AKVIS Sketch is an award-winning program for conversion of photos into pencil sketches and watercolor paintings. The program has already won the recognition of professionals and delighted home users with its neat results. With AKVIS Sketch you do not need to handle a pencil to feel like an artist. All you need to create your original work of art is good taste and AKVIS Sketch. Make any photo look like a B&W or color drawing, imitate the technique of graphite or color pencil, charcoal or watercolor painting! The program works in an entertaining way. You can observe the conversion of a photo into a drawing in real time and even interrupt the process when the required result is achieved. Once you have converted your photo into a drawing, you can add some special effects: a blend of a drawing and a photo, blurring and swirling the background. The program lets you add a texture effect to your image, making it appear to be drawn on canvas, corrugated paper, brick wall, etc. It is also possible to add a signature or a greeting to your pencil drawings to personalize the work of art. AKVIS Sketch can be useful on many occasions. Surprise your friends and relatives by presenting them with their pencil portraits. Make a watercolor drawing out of a photo from your last nature shooting to decorate your room. Convert your own photo into a color sketch to print on a T-shirt. You can even make your own comic strip or cartoons from your videos using the batch processing feature of Sketch. Now the software can create an even more stunning result! The new version competes with hand drawn art in flexibility and will spur your creative thought. Version 13 introduces a new photo-to-sketch conversion style - "Artistic"! The software now lets you choose between two styles: Classic (standard processing from the previous versions) and Artistic. The new Artistic style is designed to create expressive drawings that look like the handmade work of a real artist. In this style, it is easy to create both a quick sketch and a carefully drawn and shaded pencil drawing. The main advantage of this style is the ability to play with hatching and to vary the number of shadings and shadows to get natural tonal transitions. The new style comes with 27 ready-to-use presets which will help you create various pencil drawings. Also in the new version: fixed bugs; improved image processing when loading RAW files, improved support for RAW files from Sony cameras, added support for DNG files, and other changes. AKVIS Sketch runs on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/Win 7 and on Macintosh Mac OS X 10.4-10.7. The software is available as a standalone application, as well as a plugin to a photo editor. The plugin version of AKVIS Sketch is compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter, Photo-Paint, and Paint Shop Pro. For a free trial, AKVIS offers 10 days of fully functional use. Details are available at akvis.com.