Artstudio Pro for iOS
Affordable painting app
$6.99 From Lucky Clan, luckyclan.com Made for iPad Needs iOS 10 or later, Apple Pencil for pressure support
Some iPad art apps are dedicated painting apps, while others are photo editors with painting tools. Artstudio Pro is both. The Adjust and Filters menus are reminiscent of Photoshop, there’s a proper Layers palette, and the toolbox down the left-hand side includes image editing essentials such as selection Lasso, Clone Stamp, Sharpen, Dodge, and Burn. Tap the paintbrush icon, though, and — once you’ve figured out that you can access the Brush Editor from the brush tip preview at the bottom left — you have a full range of inks, pencils, chalks, and paints, which can be supplemented by importing brushes in Adobe’s ABR and TPL formats.
Even better, the slider icon at the top right of the Brush Editor gives you detailed control over the look and behavior of each brush, including dynamic response to pressure when you’re using the Apple Pencil, or to velocity when painting with your finger. Whichever method you choose, the results are expressive and impressive.
With image adjustments comparable to Pixelmator and artistic versatility rivaling Procreate, there’s little to compete with Artstudio Pro
except Affinity Photo, which costs three times the price.
Like Affinity, Artstudio Pro also has a Mac version ($23.99). Thanks to iCloud, you can make a new file at your desk and start painting, then pick up your iPad, tap Artstudio’s Open Documents menu, and your work’s already there. The catch is that your custom brushes aren’t, until you export and import them. We found the Mac-like nature of the iPad version less than helpful: Not only is there a full menu bar — a bit odd on the touchscreen — but the File menu and Open Documents (equivalent to the Window menu) insist on the concept of opening and closing files. Since you can’t show multiple windows, this adds nothing to the separate Documents view, which, as usual, lists all the documents you’ve saved.
We found other aspects confusing, too, including the unusual way of handling layer masks. Some features aren’t supported fully enough to make them usable for serious work: Selections lack finesse, and vector text has no spacing controls. Photo pros will miss basics like Raw editing, CMYK, channels, and paths. Then again, Artstudio Pro’s engine coped fine with highresolution files on our iPad Pro (although some brushes can feel small at very large sizes), you can import and export PSD files, and there’s a Procreatelike screen-recording mode for painting demos.
If you want one app for everything, don’t need advanced retouching tools, and are prepared to learn an idiosyncratic interface, Artstudio Pro is decent value, and its painting tools offer plenty of customization. But Affinity Photo is a more comprehensive image editor, while Procreate ($9.99) makes painting easier.
The bottom line. Artstudio Pro is a very good painting app with useful image adjustment features, but still feels a little awkward. Adam Ban ks