, even outside Krita, similar to the Sample button in the Select a Color dialogue.
Select Layers From Menu canvas input setting by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1766) allows you to select a layer on-canvas from a dropdown menu.
Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme, courtesy of Freya Lupen, (MR 1565).
Krita can now detect conflicts in the canvas input setting shortcuts thanks to Sharaf Zaman, (MR 1725).
We have no shortage of plans for how to make things better, but only with stable community contributions can we keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.
Like what we are doing? Help support us
Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.
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Dockers
Mathias Wein brought us a ‘Wide Gamut Color Selector’. This selector almost the same as the advanced color selector, except it’s capable of selecting colors in wide-gamuts instead of just sRGB. We eventually want to remove the Advanced Color Selector in favor of this one, when we’re sure we haven’t lost any functionality (MR 1600).
Wide gamut color selector is shown here as a gradient-square with a rainbow colored circle around it.
The Layers docker got some extra display options:
On Android, selecting multiple layers is tricky, therefore Sharaf implemented extra checkboxes on the side of the layers (MR 1665).
Freya Lupen added the ability to see extra information about the layer opacity and blending modes (MR 1501, MR 1520, MR 1615), as well as making the automatic layer suffixes optional MR 1498. On top of that, it’s now possible to change the scaling filter of file-layers (MR 1784).
Mcelaru Tiberiu has ensured the brush preset docker looks good in horizontal mode: MR 1670.
Brush Preset History is now configurable (MR 1623).
Undo, Redo and more for the palette docker (MR 1617).
File Formats
We changed how CMYK blending modes work (with a toggle in the config), (MR 1796), this aligns the blending modes to the way Photoshop handles blending modes in CMYK, simplifying exchange of PSD files with clients that require CMYK PSDs.
Rasyuqa A. H. has been improving the JPEG-XL saving and loading code, implementing CMYK for JPEG-XL, improving compression by giving the JXL library more color space information, better metadata handling and support for saving and loading raster layers to JPEG-XL, (MR 1656, 1693, 1673, 1722, 1795). He also improved WebP compression (MR 1785), as well improving ICC transfer characteristic code (MR 1667 and 1690).
A side-by-side comparison of the internal XYB profile and the original image profile. The example consists of a closeup of a cartoon eye that shows visible ringing with the original profile.
By using JPEG's XYB color space instead of the original profile, the JPEG-XL encoder is able to give much better results both in terms of artifacts and compression on images with extreme highlights, like those that are 40 times as bright as regular white.
Cedric Ressler has improved EXR multi-layer handling (MR 1677).
Amyspark has improved the RAW import, both the UI (MR 1679) and sped it up by using tiles (MR 1694).
Amyspark has also improved the webP exporter by adding better metadata handling and animation support. (MR 1468).
Other
One of the other big technical updates we did was to rewrite the brush settings code to work with the library Lager. Our old code had the brush presets and the widgets entangled in increasingly convoluted ways, which made it hard to extend the settings. We hope to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget (MR 1334).
Wrap around mode can now be limited to vertical or Horizontal direction, making it simpler to creating looping backgrounds.
Freya Lupen has added wrap-around directions for the wraparound mode (MR 1524).
Freya Lupen has also added ability to remove single Recent Document entries (MR 1666).
Joshua Goins has improved the tablet tester, so it now has access to tilt data (MR 1678).
Sharaf Zaman implemented easier resource location selection for android (MR 1771).
Stephen Wilson has made sure that Krita resets document metadata when using a template (MR 1769).
Agata Cacko has spent a significant amount of time on getting better display names of color profiles (MR 1768).
Amyspark has been cleaning up the UI left and right (MR 1683, MR 1696, MR 1702, MR 1701, MR 1732, MR 1744, MR 1742, MR 1772).
Shuqi Xiu has added a Lambert shading blending mode (MR 1566).
Thank You
And that’s it! We hope that Krita 5.2 has a little something to help everyone make art.
Finally, a massive thank you to the everybody involved, including all of our contributors, development fund members and, of course, our community of artists. As an open source and community-driven project, Krita simply wouldn’t be what it is today without an entire community of people testing, coding, writing documentation, creating brushes, translating, chipping in, spreading the word, and generally supporting the project however they can.
