Testers dabbling with pre-beta versions of Microsoft's forthcoming graphics tool say it's no Photoshop.Photographers and Web designers are wedded to Photoshop. Illustrators and graphic artists are yoked to Illustrator. And animators are in love with Flash. So designers of all stripes are saying that doesn't leave much room for Microsoft's Acrylic, which is the company's first offering in the desktop illustration and image-editing software market.
Microsoft Corp. is touting Acrylic as a professional illustration, painting and graphic-design product, and they're targeting designers working in print, Web, video and interactive media.
Microsoft released the second CTP (Community Technology Preview), a pre-Beta 1 build, of Acrylic last week. The software is available as a free download from the Microsoft.com Web site.
How is Acrylic connected with Microsoft's next operating system, Vista? Click here to read more.
Acrylic runs on Windows XP SP2, and also is expected to work with Windows Vista. Since its first CTP release in June, there have been more than 200,000 downloads of the technology, according to Microsoft.
Some graphic artists are raving about the vector tools.
Sarah How, a U.K.-based Game Designer that was in the private beta testing cycle, wrote on her Web log that "this is a superb vector program, with a lot going for it in a time when Adobe have pretty much cornered the market with the big guns such as Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, GoLive and Photoshop."
"… Apart from Flash," How said, "which still has a real edge on natural drawing due to the adaptive eraser making good clean nodes and it's excellent handling of gradients, this is the best vector tool I've tried."
Can Acrylic take on Photoshop? Click here to read more.
Some users are encountering difficulties with the Acrylic UI (user interface), however.
Technical author and Web developer Kevin Yank wrote on his blog that "in addition to significant performance improvements and a few new features such as XAML export… Microsoft has done some work on the user interface in an effort to improve usability. After playing with this update for a few minutes, however, I'd have to say the UI remains this product's single biggest weakness."
Next Page: More complaints noted about Acrylic's UI.
Another user, Eric Dolecki, blogged that "The Acrylic UI is wildly frustrating—you have to fight with it the entire time using it. If Microsoft ever decides to do some usability testing, hire some better UI designers, remove the bloat from their applications, and drops the notion of taking on Macromedia/Macrodobe by adding some sort of animation support, etc. They might have something there."
Acrylic seems to fall the most short when users are drawing direct comparisons between Acrylic and Photoshop.
Brandon LeBlanc, a Microsoft technology enthusiast wrote on LonghornBlogs.com that when he gave the product a try in June, "[I] found it difficult to do the same things I could with Photoshop." Recently, when he tried to give it a second try on his Windows Vista Test Machine, he still found it difficult to use.
"I've used it a few times, but unfortunately the program isn't what it was originally touted as: a graphics program like Photoshop," LeBlanc said. "Acrylic has some extremely nice graphics tools within the program that I wish Photoshop had, but for the most part - Acrylic is sort of useless to me."
"For example, you cannot save an image file into any other format other than Acrylic's .xpr file format," he continued. "In order to save a file in, say, .jpg - you have to "export" it into an image format. Also, I can't even find the setting that allows you to resize the canvas. I tried using Acrylic to take screenshots which were 800 by 600 but could not find any way to change the canvas settings to fit the image. It was a big hassle, so I ended up dropping use of the program for the time being (for a second time)."
A wish list for Photoshop. Click here to read more.
Ben Noble, a graphics design student, wrote on his web log that "Acrylic is good, but not perfect. It seems able to make an artist out of anyone with the various brush strokes that can be used. However, it's nowhere near as powerful as Adobe Illustrator. It's more like a beginner's tool. Market wise, it's too complicated to replace Paint and too simple to compete with anything Adobe has. It just doesn't quite fit anywhere."
Despite the predominantly negative feedback, some graphic artists see a brighter future for Acrylic.
"Acrylic is something different; it's not Illustrator, nor Painter or Photoshop. It's something new," said graphic artist Henry Stahle.
"The vector tools make it possible to paint with resolution independent natural media strokes. You can edit those strokes individually and revise your artwork to any resolution as you wish … The pixel painting engine is still a bit slow, but Microsoft is working on it. Soon the integration vector/bitmap in Acrylic will make the workflow and speed every serious gfx artist's tool. Soon no serious gfx artist [will be able to] do without it… But it is sure no photo editing application, like Photoshop, and never was supposed to be."
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