Moho Forum

Anyone else here use Serif DrawPlus X4?

I was looking for a cheap vector drawing programme to sketch out characters and backdrops for use as tracing images in ASP. My ideal would have been Adobe Illustrator but I can't afford it. Someone recommended DrawPlus so I got a copy from Amazon - £20 ($30) – amazing bargain.

Not only is it an excellent vector drawing programme (recognises Wacom tablets and has a pressure sensitivity feature) but it also does photo-editing. It’s got most of the tools of Photoshop Elements – layers, blend modes, curves, masking etc but it also has an automatic tracing feature with the created vector lines and fills able to be manipulated further – very easy to turn photographs into Toon-shaded images.

To cap it all it also does stopframe animation, exporting in avi or QuickTime format as well as keyframe animation exporting in .swf format - ideal for storyboarding. Incidentally, for anyone using Crazy Talk Animator, it’s a recommended programme for producing content.

It’s only failing (as far as I can see) is it can’t export as legacy Adobe Illustrator files or as layered Photoshop files but hey you can’t have everything.

Check it out. There’s plenty of training material and videos on the site and more on YouTube.

And No, I don’t work for Serif, just like the programme

I agree. All of Serif's software is excellent value for money to be honest. I've been testing out their latest video editing software. I've had it a while but only used it over this weekend to edit a lot of footage I shot last summer. It plays AVCHD at full speed on my laptop (it automatically creates proxy footage to edit) and it's never crashed once on me. This was almost 45 minutes of footage with a lot of cuts. I was very impressed.

I really like Serif's Photoplus, it really is the closest thing to photoshop and only costs 80 quid. Bargain! The one thing I do miss is hotkeys for resizing/strengthening the brush but it has brush presets, so it's not too much of a problem.

I use Inkscape as a replacement for illustrator, a free open source package which doesn't have animation unfortunately, but does everything else I want it to.