Krita 2.2 Changelog
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