SketchBook Pro review

When you think of Alias, the first things that come to mind are big, resource-heavy programs like Maya and Power Animator, costing thousands of pounds.

So it will come as a surprise to learn that its latest release on the Mac is a £120 natural-media sketching and painting program.

SketchBook Pro is designed to mimic the natural process of putting marks on paper, and to this end comes with one of the most stripped-down interfaces imaginable: a plain white page fills the whole screen, while tools are contained in an arc-shaped palette on the bottom left of the screen.

The sparseness of this interface is derived from the fact that the original application (this is its first release on Mac OS X) was designed to work on tablet PCs, a concept that hasn't made it to the Mac yet. It also comes from Alias' observation that when people sketch, they tend to swing their drawing arm from the elbow, so the positioning of the palette is intended to maximise the available drawing space. It can be swapped to the other side of the screen for left-handers.

SketchBook Pro also makes use of Alias' gesture-based 'Marking Menu' paradigm: click on a tool group and sub-tools pop out in a rosette, where either a tool or a palette can be chosen. It's not much different from pop-out menus in practice. What is different is the quality of the tools. The basic brush, airbrush, highlighter, smear, eraser, chisel brush and felt pen. These feel very responsive and natural (much more so than their Photoshop equivalents, for example). The marker pen will bleed into the 'paper', as the tip lingers and the highlight pen won't cover pencil marks, for instance. The airbrush also feels very smooth and responsive in use.

A problem does arise with the tools' customisability. The default collection of drawing tools (arranged on a 7 x 4 palette) are not themselves customisable. You have to save a preset as a custom and then alter that. The range of available attributes varies with each drawing tool, but are still pretty impressive. Hardness, opacity, tip angle, stamp pacing and so on are all catered for. However, what is missing is the ability to change the size of any brush on the fly. We kept reaching for the '[' and ']' keys (as you would in Photoshop), but brush sizes are saved as part of a custom brush description. Also, the Eraser size isn't linked to the current brush size, as you might expect - you may have to define a custom eraser, depending on the brush you're using.

The application was designed to run on Tablet PCs, and this explains the lack of keyboard commands, although 15 have been added, giving a total of 28. One shortcut that seems to be missing is the ability to bring up the Marking Menu for the current tool (or even the entire palette) under the cursor position. This is odd, since you can do this in Maya. SketchBook Pro doesn't use the barrel button on a tablet pen - maybe this could be an ideal use for it? Again, the original limitation of the Tablet PC format may be behind this, but when you're working on a Wacom A4 tablet (which is nearly A3 in size), the palette can feel a long way off.

Layers are also supported, albeit in a simpler way than Photoshop or Painter - there are no blending modes, for example - but in the context of SketchBook Pro, this can't be considered an omission. However, functions like Merge Down (command-e) work exactly as in Photoshop. One criticism must be the clunky Opacity Slider interface. Layered file saving and exchanging is done via the new layered TIFF format. The fact that SketchBook Pro has no proprietary file format makes it easier for artists working remotely to swap their ideas with art editors.