



Since the first iPad was released, artists have been imagining a new approach to their craft. That flat, smooth piece of glass is an endless blank canvas, ripe with possibility. But while a few apps managed to create wonderful native experiences on iOS—have a look at Procreate if you haven’t yet—most were disappointing: basic sketch apps, with basic tools, that saved low-res jpegs. In a field where full-featured programs like Photoshop and Illustrator are the norm, the iPad just didn’t have what it takes.









Astropad, a newly released app for Mac and iOS, aims to change all that. Built by ex-Apple developers Matt Ronge and Giovanni Donelli, the app doesn’t try to replace Photoshop (which is what I use and will discuss here); instead, it extends the Photoshop experience to the iPad and then brings it back again, allowing artists the have the massive power of Photoshop on the Mac with the immediacy of drawing on the iPad. It’s the Holy Grail for digital artists who use iPads, and Astropad, against all odds, has pulled it off.

To backtrack a bit: the gold standard of digital drawing has always been Wacom’s Cintiq line of tablets. Dedicated drawing machines, they feature built-in pressure sensitivity that allows artists to recreate the natural variation that comes from pressing harder or more lightly on a stylus. By contrast, the iPad still doesn’t have true pressure sensitivity—to get around that, manufacturers like Wacom have begun making pressure-sensitive styluses that recreate some of that Cintiq magic. Pair your stylus via bluetooth, and pressing down harder will create a thicker line; ease up a bit and the line will thin out to a whisper. It’s a decent workaround, but until now it has often been limited to use in iPad-native apps. What the iPad does have going for it is its beautiful built-in display; most Wacom tablets—at least until you cross the $1000 Cintiq mark—have no display, which means artists are drawing on a tablet while their brushstrokes appear on a different display. It’s that disconnect that has led so many developers to try to outdo Photoshop on the iPad.

The true genius of Astropad, however, is that it doesn’t settle for just being an iPad app. Again, rather than try to replace Photoshop, it reinvents the Photoshop experience, using the iPad to bring a sense of intimacy back to art. Fire up Photoshop on your Mac, then launch Astropad on both your Mac (a $50 app; $20 for students, with a 7-day free trial) and your iPad (free). Instantly, they connect over WiFi (a cabled option is available via USB as well), and Astropad’s well-considered interface launches, providing easy access to commonly used brush settings and more in a small sidebar (seen at right here) that is both moveable via drag-and-drop and easily hidden via the circular button seen below.





That interface makes a huge difference in the usability of Astropad. The few apps that have tried to turn this trick before (Duet is a similar app though not so art-focused; see my review of the very art-focused Air Stylus here) have failed largely due to two reasons: the first is a laggy, unoptimized interface, which is too often simply a tiny mirrored screen of the Mac display. The second is that those apps never fully supported custom brushes such as Kyle T. Webster’s, which is an absolute must among designers and artists. AirStylus had brush sensitivity but was hampered by terrible lag; Duet had little to no lag but never had pressure sensitivity. With Astropad, I can use any brush I have in my Photoshop library, and by pairing my Wacom stylus, I also get 2048 levels of pressure-sensitivity, which lets me draw as delicately or as heavily as I like, right on the iPad’s screen. Another huge advantage of Astropad is that by using Photoshop as the back end, it gets around all the limitations native iPad apps suffer due to the memory constraints of an iPad: limited numbers of layers, for instance.

What makes it all the more remarkable is that Ronge and Donelli have managed—by building their own mirroring tech, called Liquid—to achieve all this with barely any perceptible lag, whether over WiFi or USB, other than a deliberately built-in pixelation during large canvas movements (Astropad also supports pinch-to-zoom, which makes panning around large drawings a breeze). They clock Liquid at two times the speed of Apple’s own AirPlay, with up to 60 frames per second. After trying all the other solutions that came before, using Astropad was a revelation. There are still some issues to work out, but now they fall on the hardware side; for example, there are only a few styluses that work well with Astropad (I use a Wacom Intuos Creative; see their site for a list of other options). But for the first time, it doesn’t feel like I’m making a compromise; it just feels like I’m drawing again, and at a fraction of the price of a Cintiq. And that, even in this day and age, is a remarkable achievement. If you’re an artist who does any sort of work in digital illustration, you owe it to yourself to give Astropad a look.