Product Detail: Serif DrawPlus X5

Powerful tools for drawing & painting

Use a graphics tablet or your mouse to sketch and trace designs then edit lines and apply smoothing to avoid shaky lines. If you like digital painting, there are lots of natural-looking media brushes like pencil, charcoal and pastels, as well as photo-quality paint splats, glitter, stitching, grass, fire, clouds and more. The pressure settings on your graphics tablet can be calibrated in the built-in Pressure Studio to enhance your natural drawing style.

Instantly draw common shapes then change their colour, transparency, and edges or morph any shape to create amazing custom designs. Choose whether lines appear inside, outside, or behind a nominated object, making it much easier to add detail in and around any element of your design.

Design web graphics and animations

Create graphics that are optimised for the web as well as professional-quality buttons and banners with hover and click states. Assign links to different regions of an image – great for large web banners – then preview your graphic in a web browser.

With DrawPlus, you can make animations, cartoons, screensavers and more using keyframe or stopframe techniques. Create animations in record time with easy-to-use keyframes that automatically generate frames between key points in your animations. When you’re done, export your animation for the web as Flash^®, or share as a QuickTime^™ MOV, WMV or AVI video.

Communicate your ideas

Design charts, diagrams, plans and more with handy connection lines that automatically attach to objects and dimension lines that show the distance between two objects. Create an isometric drawing from scratch or make designs 3D instantly. Lighting & surface effects can be applied to any object, including text, to create eye catching posters.

Create professional logos and text designs easily. DrawPlus now supports OpenType fonts and super/subscript text attributes plus you can convert text to curves to individually edit each character. Easily add text along a path – simply draw a line or create a shape and allow the text to flow along the path of the outline.

Transform any photo

Use dedicated tools designed to help you transform your photos – no need to switch to a standalone photo editor. DrawPlus X5 supports common file formats like JPEG, PNG and GIF as well as Adobe^® Photoshop files and Microsoft^®HD Photo files.

The built-in PhotoLab can improve portraits with tools for red eye removal and spot repair and non-destructive adjustments, like curves and sharpen, to make your images look better than ever. The Cutout Studio makes it easy to extract people and objects from photos, ready for placing them on different backgrounds. Turn pictures into instant art using effects that recreate popular styles such as watercolour, expressionism and comic book.

The AutoTrace Studio is great for turning photos into high-quality vectors – it’s also great if you need to convert logos digitally from paper.

Create professional designs

The powerful tools and features in DrawPlus X5 give you the flexibility and precision to create professional-quality graphics quickly. Produce press-ready output with new end-to-end CMYK support and, for designers that want full control and to reduce printing costs, DrawPlus has the ability to show or hide each of the C, M, Y or K plates for colour separation.

Advanced colour management, including support for Pantone^® colour profiles, helps to ensure the colours you use will always look the way you intend them to, even if you are designing for different media. Build up your drawings with layers to make composing your designs easier and experiment with blend modes, which control how colours interact together, to create stunning artwork.

Create stunning visual effects with full control of group transparency and blending using composite transparency and knockout groups. Apply non-destructive graphic styles, such as edges, patterns and shadows, to objects and easily sample a specific colour or gradient with the versatile colour picker tool.

Share and collaborate

DrawPlus X5 makes it quick and easy to share your designs with other artists. The Export Optimiser allows you to tweak settings like quality, size, file type and transparency prior to export while super sampling can be selected for superior results. You can export 18 different file types, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF & SVG and PDF, so your artwork can be in the most suitable format for professional printing, uploading, and emailing.

Or why not share your designs online with the DrawPlus.com community. It’s a dedicated site where artists can show off their drawings, ask for help, and share advice with other DrawPlus users. It only takes one click to upload your images to DrawPlus.com – just use the ‘Share’ button in the program!