Fri, 04 May 2012 Decorator 3.0 review
While the masking tools are hit and miss and it takes an age to run the preview, the basic results can actually be fairly convincing
- Manufacturer: Akvis
- Distributor: Akvis
- Pros: Change the surface texture and colour without affecting the underlying tonality; selection tools; light source direction; library of textures to use change colour of new texture
- Cons: Selection tools aren’t good enough; there are better ways of replacing colours; no proper preview option; very slow to process to see result
- Price: From $54 (£33)
- Star rating:
The basic idea of Decorator is to change the look of a selected area by replacing either the colour or the texture, while still retaining the outline and folds. This is quite tricky to do normally.To do any of this you need to select an area first, and while Decorator comes with selection, fill and magic wand facilities they aren’t particularly good.
The magic wand for example will pick up non-contiguous areas even when contiguous has been selected. The option then is to replace with a colour or texture and here there’s a library of textures to choose from.
There’s everything from industrial, abstract shapes to colourful, flowery shapes as well as standard texture subjects like woods, tiles and stone effects. Specifying light direction and texture warping are neat touches, however you need to run the filter before you get a preview and this is slow. Results can be quite good though.

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