Approximately 1600 commits by more than a dozen authors make up the difference between Krita 2.1 and Krita 2.2. Hundreds of bugs, too many to enumerate were fixed. While Krita 2.2 still isn't the no-excuses release that everyone should be able to use for real work, it's a very solid piece of work with many interesting new features and important improvements.

Krita 2.2 includes the first third of Lukas' sponsored work on Krita: trunk froze for the release while he was in the middle of a lot of other improvements. Those will be in 2.3!

This list is very low-level, culled from the svn commit log. For a list of highlights, see the release announcement instead.

• Improvements to the multi-platform compatibility, especially for Microsoft Visual C++
• Implement presets for brush engine settings, including loading and saving
• Enable the Tiles3 tile engine by Dmitry Kazakov as default (the image pyramid code is disabled by default)
• Many memory leaks fixed and a lot of performance improvements when painting, applying filters or redrawing the image
• New brush engine: Grid Brush
• Add color options to brush engines
• Paint vectors with the krita geometrically painting tools when painting on a vector layer.
• Resize the current brush size with shift-drag on the canvas
• Show brush outline and fix 3D brush representation on opengl canvas
• New color selector: digital mixer
• OpenShiva is now thread-safe
• Support progress report for OpenShiva-based filters
• Fix painting with OpenCTL-based colorspaces
• Fix the random generator
• Fix loading/saving of DPI information in jpeg files
• Fix loading/saving of DPI information in png files
• Add support for blending modes and opacity to masks
• Add color picker and pan mode to the freehand painting tool
• Add shortcut to toggle docker visibility
• Use Enkithan's icons in many places
• Fix loading and saving in various formats on Windows (bmp, jpeg, tiff, pdf)
• Improve performance of the PDF import filter
• Create a ppm import/export filter
• Implement keyboard shortcut to switch between foreground and background color
• Don't record layer's visibility and lock changes in undo history
• Fix crash on adding a transparency mask to a shape layer
• Fix painting in 16 bit float RGBA layers
• Spray paintop can spray images now, with scaling, rotation and hsv transformations. Many more improvements to the spay paintop.
• Fix crash when changing exposure setting when the OpenGL canvas is in us
• Create thumbnails for .kra files so file managers can show previews of the contents of .kra files
• Add a JPEG2000 import/export filter
• Add an XCF import filter
• Add a right-click quick selection palette for brushes and colors
• Add a linear-light RGB profile.
• Add many options to the Pixel brush engine, like rotation angle
• Show thumbnail for masks in the layerbox
• Enhance the dynadraw brush engine
• Fix misplacing of vector objects after cropping
• Normalize when selection is an ellipse, fixes selection when dragging right to left
• Add CTL-based color transformations
• Add dodge/burn filter
• Implement alpha-locking when painting
• Fix saving of layer groups in OpenRaster
• Improve the line tool: shift contrainst to multiples of 15 degrees.
• Optimize new layers: use default pixel color instead of filling the whole layer with real pixels
• Make autosave configurable and make it work for non-native files.
• Redesign the selection tool option widget, added keyboard shortcuts to switch between modes and reorganize the code
• Add scaling/rotate for shape layers
• Fix usability issues in the image/layer resize and scale dialog
• Fix horizontal emboss
• Improve ui of the blur filter
• Improve the convolution code and start using FFTW3
• Redesign the brush settings popup: make it detachable and add a scratch area.
• Move the rate option from the brush presets to the tool
• Re-implement the OpenEXR import/export filter
• Fix problems with OpenGL on Windows
• Refactor the geometric painting tools and improve the usability
• Add Soft Brush brush engine
• Add and then remove GIF import/export filter
• Support 16 bit/channel displays in opengl mode (don't convert a high-bit depth image to 8 bits and then back to 16 in the monitor)
• Add a "ruler" assistant
• Improve performance of thumbnails for the layerbox by caching them
• Fix perspective transformation
• Enable and improve macro recording
• Make switching to opengl safe: if your system doesn't support opengl then on restarting Krita, the normal canvas will be used
• Improve serialization of curves
• Make it possible to show the curves in the curve dialog antialiased
• Add variable radius selection feathering
• Fix saving of XMP metadata
• Improve saving of EXIV metadata
• Updated collection of Shiva filters and generators
• Improve performance of autobrush (a lot!)
• Add particle brush engine (create art strokes from travelling particles according physical laws (Euler integration, Verlet integration, etc.)
• Fix calculation of the merged image if there are filter layers
• Image brushes (.gih) can now also be rotated
• Add (basic) support for Photoshop ABR brushes
• Fix support for local selections
• Rename the Sumi-E brush to hairy brush
• Add a "soak ink" option to the hairy brush
• Add a mask option for the hairs of the hairy brush
• Re-instate the brush selection tool
• Improve performance of pixel access
• Fixes to the vector layers: duplicate now works
• Make it possible to load jpeg files that contain unicode characters in the filename
• Fix spacing for stamp-type brushes
• Add many new options to the brush settings like rotation, hue, saturation
• Add new sensors to the brush settings to influence options like darken, hue, saturation, rotation etc.
• Create a new slider widget that is easy to use for both tablet and mouse users
• Fix the 3D cursor in OpenGL mode
• Improve usability of the layer docker for tablet users
• Add a search bar to find brush presets
• Add shortcuts to resize the brush
• Remove the panorama plugin: please use Hugin instead
• Fix the smudge brush engine
• Improve fill performance
• Lots of work to work around problems in Qt's tablet handling
• Add a BMP import filter
• Implement compatibility with XMP-Multi-Media
• Increase the effect of the Smoothing slider in the freehand tool
• Fix several issues with the Crop tool
• Replace old gimp brushes with David Revoy's Chaos and Evolutions brush set