Aviary's creative suite

A demo video of a Aviary's new browser based image editor software and a part its review from webware.com
"I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer." Click here to see the full video review.

Vector Drawing with ZeusDraw on Mac OS X 10.5

Chromatic Bytes has updated ZeusDraw—a vector drawing program that has both vector brushes and textured, pixel-based brushes that remain objects that can be selected, edited (path and attributes), moved, scaled and rotated—to version 1.2.1. It contains a number of small changes to insure that ZeusDraw works well on Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”). Read More

The easiest way to convert images to line art

Faster than a tracing hand, this powerful software is the raster to vector converter you need for Illustrator (Adobe), CorelDraw (Corel), Flash (Macromedia), WebDraw (Jasc), Sodipodi (freeware) and any vector-based software. Vector Eye instantly converts scanned black-and-white or color raster images (bmp, jpg, tiff, png) into editable vector files (svg, ps, eps).

Just scan any sketch, or select an image (or a sequence) in an AVI movie, make some bitmap adjustements (scale, select zone, enhance, swap colors, rotate...) and Vector Eye will automatically create multiple SVG file corresponding to differents settings. You can analyse, modify till the result suits you (quality, weight, number of vectors).
Just save it in the appropriate format for your purpose and drop into your favorite editor or authoring tool to complete or animate your design. You could also use the batch system to launch hundreds of vectorization processes. Download

Mac CS3 Brush Performance

This information may be very useful for Adobe CS3 for mac users. If you notice that custom brushes are are as laggy and slow as they used to be in Cs2 and you want to enhance their speed read below.

VM BUFFERING IN PHOTOSHOP CS3 On Macintosh computers, Photoshop can directly access up to about 3.5GB. When there is more than 3.5GB of document data, Photoshop writes data to its scratch files as necessary. On a computer with 4GB or less of RAM, the data is transferred directly between the scratch files on disk and the Photoshop RAM. On a computer with more than 4GB of RAM, Photoshop tells the operating system to use the extra RAM as a buffer for the Photoshop scratch file. In this case, when document data no longer fits in the 3.5GB of Photoshop RAM and is written to the scratch file, the operating system stores it in the extra RAM and can retrieve it from there much faster than it could be read from disk. This lets Photoshop take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM to significantly increase performance with very large documents.
When this scratch file buffering is turned on with Mac OS X v.10.3 or 10.4, the operating system periodically pauses execution of Photoshop for up to several seconds at a time. This can cause problems when painting. Installing the plug-in causes Photoshop to disable the buffering so the pauses do not occur. It also means that Photoshop only takes advantage of the 3.5GB of RAM it can directly access, so performance with very large documents will decrease.
VM BUFFERING OPTIONAL PLUG-INS
You can chose for Photoshop to disable or force VM Buffering via two optional plug-ins. If you use very large documents and have no problems with pauses during painting, you should install the force VM Buffering plug-in. If you do not use very large documents or have problems with pauses during painting, we recommend that you install the Disable VM Buffering plug-in.
To install either of the VM Buffering optional plug-ins:
Make sure the Adobe Photoshop application is not currently running.
Install the plug-in by dragging it into the Plug-Ins folder inside the Adobe Photoshop CS3 folder. The full path is: /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-Ins.
Launch Photoshop. The VM Buffering plug-in(s) will be loaded

Adobe Photoshop CS3 VM Buffering Optional Extensions plug in