Drop everything and download: Affinity Designer for iPad | Stuff
Notability is so much more than a note-taking app with its combination of handwriting, photos, typing and drawing tools. Meaning that you don't have to hop to a totally separate app to get your sketch on.
One of the coolest features of the Notability app is the palm rejection feature. This means you can rest your hand on the screen without having to worry about it affecting your work. Notability will also straighten any lines you'd like to be ruled, so all your notes will look as neat as neat can be.
Evernote is a notetaking iPad Pro app but it's a little like marmite because some people love it and others, well, not so much. It's a great app for collecting sketches, notes, to-do lists and websites, but some users find it a little difficult to navigate.
One of the cool things about Evernote is that you can record audio while sketching, meaning that you can work as you listen. But the fun doesn't stop there, the Evernote app also offers automatic palm rejection, as well as pressure sensitivity, meaning that you can really fill your notes with expressive lines strokes. LiquidText is the perfect app for reading and annotating.
LiquidText prides itself on its ability to support active reading, which means that you can highlight sections of what you're reading to come back to later, or collapse parts and sections of the document so you can refer to different parts at once. Again, having the Apple Pencil will benefit you greatly when it comes to using these iPad Pro apps.
The Apple Pencil will make it faster to use the app with its pressure and tilt sensitivity features, making LiquidText feel similar to the real thing. And if you've bagged yourself the Apple Pencil 2 then you can also use LiquidText's adjustable double-tap compatibility. Adobe's Illustrator CC is one of the industry-standard programmes for digital art, so it stands to reason that the vector art iPad Pro app is a great addition for the Apple Pencil, allowing you to design on the go with your Apple device.
We tried it out it in our Illustrator for iPad review and found, though it is a streamlined version, it still works brilliantly as a standalone program note: we tested a full version of Illustrator for iPad on the inch iPad Pro M1, , using an Apple Pencil 2. We especially love how the Apple Pencil works seamlessly with the software and the fact it is way more accessible and simple to navigate than the desktop version.
Illustrator for iPad lets you create lines, shapes, type, gradients, and effects, and you can use your Apple Pencil to merge and cut graphics with quick gestures, removing unwanted areas. You can add effects such as point gradients, radial repeats, patterns, and symmetry, and invite others to edit your projects, too.
There are over 18, fonts, as well as seamless cloud integration so you can work across your Creative Cloud apps. There's also a large community accessible via live streams on the app, including tutorials and inspirations from creative professionals. For the best current prices on an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which includes Illustrator in all its versions, see the details below.
One of the best iPad Pro apps for digital painting, Inspire Pro offers a surprisingly realistic art experience with an impressive feature set that can deliver truly professional results. With mediums such as oil, chalk, pastels and paint, the app offers multiple blending options including blending paint with the dry brush , which are based on painting using real materials.
The software is intuitive, and the Apple Pencil works with it like a dream. Rendering time is super-fast, and the neat Canvas Playback feature lets you watch your process afterwards, stroke by stroke.
Astropad was built by former Apple engineers with the objective of turning the iPad Pro into a graphics tablet for the Mac. When we tested Astropad see our Astropad 2. The result gives you the high-end experience of a Wacom pen display without actually having to buy a Wacom tablet , and you can connect it to your Mac wirelessly or via USB. Adobe's drawing app, Fresco, mimics other fine art drawing apps, bringing a natural painting and drawing experience to the iPad.
It has a lot of strong features, including brilliant brush capability, an intuitive interface and super-smooth running, although when we tested it we found it does fall short in other areas and needs some depth to be added to make it truly great see our Adobe Fresco review.
Its full integration with the Apple Pencil combined with its powerful brush features plus the ability to invite others to edit make it one of the best iPad Pro apps around, though. See our full for more details.
Procreate is the king of iPad Pro natural media apps, and the addition of the Apple Pencil offers a wonderfully fluid analogue-like experience. In part, this is due to the Apple Pencil's fine tip, its low latency and double-speed sampling rate, and in part it's because its palm rejection is nearly flawless.
But all the technical stuff fades into the background when you experience the joy of sketching with a 6B pencil, turning it flat to block in big areas of shade, or playing about with paints.
When we tested Procreate 5. Find out more about those, and the other remarkable updates, in our Procreate 5. Photoshop for iPad is included with all Creative Cloud opens in new tab subscriptions and can be downloaded from the App Store.
While we're including it in our list of the best iPad Pro Apps for Apple Pencil, note that it's designed as a complementary companion for the desktop version of the photo-editing software, and it can't replace it.
