Art Rage 4

ArtRage 4 is an easy to use natural painting package that lets you create realistic artwork on your computer. It has a wide range of artistic tools that let you get right down to the creative process without forcing you to learn complex or technical controls. It's like real paint without the mess!
ArtRage simulates real world painting tools including oils, watercolor, and more. Because it tracks the physical properties of your paint such as how much is on the canvas and how wet it is, your paint strokes create natural color blends and leave bristle textures as you go, giving you the appearance of a physical canvas without you needing to apply special effects.
ArtRage includes 20 painting tools and a wide range of features useful to basic and professional artists alike. If you're new to painting and drawing you can take advantage of the Tracing Image system to import a photo as a guide while painting. Let ArtRage pick colors from the image for you and you can focus on your brushwork and developing your skills. If you're a traditional artist who has avoided digital art tools, you'll find ArtRage pleasantly familiar as you can take many of your familiar techniques and work with them inside the software. If you're a digital artist who wants to add some natural paint to your images, you can still work with layers, blend modes and other digital tools. ArtRage Studio Pro offers selection tools, flood fills, and text to make the workflow easier. Support for Photoshop images imported and exported with their layers, groups, blend modes, and text layers intact makes it easy to use ArtRage alongside your other applications.

Painting tools

• Natural Painting Tools: Oil Paint, Watercolor, Palette Knife, Paint Tube, Airbrush, and Paint Roller.
  
• Sketching & Drawing Tools: Pencils, Inking Pen, Marker Pen, Pastel, and Eraser.
  
• Special Effect Tools: Gloop Pen, Sticker Spray, Glitter Tube.
  
• Utility Tools: Cloner, Selection, Transform, Eyedropper, Flood Fill including Pattern and Gradient Fills, Editable Text Tool.
  
• Paint behavior simulates real world media. Oil paints smear and blend, tracking how much paint is on your brush and on the canvas. Lay down blobs of paint with the Paint Tube and smear them out with the Palette Knife. Watercolors diffuse and blend wetly. Pencils smudge.
  
• Tools support user Presets.
  
• Real Color Blending mode replaces standard digital RGB blending with a simulation of real paint to create more realistic color gradations.
  
• Advanced stylus properties such as Barrel Rotation and Airbrush Thumb-Wheels are supported where available.
  
• Stylus recognition is supported where available, allowing you to allocate specific tool settings to specific styluses.

Canvas

• Canvas texture provides an underlying surface for your paint to interact with. Other properties such as color and metallicity allow you to customize the look of your painting surface.
  
• Rotate, scale, and pan the canvas so you can work at the most comfortable angle.
  
• Layers and Layer Groups allow you to manage your work easily. Layer Blend modes mirror standard Photoshop blend modes.
  
• Layer locks let you prevent specific types of changes being made to layers you want to safeguard.
  
• Color bitmaps can be used to generate full color canvases.

Tracing and References

• Import an existing image as a Tracing Image to guide you as you work. ArtRage can be set to draw color from the Tracing Image automatically so you can focus on your brush strokes.
  
• Import existing images as References which are pinned to your canvas as visual guides while you paint.
  
• Create Scraps, floating canvas pieces that can be used as mixing palettes or for testing ideas before painting.
  
• Views lets you create floating viewports that display all or part of your canvas independent of the main canvas window.

Stencils and Rulers

• Add stencils to your canvas to block out areas for masking. Multiple stencils can be added at once and interact with each other like they would on a real canvas.
  
• Any stencil can be converted to a Ruler which can be used to create precise lines or curves at any angle as part of a natural stroke of the brush.

Stickers

• Peel individual sticker images off Sticker Sheets to apply to the canvas. Comes with a wide range of sample stickers.
  
• Spray a stream of stickers from a sheet on to the canvas using the Sticker Spray. A wide range of variables can be used to control how the flow works, including stylus pressure, underlying image properties and more.
  
• Post-Edit stickers applied with the Sticker Spray. You can move, scale, rotate, or delete individual stickers that were sprayed with the tool. Spray a tree-full of leaves then delete the ones that don't look quite right, or tweak any of the thousands of pebbles that make up a beach. Post-Editable stickers remove the random chance from image spray systems.

Interface

• Simple and intuitive interface gathers controls in to appropriate groups and presets the most important ones in an easy to access first tier, while lesser controls hide away in Pods until they are required.
  
• The interface gets out of the way as you paint. If you paint stroke approaches a panel, it vanishes so that you can see what you're doing, then reappears when you're done.
  
• Scale the interface up or down to suit the size of your working environment.
  
• The Toolbox panel lets you gather together appropriate resources in to a single panel for quick access to the tools you need for your current painting.
  
• Workbench Mode collapses the entire interface in to a slim toolbar that lets you work with the full screen in a compressed environment. The Workbench Pinboard lets you pin important colors, tools, layers, stencils, and other user objects from your toolbox to the toolbar for quick access to relevant resources for the work you’re doing right now.

Scripting

• The ArtRage Scripting System allows you to record your paintings for playback later. Playing a script reconstructs the painting stroke by stroke and can be shared with other users.
  
• Annotations can be added to scripts as they are recorded, allowing you to highlight techniques or areas of your painting that others might find useful or interesting.
  
• Scripts can be played back at any resolution: Paint your masterpiece then recreate it stroke by stroke at larger size for printing.
  
• The ArtRage Scripting Language lets you control almost every aspect of the application via a text script file. Edit scripts directly or create them from scratch utilising a C-like programming language.

Paint Symmetry

• Turn on the Paint Symmetry system and ArtRage automatically replicates your strokes around the canvas as you paint.
  
• Adjust the type of symmetry (Rotational or Mirrored), the center of symmetry and the number of axes you want.
  
• The entire symmetry system can be controlled from a single ‘puck’ on the canvas.

Miscellaneous

• Support for multi-core or multiprocessor machines speeds up almost every aspect of the application.
  
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
  
• Internal filters provide Noise Addition, Blur and Color Adjustment control. ArtRage also supports a wide range of Photoshop Filters.
  
• ArtRage supports Perspective and Non-Uniform transformations for layer contents.

File Formats

• Import and Export standard image file formats including PNG, JPG, and TIFF.
  
• ArtRage can save automatic incremental backups of your paintings, storing previous generations so that you can recover older versions when you need them.
  
• Import and Export Photoshop PSD files, keeping Layers, Layer Groups, Blend Modes, and editable Text Layers intact.
  
• The ArtRage Package File format lets you package together custom resources such as presets, stickers, and stencils in to a single file that can be shared with other users and installed with a double click.

Note: The Mac version of this software does not support Steam Cloud at this time.