. Nebo: Take notes
Nebo is a digital note-taking app that gets a lot of acclaim for its handwriting recognition. It can understand 66 languages and transpose handwritten notes into a handy email-able format. It complements the Apple Pencil perfectly, allowing you not only to write, but also to create shapes, sketches and to format, meaning that your digital notes will have a similar feel to your paper-based ones.
. Inspire Pro
One of the best iPad Pro apps around, 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.
. Adobe Fresco
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 it does fall short in other areas.
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. The basic version is free, it then costs $9.99 a month. See our full Adobe Fresco review for more details.
. Noteshelf 2
Noteshelf underwent a very positive transformation a little way back and was reborn as Noteshelf 2. Its second incarnation added tilt- and pressure-sensitivity with Apple Pencil and it supports double-tap to switch between tools with Apple Pencil 2. Siri is integrated, and you can record audio notes as well as mark up PDFs and images.
Of course, you buy this iPad Pro app for note-taking, and it does that with finesse, offering a wonderful lag-free action, uncannily precise handwriting recognition and useful autoshapes. All in all, it’s one of the best notebook apps around.
. Sketch Club
. Shapr3D
Shapr3D describes itself as the world’s most intuitive 3D design app and it may well be. This professional-grade CAD modelling app is based on the Siemens Parasolid geometric engine and HOOPS Exchange translation software. CAD has been difficult to translate to a tablet format because of the level of precision needed, but that limitation is overcome here thanks to the Apple Pencil’s 9ms latency and the recent iPad Pros’ performance.
Shapr3D is sensibly offered for free as an entry point so you can learn the ropes of the application. The free version is limited to low-resolution exports and a maximum of two designs but it still gives you access to all the modelling tools. The Pro version costs a fairly reasonable $25 per month (or $240 billed annually) to unlock features professional features, including import and export of images, and to desktop CAD formats.
Shapr3D competes with the much pricier Onshape, a CAD platform that relies heavily on cloud processing, with interaction either via the web or tablet apps. But with Shapr3D, all processing is performed locally, and files are stored on the iPad, not in the cloud.
. Procreate
Procreate is the king of iPad Pro natural media apps, and the addition of the Apple Pencil completely transforms the experience. Sure, you can use your finger, a simple stylus, or even one of the increasingly complicated and costly third-party styluses like those from Adonit, but none of these offer the fluidity and analogue-like experience of the Apple Pencil.
. Photoshop for iPad
Photoshop for iPad is included with all Creative Cloud subscriptions and can be downloaded from the app store. The app has been designed as a complementary desktop companion for the photo-editing software, so it’s not going to replace your desktop version, but it’s still pretty powerful and offers some great features.
So far, Adobe has focused on compositing and retouching workflows (making selections, masking, blend modes, painting and adjustment layers and so on), and more features are promised with each new release. The app can take heavy a workload so you don’t need to worry about overloading it. It also has the ability to invite others. See our Photoshop for iPad review for more details.
. Autodesk SketchBook
Autodesk Sketchbook isn’t the most well-known Autodesk app, and Autodesk is most known for pro-spec 3D apps like 3ds Max and Maya (see our Maya tutorials here), but Sketchbook is a powerful mainstream sketching application that offers a wonderfully natural drawing experience. The iPad Pro’s ProMotion tech and, of course, Apple Pencil, suit it perfectly.
It offers 170 customisable brushes, full PSD layer and blending support, and switchable predictive stroke which transforms your hand-drawn lines and shapes into crisp, precise forms. Incredibly, this doesn’t cost a penny, making Sketchbook probably the best free drawing app around.
. Linea Sketch
The best iPad Pro apps include sketching tools for everyone. Linea Sketch is one of the best for creatives that want something more powerful than a basic pen-and-paper app but don’t want the complexity of fully featured painting and drawing engines like Affinity Designer or Procreate.
. Concepts
Concepts is an award-winning, advanced sketching and design app. With infinite canvas and organic brushes, fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, it offers a wonderfully natural design experience.
Whether you’re an architect, product designer, illustrator or visual thinker, you can explore, iterate and share your designs anywhere you go. Double-tap tool switching is supported, and you can customise how the double-tap manifests itself, which can be very useful.
. Graphic for iPad
Although Adobe’s Illustrator is now available for the iPad, some creatives will swear that Graphic remains the best vector drawing app available on iOS. Graphic offers a host of brushes and tools, but it also packs in some other useful features including geometry settings pane with -/ nudge buttons, three and four-finger tap gestures to undo/redo. You can also customise the screen tap gestures to perform whatever actions you find most help your workflow.
Graphic now has a larger drawing canvas (developer Picta claims 16k x 16k), pressure-sensitive drawing with the Apple Pencil, and document tabs. If you’re looking for professional desktop-like vector illustration on your iPad Pro, Graphic is an alternative that’s well worth trying.
