AKVIS Sketch for Mac

From AKVIS:

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 Photoshop batch mode support introduced in version 2.0 allows you to automatically convert a series of images. Just create an Action in Photoshop 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.