The other day I realised I'd actually been working with ProCreate (the fantastic industry-standard iPad art app from super-talented developers Savage Interactive) for nearly 2 years. ProCreate was pretty much what sold me on wanting to buy an iPad and Pencil for digital art, after realising that the extortionate costs of a screen tablet for my desktop Mac were probably never going to be within my means. For the princely sum of just over £380 I grabbed an iPad 7th Gen, Apple Pencil and the software.
One important difference between ProCreate and some of its higher-priced competitors is that it's a single cost on entry. You buy ProCreate for a tenner from the app store, and you get free updates thereon. No annoying monthly subscription fees (Clip Studio, my previous go-to for digital art, is subscription-based on iPad which makes me VERY ANGRY INDEED!) but real and actual value piled on with every update.
So the software has now been upgraded to version 5X with some real game-changing features included in this release such as...
- New filters. Add gradients, halftones, glitches and other cool effects either to your layers or by pencil
- Custom swatches from an image, and 'swatch drop' colour drops into your work directly from your palettes. The former is absolutely jaw-dropping, allowing you to create a new ProCreate colour palette from any image on your iPad, or directly from the camera itself (Never seen anything like this in any other digital art package, it really is stunning!)
- New blend modes for brushes, making them behave even more like traditional media (I've always thought that Clip Studio still had the edge for 'mixy' brushes but ProCreate has got so much better, to the point where the blend / smudge tools are fantastic to use).
- A reference box! HOORAY! Needed this feature more than any other, a 'floating' box for your reference image so it doesn't have to be part of, nor interfere with your image as you work from it (probably less use to me on a tiny 9.7" screen but for you posh 12.9" screen iPad Pro folk with more money than me, this is a brilliant addition!
There are stacks of other features crammed into this X update (which makes you wonder what on earth they're going to add in when they go with a full next version release.
BUT the news isn't all good. With "older" iPads (remember, mine's only 2 years old) you'll definitely notice the lack of layers (if you hadn't already) and you'll also start to see some slowdown when using certain brushes, blend modes and brush sizes. I can work around this (as I'm only an amateur) but others might be really pissed off that it feels like ProCreate is now optimised for higher-end / newer iPad processors (probably flies on the Pro or newer iPad Airs).
Even with that tiny niggle, this is still my go-to for digital art and looks like it will be for some time to come (at least until my iPad drops off the support curve for the software, I guess). The UI is simple to use, intuitive and there's a very good reason why so many industry pros are using ProCreate over Photoshop now, it simply is as good as it sounds, it's cost effective even for non-pros, and it's bloody brilliant.
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