There's something about the black and white lines of a pencil sketch that gives photos an entirely new lease of life and no program I've used does it better than AKVIS Sketch. AKVIS Sketch is very simple to use. All you have to do is browse to a photo, select the area of the photo you want to convert into a pencil sketch, and then click the Play button at the top of the interface.
AKVIS Sketch then processes your photo in a few seconds and your sketch magically appears. You can then tweak the exact look by changing the Effects sliders such as Watercolors, Charcoal and Coloration levels. In fact the number of aspects you can change is a bit overwhelming and you probably won't need many of them as the initial conversion is always pretty good. The most awkward thing I found however was the selection tool. It only seems to allow you to select a small part of your photo to convert which is a bit annoying if you want to create a sketch of an entire photo, not just a small part of it.
Overall though AKVIS Sketch produces striking pencil sketch results in just a few convenient clicks.
Added the possibility to switch between two interface modes: Express and Advanced.
Added the ability to save guiding lines to a file *.direction, and to load the file.
Added support for 64 bit to the plugin version. It is now compatible with Photoshop CS4-CS5 64-bit on both Windows and Macintosh.
Fixed small bugs.
Pros
Impressive pencil sketch effects
Easy to convert images
Quick to convert
Cons
Only allows you to select a certain area to convert
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.
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 Batch Processing support first introduced in version 2.0 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!
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.
Laws concerning the use of this software vary from country to country. We do not encourage or condone the use of this program if it is in violation of these laws. Softonic may receive a referral fee if you click or buy any of the products featured here.
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