Hello to all the Krita community artists here on Steam. Today I'm happy to bring a double-whammy of great news to you all!

This week marks the release of Krita 5.3.1!

We technically released Krita 5.3 last week, but it was quickly brought to our attention that certain users on Windows platforms with PowerToys installed were running into serious issues with user interface performance. Long story short, that meant calling an audible and delaying the release here on Steam at the 11th hour. It was a tricky one to verify and track down, but luckily we were able to find the cause relatively quickly and fix it in 5.3.1.

But more to the point, this marks the first real release in the Krita 5.3 series, which contains a huge number of new features, improvements, optimizations and bug fixes.

Krita's Text Tool has been totally rewritten to allow for direct on-canvas editing, powerful css styling, the ability to conform text to shapes and curves, and too many more features to list here. We have a handy new tool for laying out comic panels and gutters. We've got a new built-in python plugin for randomly mutating brush parameters for more dynamic painting. There's a new pixel art-friendly brush smoothing mode to create nice flowing pixel curves. There's major performance improvements to the Liquify tool.

And much much more!

Instead of trying to list it all here, please head on over to the official Krita website where, as always, you can read the full Krita 5.3 patch notes with all of the juicy details[krita.org].

Finally, and by popular demand, Krita artists who have chosen to support us here on Steam have the ability to automatically sync their Krita documents (.KRA files) between machines using SteamCloud.

Yes! That's right.

You can now effortlessly share 2.5GB (or 250 files, whichever comes first) worth of .KRA save files between any and all of your Steam-powered machines, any form factor and any operating system.

:steammocking: IMPORTANT NOTE: SteamCloud is great, but it's not a backup strategy for your precious artwork! As always, we recommend having your artwork backed up using the 3-2-1 data backup method: at least 3 copies of your files, at least 2 stored locally and 1 stored remotely. Don't trust any cloud service to keep your data safe forever. Save yourself heartache and back your stuff up!

SteamCloud for KRA files is active right now as I write this, but this functionality is still new and there isn't really any in-app user interface for it. As such, it currently takes a little bit of effort on the user's part to get working and maintain.

Here's how it works:

• Currently, you can only sync 2.5GB or 250 files via SteamCloud, whichever comes first.

• Files that you want to be synced via SteamCloud MUST be saved into a specific folder:

• -- On Windows: [c]%USERPROFILE%\\Pictures\\Krita\\SteamCloud[/c]

• -- On Linux: [c]~/Pictures/Krita/SteamCloud[/c]

• -- On MacOS: [c]~Pictures/Krita/SteamCloud[/c]

• You MUST save files into the appropriate location for Steam Cloud to sync them, other files will not be synced.

• ONLY Krita document files ending in with the ".kra" file extension will be synced.

• Steam will automatically pull save data when Krita is launched, and it will automatically push save data when Krita is closed.

• If Krita hasn't been closed on one machine, you will run into sync errors when launching it on another machine. Make sure that everything is saved and closed properly before trying to open sync files through SteamCloud.

• Remember, you are responsible for protecting and backing up your data! Don't rely on anyone else to protect your artwork!

Users have been asking for this for a long time, and this is just the beginning of our plans for leveraging SteamCloud to make things better for Krita artists here on Steam! Give this feature a try and please come to us with feedback. And stay tuned, because we're hoping to deliver more useful Steam-related features to our community later this year!

Finally, as always, I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you.

Krita is an open source project made by human artists, for human artists, and we simply could not do any of these things without the active help and support from our amazing global community.

Not only do people constantly volunteer their knowledge and talents to this project through testing, bug reports, code, translations, and more. But we also rely heavily on financial support for our community, especially from all of you who have chosen to support our project here on Steam!

More then ever, I think the world needs human creativity, artistry and character. Everything we do, we do it so that real human artists can put pixels on a screen to make something expressive, cool, cute or uniquely them. And none of that would be possible without the support that we have received from users like you.

We hope Krita 5.3 serves you well!

On behalf of the whole Krita Team, Thank you for your support!

Emmet