And if you're reading that wondering if you can help too, don't hesitate to get in touch--because there's always more to be done on our mission to make a better tool for every human artist.
Previous Post | Thursday, 5 February 2026 | Reading time: 16 minutes | Next Post
Several years in the making, Krita 5.3 is a release filled with long anticipated features. The text tool and object has been completely rewritten, but even if text leaves you cold, there's a ton of improvements and useful tools across the board, like gap closing for the fill tool, a selection toolbar, an all new knife tool and much much more.
Video courtesy of David Revoy.
Krita 6
That's right, this is also a release of Krita 6!
Krita 6 is our Qt6 port of Krita, that is, when you build Krita 5.3 with Qt5, you get Krita 5.3, but when it is build with Qt6, you get Krita 6. We are doing this because several Linux distributions are already dropping support for Qt5. By switching to Qt6 we will have future proofed Krita for years to come.
But support for Qt6 isn't the only thing Krita 6 brings. It also comes with Linux Wayland support, in particular a full featured implementation of the Wayland Color Management protocol. This finally brings HDR support to the Linux version of Krita!
The Wayland Color Management Protocol is still very young. It was the key feature we have been waiting for all these years: where on the older X11 display servers we could always figure out on which monitor we were on and which color profile to associate with that monitor, Wayland's architecture is designed around not giving away that information so easily.
This is a problem for a painting application which core feature is fully integrated color management. Now, the Wayland Color Management Protocol will provide us with all the information we need to provide color managed views of images, including everything we need to know for HDR display. Because this part of Wayland is still very young, using it means you will need an up-to-date window manager that supports it. We ourselves recommend the manager the code has been written against: KWin 6.4.4 and above.
In addition to Color Management, Wayland support also means support for fractional scaling and 10 bit display.
Beyond the Wayland support, Krita 6 and 5.3 share all the same features.
Note that Krita 6 is not available for Android yet, and that Krita 6 on all platforms is considered early access.
There are also so many changes between Qt5 to Qt6 that it is inevitable that there will be bugs in Krita 6 that are not present in Krita 5. Our focus will from now on be on making Krita 6 as stable as possible.
Check the manual for more info on Wayland Color Management
The Krita mascot Kiki the cybersquirrel, is sitting in a boat. The boat is sailing over a tropical sea, with other sailboats in the distance. Kiki is looking at the viewer with a big smile, holding a stylus and a drawing pad. The image on the drawing pad is so realistic, the waves flow out of it.
'Kiki Paints Over the Waves' by Tyson Tan
Text Tool
The text tool has been fully overhauled for 5.3! The main attraction is of course that text can now be edited directly on canvas, with full support for the usual keyboard and mouse interactions, as well as IME support. But we did not stop there! Lets go over some of the highlights:
Wrapped Text, Text in shape and Text on Path
Krita now has the ability to make auto wrapped text. You can drag an area to create a simple inline wrapping area, or click on a shape to have the text flow inside. In conformance with SVG 2, the text flow area can be composed of multiple shapes, with some adding and others subtracting from the final flow area.
Aside from wrapped text, you can also set the text to follow a path, as well as control the start position.
Text Properties Docker
The text properties docker allows you to style the text. This separate docker allows not only editing the current text selected with the text tool, but also multiple texts when selected with the shape selection tools. To ensure you do not get lost inside the list of 50+ editable properties, Krita will by default hide properties that have not been set on the selected text or its paragraph. You can configure the visibility rules of each of these to your liking, allowing you to hide properties you never use, or show all properties regardless.
A large part of the work on this was the font selector, as this required special indexing of the fonts on your system. Due this work, you can now select all types of fonts, from obscure postscript to modern opentype variable fonts (all axes included) inside the font selector. Beyond that, fonts are now resources can be tagged, searched, and will show localized names (and samples) if these were present inside the font.
With 50+ properties, it can be hard to remember your favourites. To this end, Krita now also has style presets, which allow you to quickly apply a selection of properties to the current text, or use them as a base for new text.
