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Recently I wrote a review for Adobe Illustrator 9 where I stated my desire for a convergence of Illustrator and Photoshop into the ultimate graphics tool. Well that wish is well on its way to being fulfilled. But not by Adobe. Deneba seems determined to create the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of graphic applications. Their apparent goal is to create a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker and GoLive under one roof, not a suite of linked programs. Deneba Canvas 7 is the next step in this journey. This review will examine how well Deneba's newest offspring performs in four areas of design: vector illustration, bitmap editing, page layout and Web creation.

Deneba Canvas screenshot

Vector Magic
Deneba Canvas was originally created as a vector/raster illustration tool for the Mac. Combining the ability to manipulate these two types of graphics was unique when Canvas was first released. In Canvas 6, ‘Sprite layers’ were created so designers could quickly combine vector and raster graphics using transparency. Canvas 7 has upped the ante once again with its ‘Sprite Effects’ tools.

Canvas Toolset

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