Acrylic is Microsoft’s first serious foray into the competitive world of professional drawing packages. A market we could just call “the Photoshop market” for obvious reasons. According to Microsoft:
“Acrylic” is the codename for an innovative illustration, painting and graphics tool that provides exciting creative capabilities for designers working in print, web, video, and interactive media.
My biggest criticism of Adobe Photoshop is basically that Adobe Illustrator isn’t included in the same package. It’s quite common for most other graphics software to handle both raster and vector layers – something you often want when designing websites. Clearly Adobe don’t want to offer both in the same program so that you have to go out and buy two separate products at £400+ each. It looks like MS Acrylic does both, so that puts it onto a winner already in my book. Price will be my next concern – there’s no way I would fork out for what Photoshop costs, which is why I use Paint Shop Pro instead.
However, the biggest test will be whether Microsoft release this on OSX – as most professional designers use Apple equipment.
Will they succeed? Is it any good? Decide for yourself…