While lazy Adobe dithers and whines, others embrace Apple’s revolutionary iPad (with video)

42 Comments

While lazy Adobe dithers, whines, and falls farther behind, other companies embrace Apple’s revolutionary iPad.

Case in point: Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for iPad (US$7.99).

Autodesk SketchBook Pro for iPad is a professional-grade paint and drawing application. Using the same paint engine as its desktop counterpart, SketchBook Pro delivers a complete set of sketching and painting tools through a streamlined and intuitive user interface designed exclusively for the iPad experience.

Whether you are an occasional doodler or a professional illustrator, SketchBook Pro transforms your iPad into the ultimate digital SketchBook.

Autodesk SketchBook Pro for iPad’s features include:

• Full Screen work space with support for any device orientation

• Canvas size: 1024 x 768

Multi-Touch Interface:
• Two finger pan & zoom navigation with 2500% zoom
• Three finger tap for controls
• Three finger swipe gestures for quick access

High Quality Brushes and Tools:
• Professional grade paint engine delivers smooth and precise brush strokes
• 75 preset brushes, including pencils, pens, markers, natural media and photo brushes
• New Nature & Stamp brushes
• Flood fill and smear tool
• Completely customizable brush settings for each brush
• Draw styles for creating straight lines, rectangles, and circles
• Synthetic pressure sensitivity (brush fade-off)
• 10 levels of undo and redo (Quick Access: three finger swipe left and right)
• Dynamic symmetric drawing
• Quick Access: Three finger swipe down on canvas
• Individual brushes can now be reset to factory settings by pressing and holding on their icons until the reset dialogue appears.

Layers:
• 6 Layers allowing ease of editing and control
• Import layers from Photo Library
• Duplicate, Merge and Reorder Layers
• Move, scale, and rotate layers interactively using Multi-Touch
• Toggle visibility and adjust Layer Opacity
• Quick Access: Three finger swipe up on canvas

Blend Modes
• SketchBook 1.1 introduces Blend Modes to the layer editor.
• Supported Blend modes include: Multiply, Add, Screen and Normal
• When saving to PSD blend modes are maintained in the exported file

Preserve Transparency
• When enabled on a layer this feature allows users to paint only on top of existing paint strokes. This is very useful for repainting, shading or other detailed work that requires exact detail within an area that has already been painted.

Template Library
• A new Template Library is now available from the image import button in the Layer Editor. This library includes a variety of grids, perspective reference and ruled paper.

Video Output
• When connected to a compatible display through either the Apple Component AV Cable or the Apple Dock Connector to VGA adaptor your canvas and gallery can be mirrored to an external display or television.

Gallery:
• Store and view work-in-progress
• Export to Photo Library
• E-mail images
• Export as a layered PSD file
• Browse images in full screen mode
• Export to iTunes File Sharing

Colors:
• Color Wheel with HSB and RBG color space
• Customizable Color Swatches
• Eye-dropper color selection
• Erase color chip to convert any brush into custom eraser

Customizable double tap canvas corners
• Customizable double tap canvas shortcuts. You can assign one of the following shortcuts to each corner: Clear Layer, Frame Canvas, Undo, Redo, Last Brush, Last Color.

Stay Connected:
• Built in SketchBook News panel for live info about Sketching events and announcements
• Visual help pages

More info about Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for iPad SketchBook Pro – Autodesk Inc.here.

MacDailyNews Note: MacDailyNews never receives compensation for any article posted on the websites. We cover only products that interest us and products that our readers request be covered. We do, from time to time, request and receive products for review purposes. The receipt of such products does not guarantee a review will be conducted, much less a good review. We did not receive a free copy of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for iPad.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Garret S.” for the heads up.]

42 Comments

  1. I am blown away. I can’t wait to see what gifted illustrators and artists will do with this app. To hear pundits say that the iPad has no value for content creation outrages me. And this is an app that will make them shut up.

    Welcome, AutoDesk! Well played!

    Reply

  10. I’d like to hear from professional illustrators here; those who use Mac Pros and big-screen iMacs to do their work (Freehand, Illustrator). I’m assuming you guys use some of those Wacom pads with pens for your work.

    Would this type of user interface (as demonstrated in this video) not be easier to use than the current keyboard-display-mouse/tablet?

    Reply

  11. I made my first sketch on the iPad.

    I was surprised to see how fine a line a 1.0-sized brush can make. You also have the ability to change the opacity on the fly.

    Finger swipes will take some getting used to though, because a three-finger swipe to the left invokes the Undo command, or it draws another stroke, depending on how you finesse the multi-touch commands.

    It is an awesome product though and will come handy for those other than artists, as well.

    Reply

  18. Sort of funny that this video is flash-based…as are three of the ads on the right column, two at the bottom, one at the top, and one in the middle (at least according to ClickToFlash)

    I thought MDN only accepted HTML5 ads now?

    Try loading ClickToFlash and see what I mean. Safari has a lot less memory leak now that I’ve stopped having all the Flash crap automatically show up on my pages. (It’s free/donation ware, so I’m not shilling for it. I’m just surprised that MDN, the anti-Flash crusader, has so much of it!)

    Reply

  19. @Predrag

    I just goofed around with this product and my first thought was, where is Adobe?

    As to your question about the interface, our fingers may never exact the precision capable with a stylus.

    I have the Intuous 4 and work with Autodesk and Adobe software and these tools are extraordinarily precise.

    In PS, I can sketch to my heart’s content using all manner of medium and the tablet’s resolution provides 2048-levels of pressure sensitivity, allowing for the creation of extremely thin and light gray lines and lines as thick and black as a jumbo marker all in the same stroke.

    When Adobe added Canvas Rotation on the fly in CS4′ I was in heaven. Holding down the “R” key now allows you to rotate the canvas 360 +/- in incremental degrees using the mouse or stylus, which is absolutely fantastic.

    As for vector-driven apps like Illustrator or Freehand, the tablet interface works just as easily for line drawing as it does painting. I find though, when zoomed-in at anything over a thousand-percent, it’s easier to use the mouse.

    You know, I always said that a computer would never be able to exact the precision of my hand, in terms of drawing and sketching fine lines, but Illustrator 88 changed all that.

    Those were the days though, when my Mac SE would take three-minutes or more to redraw the screen if I pushed the Illustrator canvas just a smidge. Not only that, but it would take my LaserWriter IIg (8-MBs of RAM, four-times the capacity of my SE ) forty-minutes to reproduce one of my 800k Illustrations!

    But, I gotta say, no one within a five-hundred mile radius was producing anything close to my precisely-crafted illustrations. LaserWriter, coupled with Adobe’s Postscript was a formidable combination. Letterhead put my girls through college! ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

    Autodesk’s Sketch has now become my favorite tool for the iPad. What I’d like to see is, some collaborative interaction with my desktop version. I do own a printing app for the iPad that allows me to share files with my Mac so, I should be able to take rough sketches directly into the desktop version. Wireless syncing would be a plus.

    Cheers!

    Reply

  23. G4Dualie,

    Yours is precisely the answer I was looking for. The reason for my question is my complete conviction that Mac OS X will soon be replaced by iOS, and that mouse as an interface (with a pointer) is going away.

    What you said makes complete sense, and I’m sure there will be some sort of stylus option for the level of precision you demand, perhaps even with the ability to receive pressure feedback (with the sensor inside the stylus itself), for those who need it.

    iOS is a growing OS. As it matures and gets readied for desktop, so will its feature set grow to meet the professional desktop needs (file system access/sharing, etc).

    Reply

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