Artweaver can help you create drawings using a Photoshop like interface

Overview:

Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting, i.e. Artweaver offers you all artistic effects which you need for your work.

You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is thereby so realistic as possible.


Features:

• Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils...
  
  
• A wide variety of adjustment settings to customize the default brushes or to create new brushes.
• Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
• Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD (no layer support).
• Transparency and Layers support.
• Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
• Editable text layers.
• Pen Tablet support for a realistic feeling.
• History function to undo/redo last editing steps.
• Expandable by Plug-In modules (Artweaver Standard).
• Support for many languages through language files.

Review:

Artweaver is a new player in the business of manipulating and creating images. it can edit pictures using filters and layers like Photoshop, actually the first thing that you will notice is that the interface is pretty much copied from Photoshop and so you will not have many problems getting used to Artweaver if you have ever used Adobe's program. This program comes with a lot of digital brushes like charcoal , chalk, oils,Etc. for creating really complex and professionals drawings, you can even use a Pen tablet for a more realistic feel. also there is a pretty large quantity of filters like grain, blur, ripple, Etc. there is a plugin pack that you can download in order to get even more effects.
Unfortunately Artweaver does not have some cool features that Photoshop has. for starters there's no magnetic lasso or anything like it so you have to manually select an area with Artweaver's lasso tool and i found that very hard to do using my mouse, Photosop's magnetic lasso was a great tool when i was making funny pictures. also drag'n drop doesn't work between pictures so i couldn't move a selected area between two pictures without using copy and paste which is very disappointing because i did that quite a lot in Photoshop. However all of these things could change since the program is still early in development and i expect to see lots of improvements in the future.
Artweaver is a pretty good program for those of you that want an image editor for creating your own drawing using several brushes and effects, just keep in mind that the program is still in development. Available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.


Get it at http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?artweaver_en