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Artlandia, Inc., maker of Artlandia SymmetryWorks, a popular pattern design plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, has released Artlandia SymmetryShop, a new plug-in that makes pattern design in Adobe Photoshop easy and fully automatic.
Similar to its Illustrator counterpart, SymmetryShop relieves the designer from the tedium of manually creating repeat patterns, a painstaking task that involves thousands of precise geometric transformations that used to make interactive experimentation with patterns virtually impossible. Artlandia SymmetryWorks, which solved this problem in Adobe Illustrator, is now widely used for creating surface designs for wallpaper, fabrics, quilting, tilings, web pages, fine arts, and other applications. With the release of the new plug-in, designers are no longer restricted to the use of Illustrator and can chose to create pattern designs in Photoshop, which has clear advantages for working with larger raster images, for example, sophisticated scanned hand-painted compositions or high-resolution photographs.
As a tool for professional designers, SymmetryShop creates patterns of all seventeen symmetries and allows the designer to produce an even richer repertoire of popular repeat types with a single click. The built-in library includes drop, diamond, spot, grid, gradation, and scale repeats for the same broad range of applications. Once created, patterns can be instantly converted from one repeat type to another while pattern parameters can be interactively adjusted, either from within the plug-in or directly in Photoshop. The plug-in further allows for unlimited iterations and refinement, with the design process spanning multiple sessions, which is especially important in producing complex, real-life pattern designs.
Going beyond patterns based on repeating a predefined geometric region of a source image, a technique that typically results in simplified or kaleidoscopic designs, SymmetryShop produces patterns from arbitrary selection, which brings about organic, interlocking patterns, with optionally smoothed-away boundaries. This makes the design process more natural and the designer more productive. The plug-in also gives the designer full control over the number of repeating tiles allowing the creation of border designs as well as surface patterns.
Fully-integrated with Photoshop, the plug-in lets the user export any number of snapshots as pattern fills (pattern presets) that can be used with the paint bucket, pattern stamp, healing brush, and other tools, as well as with the Layer Style dialog. SymmetryShop also produces the rectangular pattern fragment that can be easily exported to textile CAD programs or web browsers where SymmetryShop-generated patterns will seamlessly tile a fabric or a web page.
SymmetryShop is compatible with all versions of Photoshop starting from 6 and later, including the latest releases of Photoshop CS2 (Photoshop 7 or later recommended). It is immediately available for Windows 98/NT/2000/XP and all Mac OS platforms from 8.6 to 10.4 Tiger that run respective versions of Photoshop. The download-only version of the plug-in costs US$265 (or US$410 in a value package with SymmetryWorks 3). The CD-ROM version with a printed user guide costs US$291 (or US$461 with SymmetryWorks 3). The Site Version is expected to be released later this month. More information about the plug-in is available on the Artlandia web site, http://www.artlandia.com.
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