AKVIS ArtWork 14.0.2185

AKVIS ArtWork is intended to make photographs look as if they were paintings. The program´s interface is very similar to those of other products by the same developer. It is also rather easy to use and provides helpful information as to the use of each of the elements. It can also be used as a plugin for other photo editors; and, in such case, the look will depend on that of the host program.

AKVIS ArtWork allows importing many of the picture formats, including not only the most commonly used, like JPG, TIFF, and PNG; but also more specific ones, such as CRW, RAW, ORF, NEF, NNG, among others. One of the advantages of AKVIS Artwork is that it allows processing batches of images in a single operation, which definitely saves a lot of time and effort.

The results depend primarily on the type of painting techniques you choose. These include oil, watercolor, pen and ink, comics, linocut, gouache, and pastel. There are also various preset options but you can tweak them to get the picture look as you want it to. In this respect, it is possible to adjust stroke intensity, density, sharpen, blurring option and saturation. Likewise, there is a smudge tool that you can use to retouch the images.

Fortunately, there is the opportunity to preview it in real time in a before-after fashion. So, when the transformations look as expected, you can export the results to JPG, PNG, BMP or TIFF. Moreover, the tool allows you to post them to various cloud services.

If there is a word to describe the results you can get from AKVIS ArtWork is “decent”. While the tool works quite efficiently, it does not produce simulated paintings with a quality as high as that I got from another program I had the pleasure to review. However, if your expectations are not so great, this is a product you should certainly try. Luckily, it is shareware and can be evaluated without many limitations.