Krita for Krita: new functionality for Krita 2.9

A little more than three weeks ago, the Crete project launched a fundraising campaign for Crete 2.9 on Kickstarter. For all participants in the process, this was the first experience of organizing such things, and the developers faced many difficulties on the way: from trying to make a promotional video with the participation of three people living in different parts of Europe to defense from the trolls in the "specialized" forums. Despite this, the campaign can already be considered successful: at the moment the project has collected the minimum necessary amount for release 2.9 to take place. Contributions made during the remaining five days will only determine whether the project will achieve its first stretch goal and how many new features will be added.

However, the news flow somehow lost the news that in the process of Crete, the artists had long been waiting for functions: fast editing of highlights and convenient line-art. In this article I would like to talk about these innovations.

Line art - delayed pen stabilization

The developers finally took care of the convenience of the artists. Often, the process of creating an image consists of the following steps:
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1) Create a sketch with a rough brush.
2) Accurate stroking of the image contours with a thin but stiff brush.
3) Fill color obtained areas.


Illustration by Wolthera van Hövell tot Westerflier

To facilitate the second stage, a new type of line smoothing was added: “Stabilizer with a delay”. It allows you to keep the line smooth and at the same time control the parameters of the brush: pressing force, rotation, etc. Yes, in Crete, and before that, weighted smoothing of lines was present, but the new method works in a completely different way. The video from Pavel Geraskin best demonstrates how this feature works:


(many may notice similarities with similar Blender and zBrush tools)

Straight lines

Moreover, the developers have finally redone the tool for drawing straight lines. Now it not only has a preview of the drawn line and is available by pressing the 'V' key, but also allows you to control the pressing force while the pen is running along the line. This is the main difference from the functionality offered in MyPaint. Timothee Giet Videos:

Quick editing of masks and selections, isolated mode with the Alt key

It so happened that all the selections in Crete are just nodes of the layer tree. Each selection is a Selection Mask node. Each mask defines a selected area when editing the parent node and all its descendants. Such a mask can be edited not only with special tools, it can be drawn with ordinary brushes, filtered, filled with gradients and fills. The code base for this functionality existed for a long time, but it was not very convenient to use it: global allocations were not available in the form of masks and it was impossible to quickly translate them into isolated mode.

Now these problems are solved. When the Show Global Selection Masks option is enabled, the global selection mask will be shown in the layer tree and can be edited by any available means.

In addition, you can now hold down the Alt key, click on any layer, and Crete will enter the isolated editing mode of the layer. This mode is available for all types of layers, including global selections.

Instead of conclusion

These innovations are only the beginning of those buns that are planned for Crete 2.9. By the end of the year, developers will implement from 12 to 24 new features! Now you can try the new functionality by downloading packages for Windows or installing Krita Lime under Linux.