Initial Review
My first impressions of MasterWorks were mixed. Overall I think it has the potential to become a great digitizing package, but it’s not quite there. No doubt there will be refinements and changes in future upgrades that will make this program a worthwhile consideration when comparison shopping for digitizing software.
One thing that I really liked was the ability to draw on the screen without having to lift my pen to place stitch nodes. This is a great feature for digitizing line drawing and redwork designs. The downside was I could not find any way to merge lines once they had been drawn.
If you are a fan of auto-digitizing, MasterWorks seemed to do a fairly nice job with vector images. Each individual section in the design is listed on the right of the screen to allow individual selection for further refinements and viewing stitch properties. The downside is the program is designed to work only with vector images. You can bring in other graphics such as JPG or BMP as a background image or wallpaper, but you would have no choice but to manually digitize them. The auto digitizing wizard will not recognize anything but vector image formats.
The program has a very nice selection of standard fill patterns to choose from. More than I have seen in most other packages in this price range. Changing fill patterns or stitch types was quick and easy.
Creating text was limited to built-in fonts. You can import True Type fonts, but I found the lack of a preview awkward. If you select a True Type font for import you will not know what it looks like until the import process has completed. If you don’t like that font you will have to start the entire import process all over again.
I found some little quirks in the program that drove me nuts. For example, having the stitch property box open while working on a design caused erratic mouse cursor movement. No matter what I was doing the mouse cursor would jump to the “Apply” button in the properties box even though there was nothing to apply. The only way I could maintain control was to close the stitch properties box. That proved to be inconvenient as I often wanted to view or change stitch properties. If there was a way to prevent this erratic movement within MasterWorks I never found it. To disable the auto jump feature within my mouse software is not an option. I like this feature for most other applications.
Many of the tiny icons used to indicate particular components within the design are still a mystery to me. I could not find any reference to them in the help files. Consequently I had no idea what the symbols represented. In and out points were impossible to find so moving them was out of the question. Adding trim codes was a cumbersome process. I felt there were too many steps involved for what should be a simple operation. The digitizing tools built into the program reminded me of Palette and PE Design. Many of them are actually very similar, but there are many new ones as well. Once you figure out what each one does they are fairly simple to use.
While I didn’t actually sew out any of the designs I created in MasterWorks, some of my fellow digitizers did. It was reported to me that default stitch compensation settings were less than adequate. While the designs seemed to register properly on the screen, the resulting sew out left gaps between the sections allowing fabric to show through.
In all fairness the demo version of MasterWorks was limited to a 30 day trial period. I didn’t have sufficient time to completely explore and test all the program’s features. I tried to concentrate on the things I know I would use the most as a manual digitizer.
It is unlikely that I will purchase this software at this time. In my opinion the minuses far outweighed the pluses in the initial release of MasterWorks. Hopefully the next release will go a long way toward balancing the scale.
© 2006 R & M Crafts - All Rights Reserved