Glyph Palette
Another new addition is the glyph palette. The glyph palette allows you to select alternate glyphs that may be present in the currently used font. While the text properties docker allows configuring all the OpenType features in a font, the glyph palette is far more convenient. Furthermore, it allows selecting unicode character variations, which will be doubly handy for those typesetting in CJK scripts.
Type Setting Mode
In addition to the Text Properties Docker, you can edit a number of properties on-canvas with the new Type Setting Mode. This separate mode in the text tool provides controls to edit Font Size, Baseline Shift, Line Height and Dominant Baseline directly on canvas. When text is not auto-wrapped, you can even edit the position of every single glyph in detail!
Miscellaneous:
All properties were given a bit of polish, which means that Krita has full support for CSS-Inline-3 Dominant and Alignment baseline. These properties are useful for configuring the alignment of text of different sizes when they are in scripts like Devanagari or Han script.
The new text widgets are in QML, our first foray into modern QML.
As a side effect of the text work, vector shape editing is now a little faster, and select all/deselect now work in all vector tools.
Similarly, we now support SVG 2 paint-order property, which allows the outlines to be drawn behind the text.
Manual pages: Working with Text, Text Tool, Text Properties Docker, Font Family Resource and Style Preset Resource.
A variety of technical blog posts were written on the topic: Fonts, Open Type, Font Metrics, various other properties, Text in Shape and Type Setting Mode.
Weird Meeting by Sad Tea
Community Spotlight: Weird Meeting by Sad_Tea
Tools
A new Comic Panel Editing tool was added (MR 2331, manual). With this tool, you can split and merge vector objects quickly, making it easy to set up panel layouts for comics.
Free transform bounding box rotation (MR 2113, manual) — Our transform tool draws a bounding box around the selected area. However, this was always in the direction of the pixels, which can be quite cumbersome when transforming a picture drawn at an angle. You can now rotate the transform bounding box with Ctrl + Alt to fit the visual angle of the selection you are transforming.
Liquify Transform Mode speedups (MR 2461 — The liquify mode in the transforms tool was greatly sped up.
Adjust smoothing based on stroke speed (MR 2192, manual) — This allows you to reduce smoothing of a stroke with the speed. The idea is that most jitters happen when drawing slowly, so naturally the smoothing needs to be higher when the brush stroke takes longer. Conversely, fast brush strokes need less smoothing.
Example of the pixel art smoothing mode. Left is regular, right is with pixel art smoothing enabled.
Pixelart smoothing mode (MR 2158, manual) — Ken Lo's 2024 Google Summer of Code project, the pixel art stablizer provides better results when drawing with a single pixel line.
Selection toolbar (MR 2422, manual — Ross Rosales' 2025 Google Summer of Code project, the selection toolbar provides a floating bar for when a selection is active.
Multibrush has gained a 'Copy Translate at Intervals' mode (MR 1968, manual) — This allows drawing multiple brushes at set intervals.
Improved number inputs in the shape selection tool (MR 2199) — You can now right-click these to set the units.
Three examples, first a line art with gaps, second without close gaps enabled, third with close gaps enabled. The second image is fully red, while the third only has red inside the perceived outline.
The fill tool also got some love, now sporting Close Gaps functionality (MR 2050 and MR 2079, manual), which allows it to close gaps in the line work when determining the area to fill.
Skeleton and Cat by ShangZhou0
Community Spotlight: Skeleton and Cat by ShangZhou0
Assistants
Sketch of a composition of blocks with the new curve linear perspective filter.
Configuration of the assistant widgets (MR 1966) — The on canvas widget for the assistants have been overhauled, and a duplication function has been added.
Curvelinear perspective assistant. (MR 1960 and MR 2055, manual) — The curve linear assistant is an alternative to the fish-eye point assistant, and uses arcs instead of ellipses.
Filters and Layers
Animation showing the Propagate Colors filter
Propagate Colors Filter has been added. This filter makes it so that an image with colors and transparency is modified to have its colors expand into the transparent areas. Such a thing is very useful for 3D and game texture workflows. There transparency often needs to be handled as a separate texture, and when the colors have been prepared with this filter, it reduces the chance of alignment issues between the transparency and the colors. (MR 2161, manual)
Reset Transparent (MR 1860, manual — A filter related to the above. In the case that a transparent pixel has values, using reset transparent allows you to set all fully transparent pixels to be transparent black.
