Software Review - ArtRage Deluxe 2.5 From Smith Micro

Did you ever want to play with paint? That is the concept behind the product from Ambient Design called ArtRage. The latest version; ArtRage Deluxe 2.5 is touted as an easy-to-use, computer-based painting and drawing application that provides a comprehensive range of tools for both novice and accomplished artists.

As seen below, ArtRage opens with a simple interface that contains a tool picker in the lower left-hand corner that will let you choose between the tool that you will work with and give you the control on how big it will be. You have brushes, pencils, palette knife, chalk, crayons, and more.

In the lower right-hand corner you have the color picker and it is used for selecting colors and loading custom pickers. Here you have the big color wheel which shows you the hue and saturation of your color. You have the control bar underneath with a slider for setting how metallic your paint will be and a menu arrow that lets you open up the color menu for important options.

If you do not have autoclean turned on, you will get a glass of water for cleaning off your brush. You have custom color pickers which are pictures that you can sample colors for your painting. This way if you need skin tones you can load a picture with the appropriate hues and select your colors this way. You have the color samples panel where you can store colors used in your painting, and finally you also have numeric color picking via RGB or HLS values.

On the bottom of the screen you have a toolbox which gives you things for manipulating your canvas, and boxes of items that you might want on the canvas such as stencils, tracing, and a reference image that can be pinned to the canvas. You also have a layers panel that lets you do your work in layers; i.e., sheets of transparent paper that can be stacked on top of each other and painted on.

What features does ArtRage 2.5 give you?

• Layer Content Transformation – now lets you Move, Scale, and rotate the contents of Layers using the Transform Layer Contents option in the Edit Menu.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging as well as on Facebook.

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