Product Reviews

At a mere £135, SketchBook Pro may appear to sit a little oddly next to Alias' four-figure offerings, the award-winning Maya and Studio Tools products. Every project has to start off with an idea, though, so really it's the perfect foil for them - or indeed for any other pipeline where you need to rough out and polish ideas.

SketchBook Pro is a painting program designed to be as natural feeling as possible and to mimic the approach of traditional pen-and-paper media. 'SketchBook' should give you a clue as to where the program's interface gets its cues: it initially presents just a plain white 'sheet' with a discreet arc of tools in the lower left-hand corner. The first two of the five icons represent Tools (Layers, Selection and the like) and Brushes, and it's here that you'll spend most time. The other three icons are for Colours, Edit (Cut, Copy and Paste) and for File operations. Each icon on the tool arc is a special type of pop-out called a Marking menu. A circle of icons pops out from the central one, and Alias claims this gesture-based selection method is more natural and easier for the end user to commit to 'muscle memory' - that is, the user remembers the position of the icon in the circle, so the tool can be accessed with a flick of the pen.

And that's pen, not mouse. SketchBook Pro is resolutely a graphics tablet-and-pen application. You could use it with a mouse at a stretch, but that would be missing out on its incredibly natural-feeling toolset. The painting tools provided (Pencil, Airbrush, Marker, Chisel-tip marker, Ballpoint, Felt-tip, Paintbrush and Smudge) give responsive feedback when used with a Wacom Intuos tablet. For instance, the Marker pens 'bleed' more into the paper the slower you move the stylus. Results with a Graphire tablet may not be quite as smooth, as that tablet model has fewer levels of pressure sensitivity.

In

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this release, Alias has concentrated heavily on the Brush workflow, and has given particular thought to brush resizing. A new, circular floating palette allows for instant brush resizing, just by clicking and dragging on it. This also gives instant visual feedback on the brush size. Even better, holding down the B key will allow instant brush resizing.

Brush customisation is also well catered for by the Brush Properties palette. Each type of brush has its own settings, of course, but Edge settings, Roundness, Opacity Stamp Spacing and Slant are all catered for. A pane at the top of the palette provides constant visual feedback, but, as the background is white, you can't see anything if you're using white paint. The same applies to feedback about brush size when painting with white on a white background.

Once you've created your brush, you can identify and name it in a new Identify Custom Brush palette, where names can be assigned and custom icons for brushes can be chosen. These icons can be selected from more than 90 supplied icons, or you can design and provide them yourself.

This latest version also offers more tools for viewing and manipulating your images. The Zoom and Pan tools are particularly well implemented. Realising the two actions are most-often used in concert, Zoom and Pan have been combined into the same tool. This is a circular floating palette, similar to the Brush Resize tool, but it follows the stylus around the screen. Click-dragging left and right in the centre smoothly zooms in and out, dragging the outer ring pans the image. You can then either close the palette, or choose the next tool to drop it. It works well in practice, and is a real vindication of Alias' approach to this product. You now also have the option to select areas of the image (both Marquee and Lasso), and these selected areas can be independently moved, scaled and rotated using the same methods of the Zoom/Pan tool.

Finally, SketchBook Pro now supports layers. Layer tools are accessed via a Marking menu by clicking on a layer, and it works extremely well. You can copy, move and merge layers, as well as alter their opacity, although the Opacity adjustment is cack-handed in the extreme. And, since SketchBook Pro documents support layers, they can also be exported to Photoshop for further editing.

SketchBook Pro is well designed with much to recommend. Alias must sort out that Opacity slider, though.