Software » Animation 3D » Krita 5.3

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 transpar...

Clean and Flexible Interface

Art by Sad-tea
An intuitive user interface that stays out of your way. The dockers and panels can be moved and customized for your specific workflow. Once you have your setup, you can save it as your own workspace. You can also create your own shortcuts for commonly used tools.

Learn the interface
Customizable Layout
Over 30 dockers for additional functionality
Dark and light color themes
All the tools you need

Beautiful Brushes
Over 100 professionally made brushes that come preloaded. These brushes give a good range of effects so you can see the variety of brushes that Krita has to offer.



Brush Stabilizers
Have a shaky hand? Add a stabilizer to your brush to smoothen it out. Krita includes 3 different ways to smooth and stabilize your brush strokes. There is even a dedicated Dynamic Brush tool where you can add drag and mass.



Vector & Text
Built-in vector tools help you create comic panels. Select a word bubble template from the vector library and drag it on your canvas. Change the anchor points to create your own shapes and libraries. Add text to your artwork as well with the text tool. Krita uses SVG to manage its vector format.



Brush Engines
Customize your brushes with over 9 unique brush engines. Each engine has a large amount of settings to customize your brush. Each brush engine is made to satisfy a specific need such as the Color Smudge engine, Shape engine, Particle engine, and even a filter engine. Once you are done creating your brushes, you can save them and organize them with Krita's unique tagging system.



Wrap-around mode
It is easy to create seamless textures and patterns now. The image will make references of itself along the x and y axis. Continue painting and watch all of the references update instantly. No more clunky offsetting to see how your image repeats itself.



Resource Manager
Import brush and texture packs from other artists to expand your tool set. If you create some brushes that you love, share them with the world by creating your own bundles. Check out the brush packs that are available in the Resources area.

Visit Resources Area
Simple and Powerful 2D Animation

Turn Krita into an animation studio by switching to the animation workspace. Bring your drawings to life by layering your animations, importing audio, and fine tuning your frames. When you are finished, share with your friends by exporting your creation to a video. Or just export the images to continue working in another application.



Features
Multiple layers and audio support
Supports 1,000s of frames on timeline
Playback controls with pausing, playing, and timeline scrubbing
Onion skinning support to help with in-betweens
Tweening with opacity and position changes


Change start time, end time, and FPS
Export results to video or still images
Drag and drop frames to organize timings
Shortcuts for duplicating and pulling frames
Performance tweaking with drop-frame option
Productivity features
Drawing Assistants
Use a drawing aid to assist you with vanishing points and straight lines. The Assistant Tool comes with unique assistants to help you make that perfect shape. These tools range from drawing ellipses to creating curvilinear perspective with the Fisheye Point tool.


Layer Management
In addition to painting, Krita comes with vector, filter, group, and file layers. Combine, order, and flatten layers to help your artwork stay organized.


Select & Transform
Highlight a portion of your drawing to work on. There are additional features that allow you to add and remove from the selection. You can further modify your selection by feathering and inverting it. Paint a selection with the Global Selection Mask.


Full Color Management
Krita supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR. This allows you to incorporate Krita into your existing color management pipeline. Krita comes with a wide variety of ICC working space profiles for every need.


GPU Enhanced
With OpenGL or Direct3D enabled, you will see increased canvas rotation and zooming speed. The canvas will also look better when zoomed out. The Windows version supports Direct3D 11 in place of OpenGL.


PSD Support
Open PSD files that even Photoshop cannot open. Load and save to PSD when you need to take your artwork across different programs.


HDR Painting
Krita is the only painting application that lets you open, save, edit and author HDR and scene-referred images. With OCIO and OpenEXR support, you can manipulate the view to examine HDR images.


Python Scripting
Powerful API for creating your own widgets and extending Krita. With using PyQt and Krita's own API, there are many possibilities. A number of plugins come pre-installed for your reference.


Training Resources
In addition to training and educational material found on the Internet, Krita produces its own training material to help you learn all of the tools fast.