All our blending modes got double checked for HDR support. Previously, Krita would sometimes clip high range colors when doing compositing with a given blending mode, even if the blending mode supported it. Now, every blend mode that supports HDR will do so. (MR 2294)
Fast Color Overlay filter example, three images after another: first the plain sketch, second the normal overlay mode, which fills all colors with the overlay color, and finally the tint mode, which only tints the black and keeps the white.
Fast Color Overlay Mask. A filter that colorizes a sketch with a given color. This is different from the existing HSV filter, as it is optimized for speed and quick use, with a special button on the layer docker. This will be useful for artists preparing their sketch for inking. (MR 2285, 2318, 2303 and 2282, manual)
Transform shortcuts now work on multiple layers. When using the Mirror, Rotate, Scale, Shear and Offset layer shortcuts while multiple layers are selected, all layers will be transformed (MR 1811).
Curly Hair by Celes
Community Spotlight: Curly Hair by Celes
Dockers
Real Time Capture Mode for the Recorder Docker. Previously, the recorder docker would only capture once every few frames for performance reasons. Now, multi-threaded capturing has been added to the docker, allowing for real time recording (MR 2010).
Dockers can now be added to the pop-up palette. This replaces the on canvas brush editor, which in turn has been changed into a docker. As well, dockers can now also be added as a popup in the toolbar, by adding the "Docker Box" to the toolbar (MR 2062, MR 2104).
Various improvements have been made to the Grids and Guides. In particular a new Isometric mode, which is a little bit more predictable to use, and can be used for hexagonal grids. Grid and guides color configuration is now saved to the document. And finally, there's the ability to turn off either the horizontal or vertical lines in the rectangular grid, allowing for a grid that is a mere line pattern. (MR 2090, manual)
Brushes:
Two new improvements were added for working with textures in the brushes.
Soft texturing mode for the Pattern option (MR 2068, manual) — By default, Krita's texturing option uses the strength and pattern options together to limit the brush by the pattern, based on the strength. This gives a nice textured stroke, much like using a dry brush on a textured piece of paper in real life. The new Soft Texturing mode switches the behaviour of strength, making it instead control how much the pattern has effect on the brush, with at low values the pattern being invisible. This is more akin to switching between a wet and a dry brush over time.
Pattern 'Auto Invert For Eraser' (MR 2264) — When working with the texture option, you might want to keep the texture cohesive, even as you erase. For this reason, we've now added the "Auto Invert For Eraser", which'll invert the texture as you switch to erase mode.
'Kiki Paints Over the Waves' splash, with a filter dialog overlaid. The filter dialog has a curve with a sharp corner in the middle.
Corner mode for curves (MR 2191, manual) — Krita's brush engine uses curves extensively to configure the effects of various sensors on the brush. By default, the points on this curve are smooth cubic curves, which is useful in most cases. However, sometimes you want a little bit more control, so Krita 5.3 now comes with the ability to make sharp corners by Ctrl + clicking a given node. Filters using curves also benefit from this feature.
Example of Marker mode in use, left is Normal, right is Marker
Marker blend mode (MR 2375, manual) — a blend mode that prevents building up opacity across multiple strokes. When used with build-up painting mode, this gives the same effect as the same mode in Drawpile or the marker tool in other programs. Unlike Greater, Marker still blends colors normally even when it doesn't change the opacity of what's on the layer.
Time Keeper by Elixiah
Time Keeper by Elixiah
Files:
Radiance RGBE (.hdr) support (MR 1806) — Krita 5.3 now has support for loading and saving Radiance RGBE files. This is an older but fairly widely used HDR image format, and it should be a boon for people working with HDR images.
New Bundle Creator (MR 1802) — Srirupa Datta's GSoC project, which consisted of overhauling the bundle creator. It now tries to guide you through the bundle creation process, with a new feature being the ability to store tags into bundles as well.
