New and improved illustration tools

Blend tool

The blend tool has been changed so you can now drag a line to tell FreeHand which points of the objects to blend to.

Click and drag to set the blend	release the mouse	change the blend steps in the object panel

And of course changing the spine of the blend is still easy too, with Modify > Combine > Join Blend To Path.

New calligraphic strokes

Add a calligraphic stroke to any path by choosing calligraphic in the stroke type popup menu in the object panel.

Eraser tool

Use the new eraser tool to erase parts of vector objects for an easy way to edit.

New alpha channels!

FreeHand MX now gives full import and display support for the alpha channels of common bitmap image files. A psd or tiff with alpha channels retains them in FreeHand! Notice that on this imported psd file, the transparency of the window is even preserved!

New brush enhancements

Brushes now have rounded corners, allowing  a smoother look on brushed paths.

Live edit graphic primitives

This one I discovered by accident and since it has been in CorelDraw and Xara X seemingly forever, I thought I had missed it in previous versions. Not so...it is new, and it is a nice feature.

Using the subselect tool and special handles you can edit shapes at any time. The edits affect all like points evenly: editing the outer points of the star (figure 1) as in figure 2, all outer points are affected the same. to give figure 3.

figure 1	figure 2	figure 3

Corners of squares and rectangles can similarly be rounded evenly all at once:

figure 4	figure 5	figure 6

Next --->>>