New Features in Krita 2.4

Krita had about 1400 commits during the 2.4 development lifecycle which took about eight months. Of course, there's lots of cool work which likely won't be in 2.4, but in a later release, like Matus Talcik's opencl filter plugin or Torio Mishi's animation plugin.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of significant changes:

• new colorengine plugin that uses lcms2: this is preferred for performance and stability reasons and we urge all distributions to compile krita against lcms2.(Cyrille Berger and Boudewijn Rempt)
• a history docker showing the undo/redo history (Matus Talcik)
• the filter api has been refactored to make it easier to create new filter plugins (Cyrille Berger and Dmitry Kazakov)
• MyPaint brush engine support (experimental, will probably not be in the final release) (Sven Langkamp)
• New color sources (pattern, gradient, random) for brushes (Cyrille Berger, Silvio Heinrich)
• improved convolution filters (Jose Luis Vergara)
• new smudge+paint brush engine (Silvio Heinrich)
• make krita work much better with large images (Boudewijn Rempt)
• New blending modes (Arcus Tangent, Gamma Light, Gamma Dark, Geometric Mean, Vivid Light, Pin Light, Grain Merge", "Grain Extract", "Hard Mix", "Copy Red/Green/Blue/Opacy", Additive-Substractive, improved divide, Soft Light, Hard Light, Atop, HSY, HSV, HSL, HSI, dissolve and Overlay) (Silvio Heinrich)
• made the burnd, dodge and color burn blend modes compatible with Photoshop (Silvio Heinrich)
• create an experimental multihand-tool which allows the user to paint with several brushes at the same time (Lukas Tvrdy)
• add a workspaces features: you can save named configurations of dockers for different purposes (Sven Langkamp)
• add symmetry, mirror and translate mode for painting (Lukas Tvrdy)
• add a channel selection docker (Sven Langkamp)
• add new sensors and make it possible to influence a brush parameter with more than one sensor (like pressure, random, tilt and so on) (Cyrille Berger)
• improve canvas rotation (Silvio Heinrich)
• Fix embedding of icc profile data in JPG and PNG files (Cyrille Berger)
• Fix brush preset data when editing a .kpp brush preset file in Krita (Cyrille Berger)
• Add support for DNG and Panasonic RAW2 raw image files (Cyrille Berger, Sven Langkamp)
• Make it possible to select different layers in different views (Sven Langkamp)
• Improve the tiles backend to make projection updating faster (Dmitry Kazakov)
• Improve scaling gui when using the transform tool (Marc Pegon)
• Improve handling of layerbox when using a tablet (Dmitry Kazakov and Jose Luis Vergara)
• Add an opacity setting to brush presets
• Improve smoothing of the freehand tool (Geoffry Song)
• Make it possible to remove painting assistants (Geoffry Song)
• New feature: split an image in a set of rectangles (Srikanth Tiyyagura)
• Make painting obey channel locks
• Improve compatibility with GIMP's XCF file format (import only) (Silvio Heinrich, Lukas Tvrdy)
• Improve painting speed with the default autobrush (Geoffry Song)
• the sketch brush no supports density, line width and offset scale sensors.
• Integrate Get Hot New Stuff with Krita's resource management for brushes, presets, patterns and gradients (Srikanth Tiyyagura)
• Add hexadecimal input to the specific color selector (Sven Langkamp)
• Load blending modes defined in OpenRaster (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Make it possible to load single-layer PSD images (may not be in the 2.4 release) (Siddharth Sharma)
• Add opacity, size and flow sliders to the toolbar (Sven Langkamp and Silvio Heinrich)
• The line tool now supports pressure and tilt (Lukas Tvrdy)
• Add keyboard shortcut for changing luminosity of the active color (darker: K, lighter: L) (Lukas Tvrdy)
• Configurable "Show just the canvas" mode (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Improved selected color preview in the advanced color selector (Adam Celarek)
• Add simple support for BMP, GIF, XPM and XBM formats. (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Add preset management to the preset editor popup (Jose Luis Vergara)
• Improve the preset editor in many ways (Sven Langkamp, Jose Luis Vergara, Silvio Heinrich, Cyrille Berger, Lukas Tvrdy)
• Fix margins in export to PDF (Sven Langkamp)
• Add a "save incremental" option which saves your work with an auto-incrementing suffix (Jose Luis Vergara)
• Use brush presets in the right-click popup palette (Sven Langkamp)
• Add Nepomuk and GIMP-xml-based tagging to all Krita resources (Srikanth Tiyyagura)
• Make it possible to disable and enable the on-canvas preview of filters (Sven Langkamp)
• Make it possible to add a new ICC profile from Krita instead of copying it to certain directories (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Fix a problem where switching tools would make Krita, especially selecting colors, slower and slower (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Smooth out the canvas zooming in non-opengl mode (Boudewijn Rempt)
• New mode for the Text brush: it now can spray the letters of the text, one letter per dab.    (Lukas Tvrdy)
• New feature: the Image Docker, which makes it easy to create and browse sets of reference images (Silvio Heinrich)
• New color selector based on the color wheel. Picking the three color dimensions (hue, saturation, lightness) separated from each other with this color selector should be more convenient. (Silvio Heinrich)
• Implement drag & drop between Krita and other applications, like Dolphin, Gimp, Gwenview, Firefox and so on, and more advanded drag & drop between instances of Krita. (Boudewijn Rempt)
• New Text Tool: this places the text tool that creates artistic text vector objecs where users who come from Photoshop expect it. (Sven Langkamp)
• Improve brush outline mode (Sven Langkamp)
• Add a splash screen to Krita (Boudewijn Rempt)
• Make it possible to add, remove and hide resources (Srikanth Tiyyagura)
• New implementation for the curve brush with curvy, recurvy and smooth effects (Lukas Tvrdy)
• Add taskset docker (Sven Langkamp)

Uncategorized, unsorted -- just showing you what we've been doing to make your life with Krita better!