Microsoft's Acrylic

Not a Mac related post but a design news nonetheless, Microsoft today announced the availability of the beta version of Acrylic, a vector based graphic application that mimics traditional painting style. This application is based on Creature House's Expression 3 which was acquired by Microsoft last year. A free version of Expression 3 for Mac OS is available and of course no further development (i.e. Acrylic for Mac) will be available in the future. I'm not sure why the press is calling this a “Photoshop Killer” since it really doesn't do any image editing or manipulation at all. This application is more comparable to Illustrator CS if any. It is a very good application if you're trying to achieve a traditional, painterly style but if you're trying to achieve a photo-realistic effect, stick to Photoshop.

Technorati Tags: design, illustration