Week highlights: new releases of Krita, RapidRAW, and Gradia; MIDI strumming in Ardour.
Krita 5.2.13
The Krita team released a bugfix update. Some of the notable fixes are targeted at users of Android and devices with touch input:
- Background saving has been revamped
- Devices running Android v15 with a lot of memory are now supported.
- The Transform tool now works with touch input.
See here for a more complete list of changes.
RapidRAW 1.4.x
New RapidRAW releases now take longer, but the pace is still impressive. This version features several notable enhancements. I’ll take a deeper dive in a separate post, so here is the list of changes:
- Auto-culling to help you detect similar photos and discard blurry ones (in the screenshot below).
- Collage maker that distributes a selection of photos over a configurable grid.
- New color calibration panel hidden by default, for tweaking hue and saturation of primary RGB channels.
- Preset importer (says “other common photo editors”, but I don’t see any in the list, just the ones by RapidRAW).
- New section in Settings to select which functionality to show in the UI (this is where you enable the color calibration panel).
- Sorting by Exif data: a small selection of Exif fields is available (Date taken, ISO, Focus length, etc.).
- Major improvement ot local contrast tools.
As usual, downloads and the full list of changes are on GitHub.
Gradia 1.11
Alexander Vanhee released an update to his screenshot annotation tool that is growing into something larger, it seems.
Release highlights:
- At 100% zoom, scrolling the mouse wheel now changes the tool size.
- Highlighter colors are now more transparent.
- Images on the home page now have drop shadows.
- Additional resizing options for tools like Arrow and Rectangle.
- Color and width can now be changed for annotations you already added.
- Image background got some new presets.
- Angle selector on the gradient background tab has been improved.
- Tesseract-based OCR is now available.
I’d love to include a screenshot of the OCR feature and some of the other new features. Alas, the Flatpak build hasn’t been updated yet, and my custom build is faulty and doesn’t really work. Sorry about that!
Ardour
There’s a lot of under-the-hood work happening, but the team recently merged a patch that adds a simplistic MIDI note strumming feature. It’s nowhere as sophisticated as the MIDI Strum filter by Robin Gareus, but it can be enhanced in the future.
Artworks
Coral Ship Wreck by Jan Rozanski, made with Photoshop, 3DCoat, and Blender:
The Gladiators by Ken Li, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Spirit Hollow by Ignacio Bruno, made with GIMP:
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