Procreate 2 Update Is Nothing Short Of Amazing

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Procreate-2-Curves

Procreate is pretty much my favorite drawing and painting app for the iPad, and v2.0 blows the metaphorical, Cockney-accented doors off the previous version. Yes, it’s now iOS 7-ready, but it’s also now an absurdly powerful images editor, with a whole new interface design to boot.

Here’s the quick list, along with a few notes:

  • Skeuomorphism: out. There wasn’t much, but now theres none.
  • New gallery design. No more tapping to edit. You just swipe to delete or otherwise do something to a single artwork, and swipe the other way to enter bulk edit (multiple selection) mode. And folders now look like iOS’ own springboard folders, with little thumbs of everything therein.
  • Full-screen dialog boxes. No more tiny pop-up boxes for making choices. Now the whole screen blurs and the buttons are presented on top. Expect this to be widely copied in other apps.
  • Filters. This is the big one. Procreate now adds photo-like filters so you can tweak curves, opacity, color balance and even add things like Gaussian blur and noise to individual layers. This is lightning fast: even on the old iPad mini the blur is added in real time as you swipe the image, and you can even zoom in and out and twist the image while doing it. It’s pretty amazing.

The app has been reworked under the hood to move all the image processing onto the GPU, with custom code to do it. I’m amazed at how responsive the app is on my non-retina mini, which is doubly crippled by iOS 7. I can;t imagine how it’s going to fly on the retina mini, if that thing ever actually arrives

Between this and my little Selphy printer, I’m tempted to go make some digital paintings as soon as I sign off today.

Ridiculously, Procreate is free for existing users, and just $6 for everyone else. Trust me, this will be the best $6 you spend today.

Source: Procreate Blog

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