. Pixelmator
. Clip Studio Paint
. Paper
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
. LiquidText
Even without a Pencil, LiquidText is a handy tool for reading and annotating PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents, and web pages. It’s designed to support ‘active reading’, which means that you can highlight and snip out sections to refer to later while you read or collapse sections of a document down so you can refer to different parts at once.
But adding in the Apple Pencil makes it even faster to use, and it’s a great example of how the Pencil’s pressure- and tilt-sensitivity can be useful for more than mimicking real-world drawing tools.
Dragging the Pencil over text instantly selects it (rather than having to tap-and-wait with your finger), pressing harder selects any part of the document as an image, and dragging the Pencil across text at a flattened angle selects and highlights it, which is very smart. If you have an Apple Pencil 2, you can use LiquidText’s configurable double-tap compatibility, too.
artstudio pro
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Introducing Artstudio Pro, the most powerful painting and photo editing app available for both iOS and macOS. The successor to our famous ArtStudio app has been redesigned bringing many new features and improvements taking full advantage of the latest technologies Metal, iCloud Drive, Apple Pencil, and optimized for 64-bit multi-core processors to achieve the smoothest possible workflow.
Hundreds of assets are included and users have the ability to import resources in the most popular formats (ABR, TPL, PAT, GRD, ASE, ACO) giving instant access to millions of brushes, patterns, gradients, color swatches and fonts. It will boost your creativity and help you bring your ideas to life quickly and easily.
New engine
The powerful GPU accelerated ArtEngine developed by Lucky Clan is 5-10 times faster than the previous engine. It allows working with multiple documents, supports large canvas sizes and an unlimited number of layers. Incredible optimization ensures smooth work even with large canvases.
• Canvas size up to 64Mpix
• Unlimited layers
• Multiple open documents
• 27 tools: Move, Select, Crop, Eyedropper, Paint, Wet Paint, Eraser, Bucket/Pattern/Gradient Fill, Smudge, Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Text, Heal, Clone, and more
Flexible layer system
Artstudio Pro introduces a new layer system with grouping, non-destructive layer effects, and adjustment layers.
• Groups
• Masks, clipping masks
• Adjustment Layers
• 9 layer effects: Bevel/Emboss, Stroke, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Outer Glow, Color/Gradient/Pattern Overlay, Drop Shadow
• 27 blending modes
• Text layers
Advanced Brush engine
Perfectly optimized, lag free mechanism generating smooth, real looking strokes, making the most of Apple Pencil.
• Brush size up to 4000×4000
• 64-bit painting with pattern, double stamp, wet brush, dynamics
• Brush editor with over 100 customizable settings
• Over 150 built-in brushes divided into multiple groups: Pens, Pencils, Oil Painting, Inking, Charcoals, Airbrushes, Watercolor and many more
• Symmetric painting
Professional photo editor
Photo editing options developed in cooperation with professional photographers. Each feature was tested in several scenarios and light conditions.
• 15 adjustments available as non-destructive layer or simple adjustment: Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Exposure/Gamma, Shadows/Highlights, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Temperature/Tint, Black and White, Gradient Map and more
• 4 auto adjustments: Auto Contrast, Levels, Lightness, Saturation
• Transform: Basic, Perspective, Warp
• Dozens of filters with realtime preview and the ability to generate seamless patterns
• Inpaint, Elastify (Liquify)
• Retouching tools: Heal, Dodge, Burn, Sponge and more
• Image resize, Canvas resize
• Crop and Trim
Full iCloud integration
• Save and load images on iCloud Drive or local disk
• View, load, share, delete, move documents in internal gallery or iOS Files app
• Sort documents into folders
Import/Export
We have implemented many parsers from the most popular assets/images formats and we are especially proud of our ABR/TPL parser which not only reads brush stamps and patterns, but also most settings which are converted to Artstudio Pro brush engine values.
Import
• Images — PNG, JPEG, PSD, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, most raw formats
• Brushes — ABR, TPL
• Color swatches — ASE, ACO
• Patterns — PAT
• Gradients — GRD
• Fonts — TTF, OTF
Export
• Images — PNG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, PDF
Other features
• Floating panels for Colors, Layers, Brushes etc
• Screen recording
• Customizable Quick menu
• Selection displayed as marching ants, quick mask or invisible
• Snapping to guidelines, dynamic guidelines, grid
• Perspective grid assist
• Mirror (flipped) view
• Support of iPad Drag and Drop, Split View, Sharing Extension, Open In, Clipboard
• Support of Wacom, Adonit and SonarPen styluses
Minimum System Requirements
Artstudio Pro for iOS requires iPhone or iPad running iOS 13.0 or above
. Affinity Designer for iPad
Serif’s Affinity Designer for iPad is right up there with the best iPad Pro apps for designers and artists on the go. It offers complete support for the Apple Pencil’s drawing capabilities in terms of precision, pressure sensitivity and tilt functionality.
Fully optimised for iPad without compromising on power, 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 information.
