AKVIS Sketch is software for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and watercolor drawings. Surprise your friends with realistic color and B&W drawings that imitate the technique of graphite and color pencil, charcoal and watercolor.
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.
AKVIS Sketch provides a convincing result and 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. It is possible to save settings as presets for future use.
Home users will be delighted by the neat result of the photo-to-sketch conversion. AKVIS Sketch can bring much 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.
The program can be helpful to designers who need to quickly bring images to one style for a web-site or an advertisement booklet.
The program is available in two versions - as a standalone application and as a plug-in to a photo editor. This is the Standalone Edition! If you want the plugin version please goto akvis.com.
AKVIS Enhancer is image enhancement software that detects detail in underexposed, overexposed and mid tone areas of a photo. You can improve detail on a single shot or use the HDRI mode to create an HDR image out of a series of shots.
The tool is extremely useful when a photo lacks detail. For example, when a picture has been taken with the background overexposed, the foreground is hardly discernible (especially annoying when it's a picture of a person.) Or, the background of a picture might be so washed out that you wonder what the scenery was like. If you try to reveal details in highlighted or overshadowed areas using exposure correction (e.g. levels) you run the risk of spoiling the parts of the image that you want unchanged.
The idea of Enhancer is entirely different. AKVIS Enhancer brings out details by intensifying color transition. It means that Enhancer strengthens the difference between adjacent pixels that have different color gradations and therefore reveals not only the details in the shadow but even the details in the overexposed areas and mid-tones.
AKVIS Enhancer is useful not only for correction of family and art photos, but can be effective as well in technical use. Publishers of technical literature can apply Enhancer to show equipment illustrations in detail; doctors can use Enhancer to increase the level of detail on roentgenograms, etc.
The stand-alone version of Enhancer supports HDRI. HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) is a technology that expands the dynamic range of an image and shows details in both shadows and highlights.
The plug-in version of Enhancer supports Photoshop batch processing that allows applying the same settings to a series of images. The plug-in version is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel (Jasc) Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo-Paint, Corel Painter, Ulead Photo-Impact, etc.
