Sapphire Brushes - Review

[Christine Farrelly]

Sapphire Innovations - Xara Brushes.

I received the CD I ordered from Sapphire the following day, not really too surprising as we are both in London.

The brushes come in self extracting zip files which are password protected and need the password from Sapphire to unlock them - a reasonable precaution.

As the web site suggests there are 1600 (no I did not count them) brushes in 63 Xar files and although I havent had time to inspect all of them closely - none appear to be ones posted either at the Xarazone or the Swap Shop. They can be purchased in lots of 400.

However - with no disrespect intended for the effort that has gone in to creating so many, they all appear to be just vector shapes or groups of vector shapes made into brushes with no brush editing to change the output and no transparency, shading or bitmap effects in the brushes as far as I can ascertain (i.e not really Xara brushes as Xarans know them). Some very interesting and unusual shapes which give rise to other possibilites but many that appear to be just created using the quick shape tool.

Quite a few of the brushes which are groups of shapes make quite effective spraygun brushes after a bit of brush editing and being just vector do not slow Xara down.

I do not regret my purchase as I am an avid collector of all things Xaran, but unless you also are a 'collector' I would not say that this is a 'must have'.

There are a number of demo's of other offerings on the CD which may tempt some of you, plugins etc for Photoshop and PSP and even some brushes for CorelDraw.

I intend to send a copy of this review to Andrew at Sapphire as I think it only fair that he should be able to respond - perhaps he may even be persuaded to put demo versions of the Xara brushes and fills on the Xarazone.

Christine

[Christine Farrelly]

Sapphire Innovations - Xara Brushes.

I received the CD I ordered from Sapphire the following day, not really too surprising as we are both in London.

The brushes come in self extracting zip files which are password protected and need the password from Sapphire to unlock them - a reasonable precaution.

As the web site suggests there are 1600 (no I did not count them) brushes in 63 Xar files and although I havent had time to inspect all of them closely - none appear to be ones posted either at the Xarazone or the Swap Shop. They can be purchased in lots of 400.

However - with no disrespect intended for the effort that has gone in to creating so many, they all appear to be just vector shapes or groups of vector shapes made into brushes with no brush editing to change the output and no transparency, shading or bitmap effects in the brushes as far as I can ascertain (i.e not really Xara brushes as Xarans know them). Some very interesting and unusual shapes which give rise to other possibilites but many that appear to be just created using the quick shape tool.

Quite a few of the brushes which are groups of shapes make quite effective spraygun brushes after a bit of brush editing and being just vector do not slow Xara down.

I do not regret my purchase as I am an avid collector of all things Xaran, but unless you also are a 'collector' I would not say that this is a 'must have'.

There are a number of demo's of other offerings on the CD which may tempt some of you, plugins etc for Photoshop and PSP and even some brushes for CorelDraw.

I intend to send a copy of this review to Andrew at Sapphire as I think it only fair that he should be able to respond - perhaps he may even be persuaded to put demo versions of the Xara brushes and fills on the Xarazone.

Christine

[Erik Heyninck]

for your objective and very professional review.

If you don't work against time, time often works for you.