I am a great supporter of Akvis.  Akvis understand that in these money conscience times we need to ensure that the program we are buying does exactly what we expect it to do. We want clear and concise documentation before we part with our cash on how easy it is to get the results we see in the marketing material. We don’t just want to be told it’s easy, because there are all levels of easy especially when buying computer software.  We want to see for ourselves how easy it is before going through the saga of downloading a trial and clogging up our computer registry with things that will just need deleting again.

Akvis deals with this area of curiosity perfectly. Just go to their website www.akvis.com  and check out their list of innovative photo editing software. There you will be met with not only examples of each program but in-depth tutorials together with screen shots on how to achieve it.

Akvis Sketch v 7 is such a fun program to use and yields impressive results.  At $72 /£36  you can become a pen and ink artist overnight,  and a good one at that.  Of course there are standard filters that will operate similar results in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to name just two  but Akvis manages this process far more realistically, these are not pretend sketches, these really look like sketches. Just load your photo into Sketch and by clicking on the sketch tab followed by the green button  at the top of the page your photo will be transformed into a black and white sketch using the default settings. Of course the more accomplished you become the more you will experiment with the different strokes but certainly the default setting is fine for starters.  Another good function is to keep the focus point of your photo in the original colours and this is so simple. Click on the background tab change the mode from sketch to sketch & photo, follow the simple outlining instructions then whoosh!!! You have an interesting photo mix of colour / black and white and with the aid of the excellent tools you will get nice sharp edges where the colour  meets the black and white.

Another click on the background tab gives you the choice of sketch and blur, Gaussian, radial or motion. Here you can decide just what you want to blur and just how much how much you want you want to blur it.

A canvas mode enables you to choose the canvas finish of your photo.  Ample textures can be found in the texture library or create your own custom texture and save  as a jpg, bmp or png. In fact there are is a lot of fine tuning  you can do to make your drawings leap off the page.  Use the simple interface with a few sliders and who knows, with a bit of practice you could be setting up your own gallery.


Recommended system requirements:

Windows:

Core Duo, 2 Gb RAM, 2 Gb HDD
res.1280õ1024, video card Direct X8 comp. 32Mb


Mac:

OS X 10.5, Intel/G5, 2Gb RAM,
res.1280х1024, 2 Gb HDD
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