Real-Draw Pro 5 review

Real-Draw Pro 5 takes a different approach to graphic creation than most drawing packages. Its “vector-bit” technology combines the precision of vector drawing with the creativity of bitmap tools, promising the best of both worlds.

This is immediately apparent in the range of bitmap-based formatting options that you can apply to the vector shapes and paths that make up drawings. In particular, Real-Draw Pro provides a host of tiling texture fills and special effects such as drop shadows, glows, transparencies, bevels, lighting and surface skins. These make it possible to create high-impact and near-photorealistic illustrations based on just a few shapes.

As you’d expect, you can also bring in external photos and other bitmaps to your projects. Here Real-Draw Pro 5 adds an important new capability with support for draft images that maintain a link to the original. Thanks to Real-Draw Pro’s existing Megarender capability, it means you can work rapidly and conveniently with a screen-sized composition, then output a high-resolution, high-quality finished image.

Once you’ve imported your bitmaps, you can quickly apply colour corrections, sharpening and creative filters. However, you aren’t limited to these global effects. Real-Draw Pro also lets you paint directly onto your imported bitmaps using a range of brushes and blend modes.

And in this version you can also now directly paint on a copy of the full-sized image – re-cropping when needed – and go back to working on the overall composition with the draft. You can even quickly apply transparency effects to your low-resolution draft image and then have the resulting alpha mask applied to the full-resolution original.

Real-Draw Pro doesn’t only let you edit imported bitmaps, though. You can also paint directly onto the canvas to create new objects, or paint directly onto existing objects. Even more powerful is its package-based handling. This lets you quickly convert multiple vector objects into packages and then apply bitmap-based effects to the group as a whole.

At any time you can double-click the package to open it in a new window where you can edit the vector shapes or paint directly onto them. Click OK and the package is automatically updated, along with any cloned copies.

The Liquid Shape command adds another innovative combination of vector and bitmap handling. Apply this to a vector object and it opens as a bitmap in another tabbed window. Using the various Move, Grow, Shrink and Rotate brushes, you can then quickly distort the bitmap, updating the original shape accordingly, and the effect can be used with packages to quickly apply similar distortion effects to multiple objects, and to their fills and formatting.

The most impressive examples of vector-bit handling, however, are the software’s new Non Photo Realistic and Natural Paint Rendering (NPR) features. What this means in practice is that, when you create a new image, you can choose an overarching artistic style for it – watercolour, pencil, engraving, oils, ink or crayon – and the elements you subsequently add to it take on that appearance.

This might sound a tall order, but it really does work. When you start adding shapes and objects to your canvas they automatically appear as if drawn by an artist working in the appropriate medium. Compared to the flat fills and regular lines of typical vector drawings, the results are far more aesthetically appealing and, because your whole image automatically has a coherent style and artistic vision, it has far more creative impact.

Even better, if you decide you don’t like the current effect, you can just click on one of the other styles and try out a completely different look-and-feel. And there’s plenty of fine control on offer. You can adjust the strength of each object’s NPR effect, and mix different presets by making use of packages. For total control, meanwhile, the dedicated NPR dialog lets you dig deep to manage the brushes, colours and shadows that together define each style.

And there’s a further boost for NPR from Real-Draw Pro 5’s new Area Gradients tools. These let you double-click on an object to add multiple colours that are then blended smoothly together. They’re handy for creating photo-realistic images, but prove even more useful for NPR styling where they integrate beautifully with the artistic effects to help bring artworks to life.

Ultimately, Real-Draw Pro 5 can’t compete with the likes of Xara for all-round power and sheer breadth of features, but the new capabilities, and especially the unique NPR styling, add greatly to the program’s already extraordinary creative power and control. That, coupled with a more than reasonable price, makes it one of the best value-for-money propositions around, too – only US$55, and $23 for the upgrade.

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