Testing, testing
Published May 6, 2009 | 
Wheeeeee!
Here I am playing with Serif DrawPlus X3. As there is no demo I decided to buy it with my own hard earned cash. They have an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee but I don’t think I’ll take them up on it. The Program is similar to Xara Xtereme in a lot of ways but with a whole bunch of extras that users of the Xara product have been begging for for years and some that I wish we had been begging for. Top of my list are more extensive drawing tools, CMYK profile support (kind of irrelevant as Vista broke my Colourometer), Solo mode (Isolates the bits you want to work on), Natural media brushes, mesh fill,cut tool, Lasso selection, fill paintbrush – the list goes on. One thing that makes me pathetically happy is the ability to open a file and have the document match to it’s size. This means I can just open up roughs and be good to go, with out having to mess around re-sizing.
Bad points? There are a couple.
Not enough keyboard short cuts, I didn’t realise how many of these I use.
Most of the Brushes seem to be bitmaps that can’t be broken apart There is the fill brush but that doesn’t give nice smooth thick and thin lines.
The brushes seem to be a bit rough and fill in at small sizes
It crashes occasionally.
I am enjoying playing with the new features and the support is excellent, Serif seem to be really interested in improving the app. I also don’t actually use lines all that much in my Illustration style. So. Will I switch………..
Only time will tell
I’ve dabbled with SD X3, and still prefer Xara Xtreme – it handles bevels much more robustly and supports Photoshop Plug-ins, which Serif does not. While its true X3 added some interesting tools, they really don’t add things that I need. I’ve only recently found use for the 3D capabilities of Xara, so that formerly useless add-on is actually a usable feature now.
I use Xara to create professional fantasy cartography for commissions for a number of publishers. I see no reason to switch to X3, its far less functional for my needs. But it may be ideal for anyone else and for different needs than I have.
Michael
Hi Michael
I’m giving X3 it’s opportunity. It deserves it. The developers seem very keen to help and it’s development seems faster than Xtreme. I do love Xtreme to bits but I do this stuff for a living and if anything is going to help or speed me up I want to know about it.
Besides, tinkering with this stuff it fun