Using your iPad as a cintique for photo editing

- If you do a lot of image editing you might have already discovered that a pressure sensitive tablet is a fantastic editing accessory. And if you're using a pressure sensitive tablet you're probably using one made by Wacom. And if you've gone pressure sensitive tablet shopping on the Wacom website, you've probably seen the Cintiq, which is the pressure sensitive tablet that's also a display, so you're really just working right on the image. It's really cool. What I'm going to show you today is the way to get that exact same functionality out of your iPad. This is, I'm going to use a piece of software called Astropad, it's really cool.

Before that, I need an image to work with. So I've got this guy here, and there's some stuff I want to do to him. He's already in Photoshop, I want this image in black and white, so I'm going to add a black and white adjustment layer. And I'm drawn to black and white in this image because of the texture on his horns, and his fur, and that background texture is interesting. But it's really going to be some work to get him separated from the background, I think it would also be nice to, the whole image is kind of flat, so it would be nice to really bring out contrast in a lot of different places, and that's going to mean a lot of brushwork.

And so to do that, I've got this iPad Pro here, I have an Apple Pencil, and I've got Astropad installed on both my iPad and my computer. You need an app for both ends. So, I'm going to just launch Astropad here. Now I'm launching over here, and I'm connected. Now Astropad, normally works wirelessly. You need both devices on the same wireless network. Because this is a brand new iPad Pro, Astropad is not completely updated, the wireless isn't working, so we're actually going through a USB cable, but check this out.

It looks like I'm running Photoshop on my iPad. It's what you've always dreamed of right? But that's not really what's happening. What's happening is Astropad is mirroring my screen, and it's doing it in real-time. If I move things around on the screen, you see them move around on the iPad. You also see that there's some latency. It takes a while for the iPad to re-render. When I first opened up Astropad and started moving things around I thought, "Well this isn't useful, "it's all pixelated for a while." But it turns out that when you're brushing, that pixelation is not actually so critical, because the only part of the screen that re-draws is the part that you're brushing over.

So I'm going to start with an adjustment layer to increase contrast, and I would like to target this to the background, so I'm going to manipulate the mask of this adjustment layer. I'm going to invert it, to make it black. And now, with a paintbrush, and a better brush than that one, and some white paint, just going to go about here, I can now brush into my image. So on screen I'm brushing over here, and that's punching a hole in the mask, and that's revealing the darkening, but I can just as easily go over here on my iPad and start brushing with my pencil.

And it's, I'm not going to say it's just like working with a Cintiq, because there is, right in here as I brush, there's some pixelation as it re-renders that part of the screen. But for this type of edit, that really doesn't matter. There's a little bit of latency maybe, or maybe that's just Photoshop. No, that's the iPad, but it doesn't bother me. I am not here trying to mimic the feeling of a fine art paintbrush on natural media. I'm just simply needing to brush into a particular area.

Note too, that this is pressure sensitive. From the preferences over here, if you're wondering what this circle is, I can pop that and get some Astropad controls here. I have switched it from finger to stylus, it gives me a choice of various bluetooth styluses, styli, whatever, and the Apple Pencil, and so it knows how to communicate with different ones. I am pressure sensitive, I haven't yet been able to determine if I'm getting tilt sensitivity, which is something the Pencil provides. I have no control of brush size here, so I have to do that over here on my keyboard, but a lot of times that's how it is working with any pressure sensitive tablet.

You're moving back and forth between the keyboard and the tablet. So this isn't quite a perfect replacement for a tablet, in terms of the feel of the brush. I do not feel like I am compromised in my brushing. I do feel like it is a different feel, and so that maybe takes a little bit of time to get used to. It's definitely not a compromise in that I actually have the iPad with me and I didn't bring a tablet with me. I tend to travel with my iPad, so if it turns out that I am travelling with a nice pressure sensitive tablet at the same time, that's a total win.

So, you're seeing this on an iPad Pro, this will also work on a normal size iPad with one caveat which we'll see in a moment. I have here a normal sized iPad, for want of a better word. This is an iPad Air 2 or 3 or something or other. It's got Astropad running on it. It doesn't have a cable attached to it, because Wi-Fi should work here. I'm going to go ahead and start Astropad on my Mac. We're on the same network, I'm going to launch Astropad here. It automatically found it, I'm connected.

And if you notice on the Mac, I've got this box with marching ants around it. That's because the Mac screen is too big to fit on the Astropad screen. So I get this little floating palette that always sits here, that lets me choose exactly which crop of the screen that I want. And you might think, "Well that's kind of a deal-breaker, "because you can't see the whole screen." But really all I'm using this for is painting, so I don't care about seeing a bunch of my interface. I'm going to just, whoops, pan over here, and make sure that I can get a nice good view of just the area that I'm painting.

And that's my picture here. I can't seem to pan this. Stretch that out there, okay. Now over here on my iPad, I can see the area that I want to paint, and just go at it like I was before. There are some areas that need to be retouched in here. You can see some streaks there. I could either do those here, and I'm just kind of finger painting, or I could choose to go back and do the fine work with my mouse. I'm even sometimes doing that with a normal pressure sensitive tablet, so that doesn't seem that unusual to me.

I'm going to make another adjustment layer here, and work on the, the deer here. That's pretty good. And here I am painting away, and adding some contrast in. You can see that I'm doing that with my finger, because the Apple Pencil is not supported by this iPad. I do however have a regular stylus here. This is a, for want of a better term, a dumb stylus. It doesn't have any smarts built into it. It's really just a replacement for my finger.

Crank up these a little bit, there we go. So again, I'm getting all the benefits of not just a pressure sensitive tablet, but a Cintiq style pressure sensitive tablet, meaning one where I'm drawing directly on an image on the screen. And it's just on my iPad, it's something that I carry with me all the time, so I'm very excited to actually put this to use for real-world work. This is a great way of getting some extra painting flexibility, while I'm on the road. I'm sorry, I just can't stop editing this image.

With the equipment that I'm always carrying with me all the time. Astropad is twenty bucks, I think that's a great deal to have a replacement for a device that normally costs thousands of dollars. It's not a perfect simulacrum of what it's actually like to work on a Cintiq, but it's much cheaper. This is actually something I can hold in my lap, I can hold in my hand, it's very comfortable to work with. I haven't tried it on the iPhone, that's actually a little bit intriguing, it would be completely silly, but maybe I'll give that a try. Anyway, Astropad, it's available in the App Store for the iPad.

Once you launch it, it will walk you through where to get the Mac version. Very easy to install, and a great utility if you do a lot of image editing.