BeLight Software is a software developer based in Odessa where it employs some of the most inventive coders I've ever come across. The company produces a range of innovative software for Mac users with genuinely useful applications that are priced very competitively.
Belight has now announced the release of version 4.4 of Art Text, the company's powerful text effects, typography and graphic design software that runs under macOS. This latest update introduces the power of AI and applies it to Art Text's design tools.
Art Text is a graphic design package for creating text effects, logos and animated text. With an intuitive design toolkit, graphic presets and typography templates, users can create design headings for desktop publishing projects and logos for products and websites. Art Text can instantly produce 3D text graphics and it can even be used to produce animated text effects for use on Instagram, Facebook, video intros and websites.
Art Text comes with a large selection of ready-made text styles, surface materials and special effects. Users can give full rein to their creative instincts with adjustable textures, surface bump maps, environment textures, light spots and shadows. The result is text with special effects like coffee beans, colored balls, tree leaves, Lego bricks and even clouds, using the included collection or user-supplied fill images. Users can experiment with unique lettering designs ranging from highly random to structured layouts and regular fill sizes.
Art Text's Spray Colorize tool can automatically paint fill objects using custom images. The tool is useful for creating typography textures. Another use for the Spray Colorize tool is for composing photos with custom puzzles, brushes, geometry figures and other spray-fill objects.
Text designs can be finished off using a variety of masks to render things like distressed text or a vintage look. It's also possible to add a stamped effect with a single click. The great thing about Art Text is it's easy and fun to use and experiment with settings while combining masks with other effects to produce some genuinely impressive and unique designs.
Art Text can also alter a font's shape beyond standard the typeface options. For example, sides can be worn out using the Side Distortion tool which creates random holes in the body with Erosion or partially dim text using Blur distortion.
Special 2D materials can produce an array of special effects, such as bumping or embossing. Glass, plastic or gold finishes can also be applied to make a design's surface glossy, matte, bright or faded. Alternatively, graphics can be given artistic effects like watercolor, oil paint or pencil drawing.
Art Text also includes a 3D modelling engine that can convert any text, symbol or pictogram into a 3D shape. The software has an embedded 3D renderer with lots of customizable 3D materials that can deliver hyper-realistic results. In addition, Art Text comes with a huge selection of fills, distortion effects and object content that can create realistic, hand-painted, ink-written or watercolor-style lettering.
This latest update to Art Text also introduces the AI Wizard that can enhance the graphics created within Art Text templates or generate entirely new designs based on a user's prompts. To help users get started with AI design, Art Text comes with 20 free AI renders. The update also gives access to over 170 templates that have been specifically customized for use with generative AI.
AI Style within Art Text is a specially trained AI model designed for a specific effects. These styles are used in Belight's AI templates to generate typography that is super-realistic and incredibly detailed. When configuring an AI task using the AI Wizard, users can create highly descriptive text prompts with adjectives like "saturated, vibrant, dramatic or photorealistic" that can guide AI to produce precise outcomes.
The AI Effect Amount tool controls the amount of influence that generative AI functions add to a new image. Keep Original Shape is another setting that adjusts how much AI can modify a design's original shape that's been created in Art Text. Meanwhile, the AI Refiner automatically enhances the quality and accuracy of AI-generated images by adding extra details.
The AI Wizard functions as a bridge between Art Text's designs and a server with Artificial Intelligence that uses an image from Art Text, including its colors and shape mask, as an initial input for AI, such as a text prompt.
Finally, an AI template is a combination of an Art Text design, AI style, text prompt and other AI settings that can create text effects with a high level of quality and realism. There are more than 60 AI Styles included with specially trained AI models designed to create specific text effects such as balloon alphabet, fur, oil paint, bread, magic lighting and many more. If higher-resolution images are required, the AI Upscale tool can generate 4K images.
Pricing & Availability: Art Text 4.4 costs $29.99 and is available from the Belight website or from the Apple Mac App Store.
Compatibility: Requires an Apple Silicon or Intel processor running macOS 10.13 or higher.