AKVIS Sketch: Convert a Photo into Pencil, Coal or Watercolor Drawing
AKVIS Sketch 1.1 is a plugin for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and watercolor drawings. Photo-to-sketch conversion can be a lot of fun and open for you new ways of creativity. If you have always been wondering how to draw or paint, now you can embody your ideas with AKVIS Sketch. You can make any photo look like B&W or color drawing, imitate the technique of graphite or color pencil, charcoal or watercolor painting. Surprise your friends and relatives by presenting them their pencil portraits. Make a watercolor drawing out of a photo from your last nature shooting to decorate your room. Convert your own photo into a color sketch to print on a T-shirt. Home users will be delighted by the neat result of the photo-to-sketch conversion. Now you do not need to handle a pencil to feel like an artist. All you need to create your original work of art is good taste and AKVIS Sketch. The program can be helpful to designers who need to quickly bring images to one style for a web-site or an advertisement booklet. In contrast to the similar standard filters (like the built-in filters in Photoshop or PSP) that offer an approximate sketch, AKVIS Sketch provides a convincing result that comes very close to hand-drawn works of a human artist. Getting a similar result with the standard tools would require expertise in image editing and extensive manipulation with layers, masks, brushes and applying filters. AKVIS Sketch has a simple interface with a few sliders. At first you can process the image with the default settings and then touch up the photo adding color, or trying different techniques - from pencil to charcoal or watercolor. You can make the hatching denser or finer and change the pitch angle of strokes. For a free trial, AKVIS offers 10 days of fully functional use. AKVIS Sketch plugin is compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter, Corel Photo-Paint and other image editors.
The program’s functions have been significantly enhanced thus making the program more convenient to work with. Now SearchInform saves files for indexing added by the user in a separate file, which let’s you save their support even after reinstalling the program. The organization of system file storage was also optimized.
Another innovation had to do with the indexing process: SearchInform 2.3.01 now supports search in ThunderBird mail client messages, mIRC messages are available for indexing and browsing of MS Outlook messages has been optimized.
There have also been improvements in SearchInform Corporate Enterprise, which lets you index all of the available information from all the computers in the local network of the organization and puts it all together in a single database. Documents on disks, information systems, e-mail messages, instant messaging programs like MSN and ICQ — all that is processed and used in the query search.