Pocket Artist Review by JongJungBu

Many of you have heard of Adobe's Photoshop or Jasco's Paintshop Pro. In fact, "photoshop" has become almost a household word for doctoring photos and artwork, just as "band-aid" has become a household word for doctoring cuts and scratches. It should come as no surprise then that this technology has crossed over into the PDA realm. Actually, it has for some time now in a small number of avenues. But this month marks the release of another update to Conduit's Pocket Artist, now at version 2.7, and is a good a time as any to bring you a thorough review of this great application.

Installation

No problems with installation as should be expected. The trial and full version are one in the same and take up about 1MB of storage memory. The primary benefit is that the trial version allows you to try out all of the program's features, including delayed screen capture, minus the ability to save your work. You can then unlock the trial within 30 days for $49.95. Owners of version 1.2 or below may upgrade to version 2.7 for $19.95.

Playing Around

Loading Pocket Artist to play around, one can easily begin drawing or painting up a picture in just a few seconds like I did here. Users of Photoshop should feel at home and can begin creating or editing images without even consulting a manual. The most basic tools such as color choosing, eyedropper, paintbrush, fill, text, and your selection styles are readily available with just a few taps.

Features

It would be nearly impossible to cover every feature and every possible scenario one would use them in. But I will try to cover most of the tools that can make this program useful to you or to one such as myself.

Photoshop Compatible

Sounds good eh? This feature was last in my list but I find it to be the best feature. Thusly I will cover it first. This is the most striking feature for me--the ability to save your images in PSD format (i.e. Photoshop format). Actually, this is the default format that comes up when you choose to save a new image or an existing image with layers. You can then open these images on your desktop PC with Photoshop if you desire. As well, you can take your Photoshop images created on your PC and open/edit them in Pocket Artist. However, some features do not transfer to the Pocket PC though, such as Photoshop's layer blending options (e.g. layer emboss, satin). But the natural unmodified images drawn and each layer will appear intact in your Pocket Artist. In the example below, I opened a Photoshop-created file on the desktop and saved a JPEG with pillow emboss layer blending turned on. I then opened the PSD file within Pocket Artist and as you can see the layer embossing is gone. The image appears flat. But the drawing themselves remain the same. If I turned off layer blending in Photoshop, what you see below on the right is exactly what I would have. I can live with that as long as I can open Photoshop files, can't you? :)

Layer System

Before I leave the greatness of the Photoshop format, I have to mention the layering system as this goes hand-in-hand. Pocket Artist utilizes Photoshop's system--which isn't that much different than Paintshop Pro or other imaging software--but this feature should be obvious if it is going to open PSD files intact. Pocket Artist supports hiding specific layers, adjusting their opacity, changing blending options that coincide with paintbrush options, as well as merging layers in various manners. I took a moment to show you some of these capabilities in the captures below.

Image Browser

This is a nice feature to have, particularly if your filenames aren't very obvious. It's not a breakthrough or anything, but it is something that you won't find in some older Pocket PC image software or Paint. You can also choose a List View for your more traditional file listing by name, location, size, and date.

Selection Tools

Pocket Artist has a wide variety of selection tools. Some may feel that a few of the shapes seem rather unnecessary, but at least it has plenty of choices and the good ole Lasso. And one can surely divine all the uses for the Magic Wand. Your selection can then be copied to a 24-bit clipboard. Once you have a selection, you can do the usual modifications to the selection area without affecting the rest of your image--including transformations such as flipping and rotating. You may also invert your selection or feather it by any number of pixels. Image editing can get a little slow when dealing with large memory images and odd-shaped selections but this is the price one pays for mobile work. This can also vary from device to device and with available memory left though. Free up some more memory if this happens to you as that may solve your problem.

Text & Shape Handling

Pocket Artist supports not only your standard shapes and polygons, but also drawing text. You can either draw normal text or use a text outline--which acts more like a lasso-selection in the shape of letters. Text functions do not require a lot of complexity as long as they can handle various fonts and styles. Pocket Artist handles this well but with a few caveats. The good news is that it allows you to set the angle the text follows and whether or not you want anti-aliasing for smoother edges. This is great. Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don't.

The bad news is that once you have entered your text, you must then manually choose the selection tool to fine tune the position of your currently selected text. Moving text is a must-have feature and fortunately Pocket Artist does have it. I don't know about you, but my text is never in the right place the first go around. But Pocket Artist does not automatically switch to the selection tool after entering text. A new user may have trouble with this by trying to move entered text and finding the text dialog coming up again instead. Just remember to tap on the selection tool AFTER entering text and you'll be fine. One thing you must also remember to do is select the color of your text beforehand. Once the text editing dialog comes up, you cannot change the colors without cancelling or confirming the dialog. A small annoyance really but worth mentioning. By the way, I used the word "text" 17 times in this section (including this sentence).

