Karaz Beta-3 Released

2025-05-06

After the big feature release that was Beta-2, Beta-3(including 3.1) is a major polish, performance and quality of life release, but a good number of new features snuck their way in, here are the highlights:

The Outline Gradient:

Let's stat with a fun new addition: the outline gradient, it can be used to make many fun effects like these:

Text effect with outline gradient

Silhouette effect with outline gradient

Long Shadow

Long shadow is the type of shadow cast by mountains and trees, basically any light coming to the object at an angle. A common use -besides the evident use of regular realistic shadows- is the stylistic infinite shadows, for things like text.

Long shadow can be used to give a realistic shadow effect on the wall

Infinite Long shadow is a popular text effect

And of course you can -like all other shadow effects- change the “shadow” color to anything you want:

“Shadows” can be colorful

Inner Shadow

Inner shadow is similar to drop shadow, requires transparency, but the difference is that it shades the inside of the image itself rather than the outside. It can be used in many things, such as an engraving effect, lighting effect, both as shading and highlighting -as you can set the "shadow" color to white to give a highlight effect- or just to add a nice gradient.

Text effect created by a sharp inner shadow with an outline

Engravings/holes are given depth with inner shadow, here coupled with a background fill

Map Based Blur

Blur can now be variable across the image, the strength of the blur is dictated by the strength map. This can give a much more realistic depth of field effect than the old way of mask mixing.

Map based blur coupled with a soft light blend gives a nice tilt shift effect

Map based blur coupled with a radial gradient can give a fast and stylistic depth of field effect

And More From 3.1

One of the main improvements in Beta 3.1 is the sheer performance boost it offers, for both brushing and effects. Now real time brushing with effect updating is much smoother without requiring a beefy machine:

Boosted performance leads to smoother brushing with effects and faster iteration and experimentation

Another 3.1 feature is the eyedropper histogram. Histograms give important information about your image, and as as you can see they can also give you a better understanding of what tools and nodes do to your image:

Histogram can tell you a lot of information about your image

And finally, the clone tool, we added the "in-place" option. When this checkbox is checked, the current reference point is ignored, and the same place of the reference image will be cloned to the target image. If you edited an image, and only liked a certain part of it, now you can clone that part much faster without the slower process of mixing and masking.


Those were the new features highlights of the release, hope you will enjoy using them, but the real star of the show is the optimizations, improvements and quality of life changes that happened in this release that you can only experience by trying it for yourself, so grab it from here, and I hope you enjoy it.

Karaz Beta-2 Released

2024-11-24

Karaz Beta-2 is out, and the big new feature of Beta-2 is the brush system:

There are too many improvements and bug fixes in this release to cover all of them, but a few that stand out are:

Image to Channel Node Redesign

The new redesign of Image to Channel node (I2C) is both simpler and more powerful than the old one, it basically functions as a RGBA channel mixer, but with other properties available like hue, saturation, and value. This allows it to do useful things that the older design could not.

For example of a use not possible with the old design, to remove the background from the edge node result -or any B&W image- you can use I2C to swap the alpha to any of the other channels, like so:

This can be done by:

Pattern node Apply to Alpha

another quality of life change is adding the ability to only apply the patter/noise to the opaque parts of the input. A very common application is text styling, in the older version you had to use channels to image node to get the RGB colors from the pattern, and the alpha from the text, like so: