Open-source painting application Krita gets a version bump

Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer of open-source painting software Krita has announced the release of version 3.0.

3.0 is a major version bump and with this release the project now has its own repository and wiki. The main focus of the developers for this release was code cleaning. With this release Krita has been ported to the latest Qt 5 and KDE Framework 5, thus keeping the codebase modern.

Thanks to funding from its recent Kickstarter campaign, Krita 3.0 is capable of doing proper frame-by-frame animation with support for multiple layers, playback speed, onion skinning, etc.

Krita is available for Linux, Windows and Mac, although until now Mac support was lagging. With this release Mac users can expect better, but not perfect, support. According to the Krita 3.0 release notes, “We also started work on making OSX a first-class platform for Krita, but though we’ve already done lots of work, that is still a work in progress.”

I think the Krita developers should seriously target iOS in an upcoming release, as iPad Pro is emerging as a very powerful device for graphic artists.

Despite being a KDE project, Krita has formed a foundation to help developers, users and artists who use Krita. In addition to that Krita also runs successful Kickstarter campaigns to add more features to the software and bring it to more platforms.

Krita is a powerful open-source application that belongs to the elite club of open-source software, including the likes of VLC, Firefox and Chromium, that are way ahead of their closed source counterparts.