La Macchina

This is an edit of an older piece I created in Cinema 4D and The Gimp. I used Pixelmator to do some editing to see how it works. Decent little app, but lacks a lot of features. This edit was done in Photoshop CS mostly...

Vector Web Apps

I've been poking about the web looking for on-line graphics tools. Last time I looked around there were a few emerging tools for photo editing and drawing, these areas seem to have advanced nicely (Here's a really nice list of tools), but there wasn't really any decent vector solutions worth the time. That's changed a bit.

Raven is a Vector editor similar to Inkscape that runs in the web browser. The company delivering this tool, Aviary, has an image editor and other tools available as well. I created a quick eight ball to see how well the tools work. Things went well until I went to use the gradient. This tool is very limited in movement... To get around this you could do all of your high lighting and shadows with shapes, applying gradients then transparency on their layers, which is how I would do it 99% of the time anyway. Not a bad tool for a web app!

For another nice looking vector tool, not as polished, but appears to be open and allows direct editing of svg, check out svg-editor on Google code. It's very fast and once it's gets some more tools a features it could be a contender to installable applications.

Have fun and if you see any cool on-line vector tools let me know.

Sumo Painter 2.0

Sumo Painter is a web application for illustration, photo editing, and painting. After launch I was presented with a fairly intuitive interface. If you're a Photoshop user you'll be right at home as it's similar, but anyone with image editing will likely be up and working in about a minute.

Speed was really good! I ran it in the Chrome browser on Windows XP. My laptop is a hyper-threaded 3ghz machine with 1.2gb ram and an old ATI 64mb video card. I can't wait to give it a go on my new Mac Pro!

The features are dead on! Has a great plug-in set, which is what I mostly used to create the image you see. It has layers, including layer effects and can save to most formats. Good complete toolbox, nice assortment of brushes, standard adjustment filters, and selection tools.

I've played around with this a bit today and like it. You can use it as a guest, but for $20 a month you can go pro. You can save images to your machine and I noticed no limitations on the guest version. If you don't need a dedicated tool, but want something fairly similar to Photoshop this may work out for you.