Jpeg-XL: You can now use CICP instead of ICC color profiles to store the color space, as well as save alpha in lossless mode (MR 2077).
Jpeg-XL: Support was added for Multi-Layered and Multi-Pages JXL files in addition to animated JXL files (MR 2411).
Support for Text, Shapes and Guides for PSD (MR 1954) — Krita can now load and save shapes, vector masks and guides from and to PSD. In addition, it can load text from PSD, including the advanced text information, like text on path and open type features. Saving text to PSD is possible, but unfortunately more limited due the complexity of the format.
Python Plugins:
This release contains several python API improvements. Most notable is that we now have an API for painting brushstrokes (MR 2195, MR 2198 and MR 2211).
Wrappers were added for the following qt widgets:
AngleSelector (MR 1979)
SliderSpinboxes (MR 1991)
FileDialog (MR 2402)
And finally we added more methods to...
Scratchpad (MR 2087)
Grids and Guides (MR 2087)
Document autosave state (MR 2160)
Canvas panning (MR 2338)
Finally, the following bundled python plugins were added:
Mutator Brush Plugin (MR 2322) — A python extension for Krita which adds brush variation through action-invoked settings randomization.
Python Palette Docker re-added (MR 2374) — The python palette docker was ree-nabled. This docker is largely meant for palette editing experiments, having support for export to gpl and svg.
Workflow buttons docker (MR 2210) — The workflow buttons docker allows you to configure your own little docker with all sorts of buttons, with a highlight being the ability to order and resize them to your choosing.
First Painting of 2025 by Montie
First of 2025 by Montie (@carlomontie, @carlo_montie)
Other
Separate eraser cursors for non-brush tools (MR 1624) — When drawing it can sometimes be hard to remember whether you are in eraser mode, so there's an update for all the tool cursors with an eraser icon.
Pen tilt tweaks (MR 2314, MR 2337, manual) — Krita has support for the tilt direction reported by some models of drawing tablets. However, not all tablets support tilt, and furthermore, if you create a brush as a left-handed user, it can feel very different for a right handed user. To that end controls were added to allow adding extra pen tilt offset for different handedness, as well as the ability to set a default pen tilt when the tablet does not support tilt.
Soft Proofing overhaul (MR 2279, manual) — Previously, our softproofing did not allow black point compensation on both transforms, leading to a difference in looks compared to converting the document to said profile directly. We've overhauled the softproofing settings to allow configuring both transforms, with defaults to use either the current monitor profile configuration or simulate paper white and black (Note: Wayland users, due the newness of the Wayland protocol, softproofing will behave a little differently in Absolute Colormetric mode, check the manual for more details).
CSS palette support (MR 2119) — The palette docker can now load .css files with classes representing the swatches.
More actions available in Canvas Input Settings (MR 1801) — This adds a variety of actions, like color sampler, deselect, layer activation and some tool activation to the canvas input settings so they can be activated by touch gestures.
Save global color history, option to save per document (MR 1424) — Color history can now be saved either globally or per document.
Zoom shortcuts now have the ability to zoom to mouse or zoom to canvas center separately (MR 2152) — Before Krita would use the mouse to zoom to cursor and the keyboard keys to zoom to center of the canvas. This split up makes it explicit to which of the two a shortcut will zoom. The default will now zoom to canvas center.
Krita 5.2 Release Notes
Previous Post | Monday, 9 January 2023
After 5.0's big resource rewrite and 5.1's general improvements, we decided that Krita 5.2 should focus on tackling some of the biggest pain points in Krita. As such, this release contains a lot of background work that we hope to build future improvements on top of, as well as a healthy assortment of new features and fixes!
Animation
We're happy to share that two major pain points for animation got tackled: synchronized playback of audio (MR 1323) and simplifying video export (MR 1599).
In order to fix various audio-visual sync issues when playing animations with attached audio, Emmet and Eoin reworked much of the animation playback to use the MLT framework behind the scenes. MLT is a proven and flexible framework used by video editing programs like Kdenlive and designed with frame-by-frame synchronization in mind, and should help Krita animators feel confident that their key frames will stay lined up with their voice work or background music, both inside of the program and in their exported animation videos.
