AKVIS Sketch is a plugin for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and watercolor drawings. 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. Our efficient method allows creating realistic color and B&W drawings that imitate the technique of graphite and color pencil, charcoal and watercolor painting. 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; it 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. Moreover, you can not only convert a photo to a drawing or a watercolor painting, but also give it an artistic touch by adding a canvas, or any other textured surface (corrugated paper, brick wall, metallic or ceramic coating). The Batch Processing support allows you to automatically convert a series of images. Just create an Action in Photoshop or a Script in Corel Paint Shop Pro and apply the plug-in with the same settings to a folder full of images. You can even create comics from home videos in this way! Home users will be delighted by the neat result of the photo-to-sketch conversion. AKVIS Sketch can bring a lot of 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, you can convert any photo to an original drawing to print on a T-Shirt. The program can be helpful to designers who need to quickly bring images to one style for a web-site or an advertisement booklet. On the whole it's a wonderful tool for those who have always wanted to draw but didn't know how. AKVIS Sketch is a plug-in. It integrates into image processing programs that support plugins. It is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro etc.
