Hi all, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a full review of this scale, so before I begin I would like to give thanks to Clare Homer PR Manager at Serif for proving me with this opportunity. Now that’s over 😉 Here is my Review of Serif CraftArtist! 😀

First of all for those that don’t know, Serif CraftArtist is a digital crafting product which provides individuals with all the tools needed to easily and quickly make professional-looking print projects including photo books, wedding stationery, cards, scrapbooks and much more at home! I posted a press release with more info here.

Serif CraftArtist comes in various packages/Stock-keeping units a.k.a SKU’s which you can buy or get for free for that matter, the free version is available here: http://www.daisytrail.com/free-digital-scrapbooking or http://www.serif.com/digital-scrapbooking but don’t go just quite yet, here’s a quick side by side comparison of the versions you can get.

Features	CraftArtist Compact(free on DaisyTrail)	CraftArtist(inc in Baby, Wedding, Cards, Scrapbooks & Gold)	CraftArtist Professional(inc in CraftArtist Platinum only)
Create any craft project
Add unlimited text, photos, embellishments, materials, backgrounds, brushes and frames
Templates included
Change colours of items
Crafting tools:Scissors, punches, stencils
Brushes
Photo editing capabilities
Cutout studio
Blend Modes
Digikit creator
Create your own stencils, brushes and filter effects

And as for prices, here’s what they cost, not bad once you see what the software can do:

• CraftArtist Wedding Day (£19.99) – the perfect solution for brides and grooms looking to save time and money by creating their own bespoke wedding stationery and decorations.
• CraftArtist Baby Photos (£19.99) – the complete package for parents who want to make high quality personalised photobooks and cards with their cherished baby photos.
• CraftArtist Greeting Cards (£19.99) – the essential software for anyone who wants to create and print wonderful personalised cards at home, helping users save money whilst having fun.
• CraftArtist Scrapbooks (£19.99) – the ultimate home scrapbooking software to make beautiful, personalised scrapbooks and albums to share with friends and family.
• CraftArtist Gold (£19.99) – Fantastic value for money, with a selection of kits and templates from Wedding Day, Baby Photos, Greeting Cards and Scrapbooks, plus the CraftArtist software.
• CraftArtist Platinum (£39.99) – the all-in-one package for creating every type of print project imaginable. It includes all the content from Wedding Day, Baby Photos, Greeting Cards and Scrapbooks plus the CraftArtist Professional software, with added features for extra value.

I shall be showing you CraftArtist Gold. Click The Images to Enlarge. CraftArtist loads up quite nice and simple and the first time you load it up, it will check for updates, which I recommend you do, believe an update fixed a bug I was having where an embedded web page was not showing on the digital content screen. Anyhow you can manually update at any time.

From the main start up splash screen you have many options which you can choose from, blank templates, pre-made templates, tutorials, more downloadable content and more. I choose “Choose a Template”.

On the next screen I was asked what template I would like to start of with, there was so many different types of projects I could choose from, It was certainly overwhelming, but in a good way as they all seemed very high quality.

And I could even filter by date and type for example, Greeting Cards for Valentines Day.

Or scrapbooks and hover over each one to get a little preview

I decided to go with a Valentines Day one,  You’ll notice it has a default image in it of a couple.

No problem, I can ungroup and and uncrop all the items and remove the image

And add my own and crop and regroup, in terms of cropping I mean using a shape, for example the heart, and the photo and crop out everything from the photo except a heart shape, took me a while to figure out how to do, you have to send the image to the back of the heart and then select photo + heart and the crop function, but once I did it once it was easy.

You can also change the background by importing more from the Digikits Browser, which is quite a good content library with lots of resources.

And it’s not just backgrounds, there’s also embellishments (a little bit like clip art) and frames and well loads more. All of this is filterable by type and category which is great, saves be digging around to much for that perfect piece of art, all of them very good quality.

You can pretty much change anything really, your free to express you creativity for sure!

On a gift card for example, same applies to scrapbooks, you can also of course edit the inside of the card/book by adding/editing the pages. Just like the front cover you can pretty much do anything you like with it, I quite like the “Insert Sentiment” and even that’s editable, there’s nothing like words from the heart so not being able to edit it to your own words would be a downfall, but it’s not so thumbs up!

Overall CraftArtist is a great product, and theres a lot more behing the scences than I can show you, plus it’s better for you to explore than me show you. I will certainly be recommending it and I truly believe that if you enjoy making cards and such then you will enjoy this, that goes for both those who like to make them but don’t always like the hassle of doing it or for those who would like to but find it to hard, it also applies to those who are professionals and like making such things by good old hand. Doing it digital can be as simple or as complcated as you like with little or loads of effort depending on how creative you want to be and its certainly fun.

If anyone gets it please post your crafting results here, would love to see. 😀

Don’t forget toy can get the free version here: http://www.daisytrail.com/free-digital-scrapbooking or http://www.serif.com/digital-scrapbooking

And Craft Artist Platinum here: http://www.serif.com/craftartist/platinum/