Procreate vs Affinity Designer - Which is the Best iPad Art App?

this video is sponsored by Squarespace there are a lot of good art apps available for the iPad but there are two that I probably mentioned more than any others those are procreate and affinity designer and today we're gonna be taking a look at those and talking about their strengths and their weaknesses and which one might be the right fit for you hello my name is Brad I review tech for creative professionals illustrators designers zookeepers no probably done zookeepers I make this kind of video on this channel called the Smackdown where I take two pieces of tech and I haven't fight it out and see which one is the winner at the end this is not a smackdown video in fact the purpose of this video is to answer one of the most common questions that I get around here from new iPad users which is should I go with affinity designer or should I go with procreate and there's no right or wrong answer as to which one is the best I've spent a lot of time with both of these applications I've made entire courses on these applications and there are both fantastic but they're both very different and both good at different things since that's the point of this video is to do a little comparing and contrasting to help you make a better choice we're gonna start off by looking at the interface and when we just peer into procreate we don't see a whole lot of stuff we can change the size of our brushes over at the side and the opacity we've got some features over here in the left hand corner like the ability to jump back to the gallery and a lot of the settings are buried in here and then over here we have our primary tools our brush our smudge tool our eraser and then of course our layers and our color palette if you're coming from the desktop affinity designer is gonna look a lot more like a traditional desktop app we have a lot of our tools along the side like are various arrow tools pencil tool brush tool that sort of thing also some shape tools and text tools and then over here on the left hand side which is hidden right now but if I tap on anything it's gonna bring up these palettes that are gonna give us a lot more options and I think it's here where these two apps really start to diverge from each other quite a bit procreate is hyper focused on drawing and painting and so any other features that they've added to the app tend to be tucked away let's jump over to that and let's look at some of these tools for example if I want to add text to this I - my wrench over here I go over to my add tab and I have the opportunity to go ahead and add some text and now I can come in here and and play around with that a little bit in fact I'm gonna do just that I'm gonna change the color to white so you can actually see it on camera so even though procreate has been adding a lot of those features they've been adding them in such a way that they don't get in the way of what it's primarily trying to do which is drawing and painting it hasn't added a text tool up at the top or an animation tool up at the top whereas affinity designer as they add more tools those tools tend to kind of get docked along this pallet with everything else oftentimes and a lot of my reviews I'll say something along the lines of affinity photo or affinity designer is a pro-level app and I've been asked in the comments what about procreate isn't that a pro-level happen yeah it is a pro-level app but I should point out here that pro-level app is a made-up term I'm not the person who made it up but I'm probably person who says it the most here on YouTube it's not like there's some list somewhere where you could go to Wikipedia and see what features you need to be a pro level Archer animation app or something like that it's more of a feel I think when you say a pro level app most people think of something from the desktop like Photoshop which has a lot of tools and palettes that look very similar to affinity designer affinity photo and as compared to procreate which is just a very feature-rich mobile app now before I get too deep I want to thank today's sponsor Squarespace from websites to online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business I keep finding new features every time I look under the hood there's an entire section that lets you add online booking and scheduling for your classes or sessions it integrates right into squarespace's websites client can easily see your availability and reschedule if they need to taking the hassle out of coordinating calendars check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash Brad Colbert to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain what is going to set apart affinity designer from procreate is how many features are in here and how many different use cases this application covers and a lot of those use cases they're actually covered by these icons right here along the top of the screen affinity designer calls these personas right now we are in the vector persona but there's also a pixel persona and there's also an export persona so what does all that mean well over here in the vector persona we can come in here and do all sorts of different vector things for example I can make a vector shape right here on my canvas let's go ahead and color that in so you can actually see it and then taking a finger placing it on the canvas I could select this other shape as well sometimes it takes a tap or two and I can go up to my settings and I could go ahead and I could subtract one shape from the other shape so it has a lot of those vector tools already in here and it also includes things like the text tool and gradients and symbols and things like that that you'd expect to see in an app like Adobe Illustrator or the desktop version of affinity designer now when we talk about features in procreate most of the features that you see are the ones that are listed along the top the brushes the smudging the eraser the layers I did mention that you can insert text you could do things like insert a photo or take a photo and there's copy and paste and that sort of thing and as you go through these you are going to find different features in here for example procreate has something called animation assist let's jump to a file where I could show that off all right this is a file from my animation course I'll link those down below if you're interested in that and how this works is once you turn on the animation assist gives you a timeline down here we could go through and we can play this animation pretty sweet a lot of the other features in procreate are buried in the layers for example there's layer groups and there's all sorts of different layer settings if you tap on a layer you can bring them up and also a lot of the features in procreate are in the brushes as well there's so many cool customizations you can do with the brushes of procreate but that's about it whereas affinity designer can do many of those things procreate only does a couple things but it does those things it extremely well so an affinity designer I can paint the way I paint and procreate or I could do logos like I would do in