AKVIS Draw can give your photographs an artistic appearance by making them look as if they were drawn by hand.
The program can satisfy the needs of both skillful and inexperienced users. In this respect, it is excellent that there is a great collection of presets to turn your pictures into pencil sketches. You can even try some and see which one you like the best. The workflow is quite simple: load the images (TIFF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, RAW, or DNG are supported), pick a preset and proceed to export the results. Moreover, you can process a whole folder by applying the same preset to all the picture files it contains.
Luckily, you still have the opportunity to customize various parameters. For instance, you can decide whether you want the original colors or just black and white. Besides, you can change the width of the stroke and change the detail level. Similarly, you can insert text or image watermarks. What is more, you can save your options as a new preset, which you can reuse in the future.
All in all, AKVIS Draw is easy to use yet customizable enough for the needs of everyone. It produces nice results, which makes photos look like actual drawings. Compared with other tools of its kind, its only drawback is that it supports just one type of artistic effect. The product is sold in three licenses: Home, Home Deluxe and Business. Besides, it can be used as a standalone program or a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Corel PaintShop, Xara Xtreme, or GIMP.
Pros
- Very nice results
- Multiple presets available
- Supports many picture file types
- Highly customizable
- Allows creating new presets
Cons
- Supports one type of effect only