Image Adjustments

Pocket Artist supports a number of image adjustments that you can find in commercial desktop applications. Such features include color levels, contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, resizing, and cropping. These tools are great for adjusting photos. Crop an image after you used the selection tool, resize your canvas, or you can resize the entire image--stretched or proportional. The resizing methods include nearest neighbor, bilinear, and bicubic.

Filter

You know the best things in life aren't for free. Oh wait, not THAT "Filter". I mean the Filter tools in Pocket Artist. Your standard repertoire is here: blur, motion blur, sharpen, sharpen more, despeckle, reduce grain, convolve, emboss, find edges, and solarize. Whew! Who could expect so much from a Pocket PC program.

Red-Eye Removal

You can use Pocket Artist to remove red-eye from those old photos of yours. This is pretty handy, though not necessary. However, if you have a digital camera that supports the same storage card slot as your Pocket PC (many of you do), this is a great way to edit your pics on the go! The Red-Eye Brush may also be used to remove a color you pick-up or that is set to your background. So it is not exclusively for red-eyes.

Smudge

The smudge tool is very useful and just as powerful as in desktop software. It is prized in digital painting and also quite handy in image editing. In the example below, I decided I did not like the lamp in the background. So I smudged it away. :)

Dodge/Burn

The Dodge/Burn tool can be useful for brightening or darkening certain parts of an image. Say, if the lighting is bad in your photo. It is also useful in digital artwork for shadowing or lighting. Take a gander at the example below. I whipped up a moonlit sky real quick and I want to highlight the clouds to reflect the moon. I could just paint it in, smudge it, maybe do some blurring. OR I could do it all in one step using the Dodge brush.

Capture Screen

This is a very handy tool. You can use it to capture an image of the screen on a delay that you determine. In fact, all of the images that you see in this review were captured using Pocket Artist itself. :D

Use As Desktop

This is another handy tool. Not necessary, but its a cool feature to have. With this, you can set any image you want as your Today Screen image. Be forewarned, it does not resize the image and it will put a faded look or haze to them to make text easier to read on them. You will have to do some tweaking of text color and image size if you want the perfect Today Screen. The example below explains what I mean. I didn't bother to take it any steps further than tapping Use As Desktop.

Standard Tools

Some of the other tools that Pocket Artist has do not deserve the kind of flare the other features get. Why? Because I said so...er...I mean we expect them or even Paint has them. But nonetheless, I will glaze over them in case you are wondering if this program has them. Pocket Artist retains a list of the 4 most recently opened images, so you can quickly re-open a photo without searching for it. If you've edited an image to your unliking, you can revert to the last saved document. You also have your usual transformations such as rotating, horizontal flipping, and vertical flipping. While editing images, you may zoom in and out, to 100% (actual size), zoom to fit, or quick zoom to a list of preset percentages. Toolbars may be turned on or off in case you feel they are in your way. Color selection may be made on the usual rainbow palette, from a preset palette map, or by editing the specific RGB numbers of the color in question. I could not find a hex value to edit for the colors. The eyedropper may also be used to select a color from an open image. This can either be the usual point sample, or an area averaged or weighted color selection. Lastly, the color for foreground and background may be swapped instantaneously with just a tap.

What's Lacking?

One feature that would be highly desired for this program is a History Palette. What I mean is the ability to Undo more than once. Currently one can only Undo/Redo once. Although this is fine for a lot of actions, there are those times where you really want to try more than one step without having to save each one separately. This is something I do quite a bit for creating sprites. Some only vary between each other by a few pixel strokes at a time.

Another feature missing is even-sized brushes. There are various preset brush shapes and sizes that you can choose from. But I am a fan of brush size 2. Pocket Artist comes with brush sizes 1, 3, 5, 9, 13, 19, and so on. So that was a little bit of a turn off there. Nothing to cry over, but its nice to have options. Especially since the older versions of Pocket Artist if I remember correctly, as well as the H/PC version, support more brush sizes. I may be wrong on this, but I cannot find a means to select the exact size I want. I'd rather have more brush sizes than a star-shaped brush. It should be noted that you can import custom brush sizes if you desire using Photoshop's ABR brush library format. However, for the casual user that may or may not have Photoshop, you may have some extra work on your hands if you still want even-sized brushes.

Conclusion

Overall, Pocket Artist is a great program to have--especially for those avid users of Adobe Photoshop. Using a stylus or pen to manipulate images is so much easier than using a mouse. Shouldn't that be obvious? Of course, if you have other means of input for your desktop then this is debatable. But still, Pocket Artist packs a lot of features into such a small size. If you do a lot of drawing or photo editing on your PC, this could be a great way to use your time wisely when away from your PC, or relaxing on your sofa. Unless your PC is in front of your sofa. You know who you are. :) If it were not for the lack of multiple Undo's and even-sized brushes, I would have given Pocket Artist a perfect 10. Go ahead and give it a try yourself though. I did and the image below was drawn completely in Pocket Artist. So it's possible to make SOMETHING even if it isn't a masterpiece. :)

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