Adobe Illustrator or I could even do layouts like if I wanted to do different like interfaces or website so that kind of graphic design work you could do that an affinity designer it'd be much harder to pull that off and procreate the downside to having more features in an app like affinity designer is there is gonna be a lot more of a learning curve to an app like this in fact I will say it right now there's definitely more of a learning curve to get used to affinity designer then there isn't procreate if you're brand new to drawing an illustration on the iPad learning procreate is probably only going to take you five minutes this is going to take you several hours to get used to let's jump over to our pixel persona and let's play around with some of the brushes that we have available to us infinity designer there is a brush palette over here on the side and I'm gonna change this to a brush the color of which we can see there we go then I can open my brushes again and we have a lot of options so if I tap on the word basic here I can come in here and grab some of my other things like these are just watercolor brushes as you can see and when you start drawing it's going to create a new layer for you overall I feel like everything I want to do with drawing and painting I can do here pretty easily the one thing that this can do that procreate cannot do our vector brushes however I'm gonna go ahead and draw a boring vector line but when I select it I can still go in here and change how this brush looks just by going into my brushes and jumping on a different vector brush I could easily go in and change a lot of things after they've been laid down so in terms of things that you could do in here there's just so many more settings than so many more options but for newcomers and and even honestly for me a lot of this stuff can be kind of overwhelming and not really needed let's go check out procreate because procreate brushes are pretty awesome as well I also feel like procreate has a lot of brushes that are available online that you can go and download probably more so a much wider selection than you're gonna find for affinity designer just because procreate is so much more popular of a drawing and painting program like affinity designer any of these brushes allowed you to go in here grab the brush you're looking for tap on it and come in here and modify all sorts of different options now in terms of line quality and that sort of thing I feel like they're pretty similar and I personally prefer drawing and procreate and I think the reason why is because the brushes that I have found I've gotten really used to they feel very responsive they do exactly what I want them to do now there's a lot of settings in affinity designer and I think that if I fiddled around long enough I'd probably get to the point where I feel just as good about those brushes as I feel about the brushes that are available here I think the big difference however is right out of the gate I think the default brushes that procreate comes with especially the most recent version of procreate which is added even more feel more organic and feel more natural than the base level brushes that come with affinity designer the last thing I wanted to check out was starting a new document so if I want to create a new canvas and procreate I can grab these are this is literally every size that I have ever created and procreate ever I've created way too many sizes but this icon here lets me come jump in and create whatever size can this I want and there are some options here for example I can change the dimensions including changing to millimeters centimeters or inches or I could just stay in pixels which I usually do I can also come in and change the color profile I can go to CMYK if I want to and that's about it there's some time lapse settings as well if you want to export your video speed draw which is pretty cool and then there's some canvas properties as well which is really not a whole lot of stuff affinity designer is a different story when I go to create a new document I have a lot of options a new document a new document from the clipboard from a template which means you could actually create templates and use them over again you can open from the cloud open from photos let's go to new document so you can see what's here this is probably pretty dark so I'm gonna turn up the brightness way up on my camera so hopefully you can see it better in many ways you can do exactly what we just didn't procreate which we could define the height and the width and the DPI but there's so many more presets and options available here that weren't available on procreate for example we can choose a device which is hey let's go from print and then from print okay do I want an a4 size paper do I want one sheet paper do I want a business card do I want a CD booklet that sort of thing so there's a ton of presets built into this app that you're not going to get in procreate if you wanted to do a business card and procreate you'd have to you know already know what size you want it's not a big deal a Google search can do that for you but oftentimes just being able to dig through some of these options can be really helpful same thing with devices okay I want the iPad size document here but maybe I want an iPhone 6 size that I'm going to be working with this comes in really handy especially if you're doing a lot of interface design doing a lot of print design things where you need those specific sizes that's really gonna help you out and just be a time saver long term sometimes by the end of these videos I pick a winner and I said at the beginning I wasn't gonna do that this isn't really about picking a winner this is really helping you choose if you're new to the iPad which one of these apps that you want because I don't really feel like there is a winner or a loser in this category it's a general rule of thumb if you were brand new to this and you just want to draw on the iPad I feel that procreate is the place you want to start however if you have specific things in mind that you want or need to do like if you are a graphic designer who wants illustration elements inside your designs or you want to create logos or that sort of thing affinity designers probably the better choice right t-shirt designer you're gonna need something that you can export out you can do that in procreate it's probably just gonna be easier an affinity designer and then the other thing to keep in mind is just the learning curve there's not a huge learning curve to procreate there's a lot of features in here and a lot to dig into but that learning curve an affinity designers just gonna be much greater than it is here and procreate so what do you think let me know down below in the comment section you for watching and I'll talk to you in a couple of days [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 397,383

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review, ipad art apps, ipad pro, ipad mini, ipad air, draing on the ipad, affinity, affinity designer, affinity photo

Id: yTx1J1eyEhg

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020