Speaking of the video export option, FFmpeg is a massively important program that manages (among other things) rendering and conversion of audio and video formats. Previously, Krita required users to point to an FFmpeg executable somewhere on their system in order to use many of the features pertaining to video, such as animation video export, video import as animation, and the Recorder Docker for recording your painting sessions. This was mostly good enough for studio use, but it was still difficult to set up for users who aren't that technical, and almost impossible to do on locked down systems like Android or even a school computer. To make this better for almost everyone, we spent some time to include a basic build of FFmpeg into Krita itself, which should include "out-of-the-box" support for every free and open container and codec format under the sun. (Along with Emmet and Eoin, big thanks to Amyspark, Ivan, Sharaf and Dmitry who put in a lot of effort to help get every possible format building and working across various platforms.) Oh, and by the way, Krita continues to support the use of alternative FFmpeg binaries in the rare case that you need to additional features that we aren't able to provide.
Note: As of the writing this, animation export via FFmpeg is sadly still not working on Krita for Android due to restrictions of the platform itself, but we are looking for solutions to this going forward.
Text
Because our original one didn't give artists enough control over the underlying text (making it hard to use and extend, as well as write a better text tool on top of), Wolthera completely rewrote Krita's text layout engine.
Demonstration of some new text layout features include (but are not limited to): text-in-shape, text-on-path and color font support.
With the new layout engine, we can handle everything the old engine could, as well as text-on-path, vertical text, and wrapped text and text in shape. We can now also access OpenType features as well as render emoji (bitmap and colrV0 types) (MR 1607, MR 1767).
This was no small feat and is only just laying the foundation for more improvements to come! For Krita 5.2, you’ll still have to use the SVG code editor to access these new features, but for Krita 5.3 we’ll be working on the text tool proper, making it on-canvas and allowing you to configure the new features with menus and presets.
Tools
Dmitry Kazakov overhauled the cumulative undo feature (MR 1780), this feature allows merging undo operations, which is useful when painting many strokes. We’ve simplified the code and made the options more intuitive to use.
The ability to anti-alias the results of the Sketch Brush Engine has been added by Przemysaw Gob (MR 1425).
Freya Lupen added the ability to transform all selected layers at once with the transform tool (MR 1792).
Fill Tool
Deif Lou has added a new mode to the fill tool: Fill areas of similar color (MR 1577). In addition, both the fill tool and the enclose fill tool have gained Stop growing at the darkest and/or most opaque pixels and Fill all regions until a specific boundary color (MR 1549, 1560), as well as a toggle to use the same blending mode as the brush tool, or to have its own (MR 1749).
Four images next to one another, the first only shows a dot, the rest show how starting a fill at that dot will have different fill results with different options.
From the manual, filling the example in image A at the red dot will result in B for regular fill, in C with expanding the fill with a number of pixels and in D with the 'fill to boundary color' enabled.
Selection Tool
The Contiguous Selection Tool also received the same selection extending option as the Fill tool (MR 1549), and the ability to set the opacity of the selection decoration (MR 1697). Furthermore, the selection decoration has been made DPI-aware (MR 1774).
Shortcuts
Several new actions have been added:
Showing select-layers-menu in action: An on-canvas menu with the layers of the image shown, stating 'rain_shining, rain_simple, clouds and select all layers
Demonstrating the “Select Layers Menu” option, this menu shows the layers under the cursor.
Toggle Eraser Preset by Freya Lupen, (MR 1689) allows you to switch to the preset that would otherwise be stored for the ‘eraser’ end of the tablet stylus. Not all stylii have an eraser side, and some people really prefer to activate it by hotkey.
Sample Screen Color by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1720) allows you to select a color anywhere on the screen, even outside Krita, similar to the Sample button in the Select a Color dialogue.
Select Layers From Menu canvas input setting by killy |0veufOrever, (MR 1766) allows you to select a layer on-canvas from a dropdown menu.
Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme, courtesy of Freya Lupen, (MR 1565).
