Procreate Pockets – A Quick Review
Procreate Pocket is an iPhone application that lets you create high-quality, professional artwork from your own photos. The application has no interface, but it works with both iPhone and iPod touch. It’s great for sharing your work with family and friends, and it lets you use Photoshop and other graphic tools right on your phone. With its Widget, you can instantly launch and share your creations via Bluetooth, iMoto Style, MMS or e-mail. It’s also great for sharing your works on the web, where you can reach a whole new audience.
Procreate Pocket is made by Savage Interactive in Australia, using high-quality photographs (many taken by their staff) to create award-winning, high-fidelity, pixel-perfect, animated creations. You simply need to tap on the images, and the application will load them into the main page. Tap again to zoom and stretch the image to make the best dimensions. Press harder to create borders or shapes, and the canvas gets wider. Mix a wide spectrum of vibrant colors in the app: from subtle blues to vivid reds, from natural earth tones to oversaturated yellows.
In terms of features, Procreate Pocket is really quite simple. There are some useful ones like a Large Selection Widget, which lets you quickly jump to a new photo and save it for further review. There’s also a Digital Effects Gallery, which allows you to see the finished result as you’ve viewed it on your iPhone is, before you save it. And then there’s the ability to copy, paste, and edit your work from a previous version on your existing iPhone. It’s all made possible just by tapping on the digital canvases you want to put your photos on.
But it’s the brush work that really sets Procreate apart from other similar apps. Each brush represents a particular painting technique, allowing you to easily transition between brush strokes and different painting styles. For example, you can create a charcoal effect simply by selecting a charcoal drawing tool and tapping to darken it. Another popular technique is creating an “oil painting” appearance by selecting several oil painting brushes, tapping to blend them, then tapping to change the color palette used. And while all these canvases look great on the big screen, they also look great printed out – in poster-size. You can print several copies of each canvas using the Procreate ‘print’ function.
In fact, even though Procreate Pocket is extremely well designed and intuitive, its greatest feature may be the customizable settings for every brush in the painting engine. The touch screens on both sides of the display allow you to quickly change each brush’s size, transparency, and angle, which give you unprecedented control over how your artwork will look when you’re done. Plus, there are countless other customizable settings to test; and if you happen to like a particular technique, you can easily trigger the ‘smitro’ mode, which makes the brush move in an alternate direction, making the finished painting even more interesting.
So although Procreate is not as extensive as some of the other professional-grade painting apps, it does have some very advanced features. The touch screens are extremely responsive, and you can easily pinch in and out of the painting app, and view brush strokes while they are in place. The convenience of being able to easily swap brushes makes Procreate Pocket a very convenient iPhone app. And, best of all, it’s free – a real bargain for all that technology.
