Procreate Review

Procreate, a professional-grade painting app for iPad and optimized for iPad 2, has been my favorite since it launched. Procreate has a wonderfully clean and intuitive GUI that welcomes any level of artist. The app is speedy too -  there is zero lag between brush strokes on the touchscreen and their appearance on the virtual canvas.

This real-time experience got me so intrigued I contacted the Australian developers who explained they built a custom engine - Open GL engine-Silica – that uses just about every drop of power in the A4 and A5 processors to provide desktop quality speed and performance.

Another thing that sets Procreate apart are the brushes. It has 12 presets that offer an amazing amount of configurability. Users don’t just control the size of the brush and the opacity, but also the wetness and paint load, the scatter, the plot, everything an artist – amateur or professional – might want to tweak.

Procreate takes it a step further. The detail-oriented artist can choose any images loaded onto the iPad to create the specific customized brush they need. Procreate was the first to offer this feature; others have tried to copy. What sets Procreate still far afield from the rest is the way brush creation works. Users choose two images, one for texture and the other for shape, and the app merges them to make the perfect tool for any project.

The smudge tool - like everything about the Procreate- feels organic, and artists can work with up to 16 layers effortlessly in way that will feel familiar to Photoshop users. The recently added pinch-to-zoom feature and optional HD canvas are very useful too. Procreate also offers Photoshop integration with multi-layered, multi-faceted project saving in PSD format. There is also PNG output, that allows for true transparency.

Procreate, with all that power, is the serious artist’s best choice, and for those who just like expressing their creative side, the simplicity and clean canvas are altogether too inviting to ignore. Most who have tried it agree: Procreate wins best in class.