Savage has released a major update to Procreate, the bestselling iPad illustration app.
In the first major update for 2019, Procreate 4.3 ships with the highly anticipated addition of Text. Created in response to unprecedented customer demand, this powerful new toolset offers artists the ability to import fonts and weave typography into their illustrations and designs, making Procreate more versatile than ever.
The guiding principle of Procreate is to preserve the natural feeling of drawing and painting above all else. Savage has re-imagined Text tailored to an illustration mindset and integrated into the multi-touch environment as smoothly as the rest of Procreate’s tools. It’s powerful enough for professionals, yet simple enough for everyone to use.
Including precision design controls such as kerning, leading, and baseline empowers professional designers to use Procreate as a versatile tool for drafting layouts like magazine covers, and enables comic artists to add lettering directly to their artwork. Presenting these controls as a series of simple sliders makes designing beautiful typographic arrangements so fun and easy, anyone can do it.
Procreate uses all the standard iOS fonts, and ships with three additional typefaces. Artists can add their own fonts to Procreate in several different ways, including simple drag-and-drop.
Lightning-fast graphics acceleration using METAL means artists experience flawlessly crisp, pixel-perfect vector typography even when zooming, typing, moving or warping text, turning Procreate into a versatile on-the-go tool for designers.
This seamless combination of illustration and text capability makes Procreate a total solution for comic artists, who can now handle layout, sketching, inks, flats, colouring, effects and lettering in the one place. Procreate now offers letterers a level of control previously only found in desktop design software, paired with the ease of use and portability of the iPad.
Concept art often calls for environmental text on surfaces that may be angled, curved, or uneven. The powerful warp and transform capabilities of the new Text tool enable concept artists to seamlessly incorporate complex environmental text into their illustrations with ease. Text remains in vector format when warping and transforming, and only rasterises once changes are committed, leading to sharper results without the rough pixelation common in other programs.
With improved pressure smoothing, Procreate brushes feel steadier and more realistic than ever before, supporting calligraphers in their quest for the perfect line.
This update also offers all new Layer Export options: artists can export layers as a folder of web-ready PNG files, multiple pages in a PDF, or frames of a simple looping animated GIF.
The new Export to GIF capability brings animation to Procreate for the first time, offering frame rates from 0.1 to 60 frames per second, with optional background transparency, and the choice to export full-size or web-ready with a single touch. Procreate’s expressive brushes and approachable interface combine with this new feature to make it a great testing ground for short pencil tests, walk cycles, and experimental animation.
Other new features and improvements include additional Blending Modes, giving artists a suite of options to adjust the appearance of the colours and layers in their artwork.
As always, this update is free to existing users, and US $9.99 for new customers. With more powerful tools and exciting advancements planned for future releases, there has never been a better time for artists to unleash their creativity with Procreate.