Week highlights: new releases of Krita, Bonsai, OBS Studio, and Kdenlive; new features in GIMP, FontForge, and Ardour.
GIMP
Here are some of the latest changes in the development branch:
- CmykStudent’s patch that adds support for MyPaint v2 brush engine features (sans spectral blending) is now merged and will be part of GIMP 3.2.
- CmykStudent also added support for Sketchbook-specific TIFF files, which means setting layer selection, visibility of the background layer, layer blend mode and color tag, and reading group layers.
- Niels De Graef and Michael Natterer (it’s been a while!) have been porting the controller configuration part of the Preferences dialog to use newer widgets.
Krita 5.2.10
This is a bugfix release (with another one likely coming within a week). You can find the list of fixes in this announcement. The team also mentioned that they are now focusing on upcoming releases of Krita 5.3.0 (new features) and Krita 6.0.0 (Qt6 port, initial Wayland support).
FontForge
I haven’t followed FontForge development for some years. So it’s good to know (thanks to Nathan Willis) that the program now renders previews in the Metrics view with HarfBuzz. The same contributor has been working on a GTK3 port for a while, too.
If you’ve been around long enough, you probably recall that there already was an attempt to create a GTK-based UI years ago when the original developer was still around. That didn’t work the last time, so maybe this time it will.
Bonsai 0.8.3
The new version of Bonsai (formerly BlenderBIM) comes with 770 new features and fixes. Here are some of the changes:
- Blender 4.5 (currently at RC1) support.
- buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) now supports multiple dictionaries, using dictionaries both in classifications and properties, and a few other new features.
- Various small improvements in IFC5D support.
- Openings and spatial elements now have support for arrays.
- Topology representation items are now editable again.
- IfcSQL is now a lot more robust.
- IfcApplications can now be managed in the interface.
- A new special UI to generically edit any attribute pointing to an object.
See here for the announcement.
OBS Studio 31.1
This release of OBS Studio brings various new features:
- Support for Windows on ARM
- Preview zoom controls
- Support for multitrack video on macOS and Linux
- Support for color format/space/range GPU conversion
- QVBR rate control for VA-API
- Explicit sync support for PipeWire screen capture
- Support for hardware-accelerated browser source on Linux
See here for the full list of changes.
Kdenlive 25.04.3
This update brings half a dozen minor bugfixes. Meanwhile, contributor balooii balooii has been steadily submitting various cosmetic user interface fixes, improving UI contrast and HiDPI support. Recently, they also contributed a patch (currently in review) that adds a draggable rotation anchor to do non-centered rotation of clips.
Ardour
Paul continued working on pianoroll windows and related functionality, then switched back to implementing recording audio in the Cue sequencer. He also began extending recently added support for keyboard control for automation points. Now when you press Enter to add a new automation point, you automatically get an input box to type the new value. This isn’t finished yet, though.
Artworks
Alive by Muhammad Fahad, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Pact by Sravan NCS, made with Blender, Zbrush, and Photoshop Elements:
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