Serif Launches DrawPlus X4!

[Dale_Cook]

Hello everyone!

We’re delighted to announce the launch of DrawPlus X4, the latest and greatest drawing and illustration software from Serif. Described as “Powerful Drawing and Graphics Made Easy”, DrawPlus X4 represents a real advance, with developers focussing on ease of use for core drawing and painting abilities, increasing the quality of artwork created by DrawPlus X4, and innovating with new creative artwork and productivity features.

Changes to DrawPlus in this impressive new version include but are not limited to the following:

• Blend modes allow you to combine objects’ colours, textures and much more in very creative ways. Blend modes need to be seen to be believed; take a look at the DrawPlus X4 video, and be sure to check the Sample Designs in the product when you try it!
  
• Improved drawing tools make every drawing and illustration project more intuitive, quicker and smoother. Vertex snapping when drawing and editing nodes & shapes, dynamic page guides, a new Path text tool, improved text selection, and improved curve smoothing all combine to make things “just work” the way they should, and give smarter results.
  
• The PhotoLab radically beefs up DrawPlus’s photo editing and image effects capabilities, with over 70 adjustments, corrections, filters, and Instant Artist styles. Effects can be tweaked, combined, and limited to a specific part of a photo.
  
• A new Pressure Studio allows customisation of graphics tablets, with a practice area to test behaviour for soft and hard pen strokes. You can calibrate or manually adjust the device’s ‘pressure profile’ for as many input devices (e.g. pen nib and eraser separately) and as many graphics tablets as you like, too. Also customise other tablet inputs for improved productivity.
  
• Cool new colour tools bring a touch of designer know-how to regular computer users, and make striking artwork quicker for designers to create. The colour picker is elevated to a proper tool and now has options including picking an average colour from an area, useful for getting a colour form an image with noise, for instance. A fantastic Gradient Sampler picks colours along a line and creates a gradient fill, ideal for backgrounds and effects. The new Colour Palette Designer automatically generates harmonious, analogous, or close range palettes of colours for design, painting, everything. New Swatch organisation features help keep different palettes in check, and colours can now be specified using Hex RGB values for web graphics.
  
• Improved quality permeates throughout the program to improve your designs. On-screen drawing of filter effects is enhanced (and they are faster with multi-threading), brushes are now sampled at different sizes to ensure you achieve photo-quality textures at a much wider range of brush sizes, PDF import accuracy is improved and new options are available, and the Optimizer now offers Super Sampled images for best-in-class exports; higher quality, greater definition, more detail – without increasing image size or file size.
  
• Compatibility is improved with new support for SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG files are well supported by web browsers and can be massively more efficient than other web graphics like JPGs and PNGs. Plus, SVGs are a text-based file format and their content is searchable. Now importing popular formats like PDF, AI, DXF, EPS alongside popular standard formats like WMF, JPG and more, DrawPlus X4 is highly compatible!
  
• New and reorganised content enhances DrawPlus for users of all levels, with revamped and new brushes, a streamlined Gallery for ready-made artwork, new one-click Effects, and stylish new connector symbols for charts.
  
• Other productivity enhancements combine to make DrawPlus X4 quicker and slicker, especially for those who like to customise their workspace and workflow. A new Properties Pane makes it easy to see and modify attributes for selected objects, keyboard shortcuts can be customised, and the aforementioned Pressure Studio offers hot hey, button, slider, wheel and ExpressKey customisation for multiple graphics tablets. For touch-sensitive LED ExpressKeys, you’ll find DrawPlus X4-specific tool icons available for display on your graphics tablet, too.

Please visit the following pages to learn more about DrawPlus X4:

DrawPlus Home Page
Design Unleashed: An Overview
Create Stunning Artwork
Create Logos and Web Graphics
Transform Your Photos
Easy Animations
Highly Compatible
New Feature Highlights
Full Feature Table
Video and Screenshots
Examples
User Guide
System Requirements

If you have any queries please post them in this thread.

Regards, Dale.