Krita Released 6.0 Beta with Qt6 Port & Native Wayland Support

Krita, KDE’s digital painting software, released the first Beta of the next major 6.0 and 5.3 versions yesterday.

The 2 versions were released in parallel. Krita 6 and 5.3 share all the same features, except, that 5.3 is built on top of Qt5, while 6.0 features Qt6 port and native Linux Wayland support.

Thanks to Wayland support, in particular Wayland Color Management protocol, the 6.0 Beta brings HDR support for Linux as well as fractional scaling and 10 bit display support.

Besides the Qt framework change and Wayland support, the new version also completely overhauled the Text tool. Instead of opening the edit text dialog, it finally supports on-canvas edit just like other image editors do.

It as well supports wrapped text, text in shape, text on path, and text Properties docker, allowing to configure text font family, style, font size, align, as well as few dozens other properties.

In addition to Text Properties docker, the Text tool also features glyph palette to select alternate glyphs that may be present in the currently used font, and new Type Setting Mode that provides controls to edit Font Size, Baseline Shift, Line Height and Dominant Baseline directly on canvas.

The new version as well introduced a new knife tool (Comic Panel Editing tool) for vector objects, allowing to cut through a shape with a gap width.

So far there are 3 gap widths to choose from, and it supports removing a gap (merge shapes). And, it will probably support custom gap width, snap, move the gutter etc functionalities in future releases.

Knife Tool

The Beta of Krita 5.3 and 6.0 added loading and saving support for Radiance RGB, the old but fairly widely used HDR image format.

It also added support multi-layered and multi-pages and animated JXL files, new Bundle Creator, as well as loading and saving shapes, vector masks and guides fro PSD.

Other changes include:

Add Fast Color Overlay filter.
Add Propagate Colors filter.
CSS palette support.
Multibrush ‘Copy Translate at Intervals’ mode.
Add Python Painting API.
Ability to add dockers to the pop-up palette.
Real-time capturing support for the recording docker plugin.
Refactor blendmodes to properly support HDR modes.
Transform shortcuts support for multi-selected layers.
Rotate the transform bounding box with ctrl+alt.

For more about the new versions, see the official release note.

Get Krita 5.3/6.0 Beta

The source tarballs, as well as the official packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android are available to download in KDE website via the link below:

Download Krita Unstable

For Linux on Intel/AMD platform, select download the .AppImage, then add executable permission and run the launch the image editor.

Tips: Ubuntu since 22.04 needs to install libfuse2 for AppImage support by running the command below in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):