That said, it does offer some powerful features. Our Photoshop for iPad review shows we weren't blown away because of the lack of features, but some have been added since then, including Curves and the Subject Select tools so it's clear that the app will only get better. It does allow you to composit and retouch workflows making selections, masking, blend modes, painting and adjustment layers and so on , and the app can handle a heavy workload so there's no danger of overloading it.
It also has the ability to invite others. Serif's Affinity Designer for iPad is right up there with the best iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil for designers and artists that want to work on the go. Fully optimised for iPad without compromising on power, we think the Affinity Designer for iPad offers the functionality of a professional desktop app, adapted to a tablet workflow. See our Affinity Designer for iPad review for more details.
Another one from Serif, Affinity Photo is a fantastic Photoshop alternative thanks to its solid toolset and one-off cost rather than a subscription. The app is compatible with earlier iPad models, but paired with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, that Affinity Photo really comes alive, taking full advantage of the Pencil's pressure and angle sensitivity. It's great for tasks from painting with its professional brush engine, or for applying realtime lighting effects. Affinity Photo is also built for a professional workflow, with support for raw and PSD files.
It offers full cross-platform performance and file compatibility in case you feel the need to add some final polish on your desktop, although you probably won't need to.
It's a mature, well-developed app that offers natural media drawing tools that work well with the Apple Pencil. Pixelmator allows you to tweak colours either by applying Instagram-style filters, or with sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, RGB and white balance — or indeed by tweaking the curves. Pairing Pixelmator with the Apple Pencil works very well when it comes to doing touch-ups or object isolation. The touch-up controls — repair, dodge, burn, sharpen, saturate and more — are easy to apply with the Pencil especially given its precision.
When painting out backgrounds this precision, plus the various different eraser types available, are hugely welcome. If we have one criticism, it's that we'd like the option of pressure-sensitivity to affect the size of an eraser rather than its opacity. Check out our Pixelmator review for more info we reviewed Pixelmator 2. Clip Studio Paint replaced the popular Manga Studio and inherited its legions of users thanks to its specialised features for drawing comics and cartoons.
Instantly familiar to anyone who has used the desktop version of the app, it allows you to create full-colour comics and cartoons with ease. The desktop-style UI means an Apple Pencil is virtually essential here unless you have particularly slim and pointed fingertips.
But once you've familiarized yourself with the fiddly buttons and menus, you have a feature-dense drawing app to use. There are many cheaper apps, but if you specialise in this area of art and design, there are few better and with such a vast repertoire of tools. See our roundup of the best Clip Studio Paint tutorials if you want to improve your skills. At first glance Paper by WeTransfer formerly Paper by FiftyThree might look like a fairly simple drawing and diagramming tool, and it is on one level, but there are a few extra features here that can be difficult to discover but add a lot more possibilities.
Take a look through the online support files opens in new tab and you'll learn how initially simple-looking tools can be used to create graphs, org charts and Venn diagrams, to easily duplicate shapes, link shapes with lines with optional arrows at one or both ends and much more. Affinity Designer for iPad wants to free you from such constraints, by way of being desktop-grade vector design software you can use anywhere — and that works in buttery smooth fashion beneath your mitts, or a flurry of scribbling from an Apple Pencil.
Vectors remain pin sharp when zoomed in to a ludicrous degree and Affinity Designer for iPad has bonkers zooming capabilities , hence them often being used for logos and interface design. But many illustrators and artists prefer them, too, because every line or object you draw always remains individually editable.
With Affinity Designer for iPad, you get a full suite of vector tools, raster brushes for textures, symbols, and smart shapes, all rethought for multitouch on-the-go iPad shenanigans. Affinity Designer for iPad offers an embarrassment of riches, but this means some complexity. There are lots of buttons and panels to master, and many tools lurk within fly-out menus.
Considering the price, what you get in terms of scope and power is a bargain. A Mac version is also available. Affinity Photo for iPad, a Stuff app of the week last year, is currently on special offer as well.
Affinity Designer for iPad tutorials.
You'll have all the tools you need at your disposal for free! Job Board. It's a one-time pay software. If you need a hand choosing the right iPad, then make sure you head over to our guide to the iPad generations or read up about the latest model in our iPad Pro review. Orestis Bastounis opens in new tab. Keyboard Shortcuts Seamlessly perform shortcuts with over 40 keyboard shortcuts on your connected keyboard with Vectornator on iPad, iPhone, or Mac.
