Shareware, $72.
AKVIS Sketch is a plugin for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and watercolor drawings.
Surprise your friends with realistic color and B&W drawings that imitate the technique of graphite and color pencil, charcoal and watercolor.
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.
AKVIS Sketch provides a convincing result and 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 neat 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.
Home users will be delighted by the quick and neat result of the photo-to-sketch conversion.
AKVIS Sketch can bring much fun: a pencil portrait can be a good present for your relatives and friends, a watercolor drawing obtained from your last nature shooting can decorate your room.
On the whole it's a wonderful tool for those who have always wanted to draw but didn't know how.
The program can be helpful to designers who need to quickly bring images to one style for a web-site or an advertisement booklet.
AKVIS Sketch is a plug-in.
It works with image processing programs that support plugins.
It is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel (Jasc) Paint Shop pro, etc.
Program OS Support: Win98, WinME, WinXP, WinNT 4.x, Windows2000, Windows2003, Mac OS X.
Program System Requirements: P II / RAM 256/ HDD 15Mb; OS X 10.3.9, PowerPC G3.
Author: AKVIS LLC (submit at akvis dot com)
Version: 1.1 Filesize:
Membership: 
Overall: 257
