ArtRage 2.5 released

Ambient Design today released ArtRage 2.5, a full-featured intuitive natural paint and drawing application designed for hobbyists and professionals alike. The software ensures users have a readily accessible choice of canvas size, paper textures, and mediums such as oils, pencils, crayons, airbrush, chalk, and markers that blend with the palette knife tool. Artists can use a pre-set color palette or customize one from a chosen project, and have access to Photoshop-compatible transparent layers that can serve as advanced compositions. Users can also recreate photos as well as images as paintings with ArtRage, which supports popular pen tablets from companies such as Wacom that allow artists to draw and paint with pressure sensitivity. ArtRage 2.5 runs natively on Intel-based Macs as a Universal Binary, is Windows Vista Certified, and adds several new features like stencils and rulers. ArtRage 2.5 is priced at $25, and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.

ArtRage 2.5 features a simpler user interface, and adds stencils as well as rulers that work the way traditional media artists expect. Users can import images to layers without worrying about whether the images was created in another graphics application, and can import an image as a separate layer or copy/paste layers directly from the clipboard into a new layer.

The software supports moving, scaling, and rotating the content of image layers in groups or individually. New printing resolution support ensures image files cater to creation measurements in inches, centimeters, and millimeters with full control over dots-per-inch settings. Two new tools -- the Precise Pencil and Smooth Blender -- enable artists to work like a mechanical pencil for a precise line and produce soft-edge subtle blending, respectively.

by MacNN Staff