Procreate 5 arrives with Photoshop brush import, Animation Assist, and CMYK mode

Procreate 5, Savage Interactive’s newest update for the iOS painting and illustration app, is now available. The free update brings long-awaited features such as Photoshop (ABR) brush import, custom brush creation, CMYK mode, and more robust animation features.

The app runs on a new Valkyrie graphics engine that works with Apple’s Metal API for faster performance on the iPad. With Valkyrie, Savage Interactive says the imported ABR brushes paint faster in Procreate 5 than in Photoshop. That’s something that’s going to make a difference for artists when they’re choosing which drawing app to use on the iPad, especially on the heels of Adobe’s Photoshop for the iPad, which received disappointing reviews when it was released last month. Photoshop for the iPad doesn’t actually support brush importing yet. (Fresco, Adobe’s illustration-focused app, does.) So the fact that Procreate now supports Photoshop brushes is a big deal.

Image: Savage Interactive

It’s the Valkyrie engine that also powers the new Brush studio feature, which lets artists combine two brushes to create a custom one. Users can continue to tweak settings and control how the brushes will look and behave.

Procreate 5 adds a host of new color features. Color Dynamics lets artists control settings like hue, saturation, and brightness through the Apple Pencil’s tilt and pressure. And Color Harmony automatically selects complementary, split-complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic colors based on the color you’ve chosen. CMYK mode is another welcome addition to Procreate, which will give artists the flexibility to work with print files, like comic book pages.

Animation Assist is a new tool that adds a timeline to the app for looping GIFs and animated videos. Procreate added animation features back in April, but Animation Assist adds features like onion skinning (including the ability to tweak how many frames you can see at once and control their opacity) and set frames per second. There’s also an instant playback feature, which is a huge improvement over the old method, which required users to export layers to see the final animation.

There are more additions in this update, like a clone tool, a detachable color panel, and small UI improvements as well. But Photoshop brush support and Animation Assist are the big key features that show how Savage listens to its users and the reason why Procreate remains the best illustration app on the iPad.

Procreate is available on the App Store for $10, and the update is free for all users.