Krita can now detect conflicts in the canvas input setting shortcuts thanks to Sharaf Zaman, (MR 1725).
We have no shortage of plans for how to make things better, but only with stable community contributions can we keep a core team of professional developers working on Krita.
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Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.
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Dockers
Mathias Wein brought us a ‘Wide Gamut Color Selector’. This selector almost the same as the advanced color selector, except it’s capable of selecting colors in wide-gamuts instead of just sRGB. We eventually want to remove the Advanced Color Selector in favor of this one, when we’re sure we haven’t lost any functionality (MR 1600).
Wide gamut color selector is shown here as a gradient-square with a rainbow colored circle around it.
The Layers docker got some extra display options:
On Android, selecting multiple layers is tricky, therefore Sharaf implemented extra checkboxes on the side of the layers (MR 1665).
Freya Lupen added the ability to see extra information about the layer opacity and blending modes (MR 1501, MR 1520, MR 1615), as well as making the automatic layer suffixes optional MR 1498. On top of that, it’s now possible to change the scaling filter of file-layers (MR 1784).
Mcelaru Tiberiu has ensured the brush preset docker looks good in horizontal mode: MR 1670.
Brush Preset History is now configurable (MR 1623).
Undo, Redo and more for the palette docker (MR 1617).
File Formats
We changed how CMYK blending modes work (with a toggle in the config), (MR 1796), this aligns the blending modes to the way Photoshop handles blending modes in CMYK, simplifying exchange of PSD files with clients that require CMYK PSDs.
Rasyuqa A. H. has been improving the JPEG-XL saving and loading code, implementing CMYK for JPEG-XL, improving compression by giving the JXL library more color space information, better metadata handling and support for saving and loading raster layers to JPEG-XL, (MR 1656, 1693, 1673, 1722, 1795). He also improved WebP compression (MR 1785), as well improving ICC transfer characteristic code (MR 1667 and 1690).
A side-by-side comparison of the internal XYB profile and the original image profile. The example consists of a closeup of a cartoon eye that shows visible ringing with the original profile.
By using JPEG's XYB color space instead of the original profile, the JPEG-XL encoder is able to give much better results both in terms of artifacts and compression on images with extreme highlights, like those that are 40 times as bright as regular white.
Cedric Ressler has improved EXR multi-layer handling (MR 1677).
Amyspark has improved the RAW import, both the UI (MR 1679) and sped it up by using tiles (MR 1694).
Amyspark has also improved the webP exporter by adding better metadata handling and animation support. (MR 1468).
Other
One of the other big technical updates we did was to rewrite the brush settings code to work with the library Lager. Our old code had the brush presets and the widgets entangled in increasingly convoluted ways, which made it hard to extend the settings. We hope to use this work as a basis to redesign the brush settings widget (MR 1334).
Wrap around mode can now be limited to vertical or Horizontal direction, making it simpler to creating looping backgrounds.
Freya Lupen has added wrap-around directions for the wraparound mode (MR 1524).
Freya Lupen has also added ability to remove single Recent Document entries (MR 1666).
Joshua Goins has improved the tablet tester, so it now has access to tilt data (MR 1678).
Sharaf Zaman implemented easier resource location selection for android (MR 1771).
Stephen Wilson has made sure that Krita resets document metadata when using a template (MR 1769).
Agata Cacko has spent a significant amount of time on getting better display names of color profiles (MR 1768).
Amyspark has been cleaning up the UI left and right (MR 1683, MR 1696, MR 1702, MR 1701, MR 1732, MR 1744, MR 1742, MR 1772).
Shuqi Xiu has added a Lambert shading blending mode (MR 1566).
Thank You
And that’s it! We hope that Krita 5.2 has a little something to help everyone make art.
Finally, a massive thank you to the everybody involved, including all of our contributors, development fund members and, of course, our community of artists. As an open source and community-driven project, Krita simply wouldn’t be what it is today without an entire community of people testing, coding, writing documentation, creating brushes, translating, chipping in, spreading the word, and generally supporting the project however they can.
And if you're reading that wondering if you can help too, don't hesitate to get in touch--because there's always more to be done on our mission to make a better tool for every human artist.