Gertrudis MX is a standalone application that transforms an image (generally a photo) into an original artwork. With it, artists can start with an existing picture such as from a digital camera or scanner, a 3D rendering or painting from another program or imaging application. Gertrudis first performs a topological analysis of the image's content and builds a matrix of flow direction vectors. Users can then paint a few quick strokes across the desired features of their image. Gertrudis MX uses this information to generate something that looks more like hand-drawn masterpieces.

"Getrudis MX is one of the most intuitive Digital Art Tool at your fingertips. You can customize your styles as never seen before," said Martin Düerr, the owner of CYBERSIGN.DE a Digital Art firm from Germany. "It's a 'must have' for any serious graphic artist or digital painter. It's an indispensable tool for my daily work."

Realistic imitations of traditional media
While one of the main goals of Gertrudis MX is enabling users to create their own styles, there are a number of standard, "ready to use" styles which successfully imitate traditional media: Watercolor, Oil painting, Crayon, and Pen & Ink. Each of these comes in different sizes, and levels of details.

Custom Styles
One of the most important differences between Gertrudis MX and its predecessor -Gertrudis Pro- is that Gertrudis MX lets the user create its own style from the ground, with a deep level of customization, including the shape of the brush, texture, color sampling technique, width, length, and many more features. There are in fact more than 40 different parameters, organized from the most common parameters like width, length, transparency, to more sophisticated parameters like color variation, pen & ink behavior and others.

High resolution output
One of the key features of Gertrudis MX is that it is independent of the resolution, therefore, the user can render the picture at any size. An on-line example of this feature is available here.

Main Features
•Realistic imitations of the traditional media: Watercolor, Oil, Crayon, and others.
•Advanced Style Management: It lets creating variations of the existing styles or create new styles from scratch.
•Automatic drawing: There is one tool called "Autosketch" which lets the designer choose the option of giving the direction of the strokes in an automatic way. This is done by its exclusive flow analysis algorithm.
•High resolution pictures output: The resulting output can be rendered at high resolution without loss of quality.

Some examples of drawings done by its users can be found here.

System requirements: Windows 98, NT, 2000, or XP. 128 MB RAM.

Availability: Gertrudis MX Beta is available here.