A few days ago I overviewed Calligra, the KDE office suite, which also includes Krita, the powerful image editing tool. Although I’ve mentioned it as being free, it looks like Krita Gemini, which is the name by which Krita goes on Steam, actually costs $22.99, covering the work needed to build, release and maintain it on Steam.
Krita 2.8.1 in KDE:
So you can start ordering Krita Gemini now for $22.99, while in early access. According to the Steam page, Krita is to be expected in May:
“We’re hard at work, aiming to release the full Krita Gemini in May and we wanted to start getting feedback and building more of a user community as soon as possible.”
Other features that are being worked on include:
- improving the UI and adding some additional features to the Sketch view
- Doing more with the Steam Cloud in order to share more information between devices
- Steam Workshop for presets and templates
- Performance and stability
- Linux release
Krita is a powerful image editing application with support for layers, lots of filters, exporting and importing from a big number of image formats, templates, and more.
Steam is can be a very good move for any open-source application since it provides a pretty sure way to monetize it in some way, and I can only anticipate new development and features for Krita if all goes well (and it should).
If you can’t wait for the Steam release and want to try the latest Krita, follow the instructions I provided in this tutorial to install Krita 2.8.1.
