{"id":14275,"date":"2020-08-08T18:12:12","date_gmt":"2020-08-08T18:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/dazposer\/?p=14275"},"modified":"2020-08-08T18:12:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T18:12:12","slug":"releases-akvis-decorator-8-0-and-charcoal-5-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/2020\/08\/08\/releases-akvis-decorator-8-0-and-charcoal-5-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Releases: AKVIS Decorator 8.0 and Charcoal 5.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s some interesting movement from AKVIS, makers of rather over-priced but robust single-purpose graphics plugins. <\/p>\n

1) Their AKVIS Decorator 8.0<\/strong> is now finally ready for prime-time, having introduced a 3x speed boost with version 7.0 just before Christmas 2019, and their version 8.0<\/a> in early 2020 polished that up even further. It works as a Photoshop plugin and replaces clothing and wallpaper while retaining shadows, folds etc…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve given the Photoshop plugin version a good test in PhotoLine, and it now works fine and fast, having previously been very slow. It can now take only seven seconds to replace a dress at 2400px, compared to many minutes before. Just remember to tweak your material scaling up to 150% or above, for a huge speed boost. The higher the scaling, the faster it runs. <\/p>\n

2) Their AKVIS Charcoal 5.0<\/strong>, which I’ve not been impressed with in the past, now runs on a completely “new photo-to-drawing conversion algorithm” as of the new 5.0<\/a> (29th July 2020) version. A change which kind of confirms my feeling that previous versions were lacking something. Again, I’ve tested the latest version, since they have ten-day demos. As you’d expect from the name, it tries to convert your cute cat \/ boyfriend \/ selfie photo etc into a mixed charcoal\/chalk drawing. It’s fast and on my test Poser comic-book render I found a few of the thirty or so presets that I could just about<\/em> imagine making a stylised horror comic with. Most were too scribbly and the scribbles had no respect for the eyes, though, and did little better than the free G’MIC. AKVIS needs a “detect and partly protect the eyes” module in the algorithm, I’d suggest. Still, I was able to brew a pleasing custom preset fairly quickly…<\/p>\n

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…and I like the software far more than before. This picture is still sharp at the edges, because Charcoal was running on a masked PNG render. Provided you want heavily ‘smudged and gauzy’, with a little work it could give you a style that could work for a Halloween ghost tale. There may also be some potential for hatching into shadows, but I didn’t immediately see it other than in some promisingly-labelled sliders. Otherwise, for charcoal also look at the free G’MIC plugins before you spend $50 to buy this. The only drawback there is that, last time I heard, the G’MIC suite is for Krita, GIMP, Paint.NET… but not for Photoshop. G’MIC for Photoshop will likely happen, but it could be a while yet.<\/p>\n

The cost is the main drawback with AKVIS, with each plugin costing around $50. $49 for Charcoal, and $54 for Decorator. And even at that price, neither are commercial-use and amazingly they’re feature-restricted unless you go for the even more<\/em> expensive Business version. For example, the $49 standard version of Charcoal won’t let you select an earlier frame unless you have the $89 Business version.<\/p>\n

It’ll be interesting to see if AKVIS Watercolor gets the overhaul treatment next, as the February 2020 changelog suggests it’s about where Decorator and Charcoal’s changelogs were a while back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s some interesting movement from AKVIS, makers of rather over-priced but robust single-purpose graphics plugins. 1) Their AKVIS Decorator 8.0 is now finally ready for prime-time, having introduced a 3x speed boost with version 7.0 just before Christmas 2019, and their version 8.0 in early 2020 polished that up even further. It works as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,13,22,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automation","category-companion-software","category-natural-media-emulation","category-spotted-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}