Transcription
In the early days of Procreate, there were big feature updates happening about once every year or so, sometimes more. But as Procreate has filled out and locked down its core feature set, it's good enough now. It doesn't need a ton of extra stuff. And so, we've seen the frequency of those updates slow down. I'm okay.
So, I have my hands on the beta of Procreate 5.4, which is the new update that's going to be coming out sometime in the future. There's not a definitive release date for this thing yet, but I thought it might be fun to jump on screen here and check it out. So, the first thing you're going to notice with this beta is that it is Procreate. All the tools are in the same place. There's not any major overhauls. The interface is the same.
The one place you're going to see a difference, and it's really the main thing that they're focusing on here, is right here in our brush palette. It looks a little bit different. We still have our brushes listed along the side. And as you jump into these different areas, you're going to get different brushes. Like this is a nice little gouache brush we've got going on. There are 144 new brushes that they are planning to ship with this next iteration here. And that's what we're looking at.
And so when we look at these categories, there's new pencils, there's new pens, there's new inks, charcoals, pastels, oils. I think some of the more interesting brushes here for me are some of those like weter brushes, right? Watercolors are kind of interesting. I'm going to jump over to another color. So, when I come in here, it looks and kind of feels like a watercolor brush when I use it. Same thing with some of the oil brushes. I was using the oil brushes for the background of the little cartoon I showed in the beginning. I was having fun with some of these just because of the way the colors kind of move together. Let me grab a different color so you can see what I'm talking about. They kind of smear together a little bit. I really like how that's looking.
So, confession time. I am not used to using things like gouache and oils and even watercolors all that much. Traditional media. So, these to me look like them when I'm using them, but I'm curious to see what you guys think when you get your hands on this if they actually feel like you're using those kind of traditional things when you're playing with them. I love the look of them. Um, and I think there's a lot going on here.
Now, one thing that's kind of curious about these is they have a new team member who's helping develop some of these brushes, a guy named Kyle T. Webster. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he's been around for a long time. He used to make Photoshop brush packs back in the day. Eventually, he went to go to work for Adobe to like build out brush libraries for them. If you're familiar with Adobe Fresco, that brush engine that's in there, um, it uses a lot of Photoshop brushes, but they built some live brushes and some really interesting things where watercolor mixes together and that sort of thing into Fresco. That's really cool. Kyle was working on the team that was also doing that. He ended up leaving Adobe well over a year ago now. Um, and he has been working with the Procreate team to build some of these brushes. Uh, I've been following him on Blue Sky, kind of like Twitter, and he's been posting some of these examples that he's been playing with. Very interesting stuff, and it's been kind of fun to get my hands on these.
Now, when I did jump in here for the first time, I thought, wait, what happened to all of those brushes that I've learned to love uh with Procreate in the past? Like, where's my peppermint pencil? I love that thing. All of those are gone. But they're not. The other thing that they've added for brushes here is if you pinch out while you're in the brushes, look at that. You have different brush libraries. So, I can go back to the classic library. And if I go to the sketching tab, look at that. There's my peppermint brush. I can still draw with my pencil. Uh, I like some of the inking brushes that are in here. Of course, you can import your own. I've taken many of Procreate's like core brushes and I've modified them a little bit. I rely on those pretty heavily. So, I am going to be pulling those brushes over.
And if I want to, what I could do is I could just go up to this plus sign. I could create a new library that has just my brushes in that and bring them in there or I can import them and add them to a library that already exists. Depends on how you want to use it. So I think for a lot of people who depend on a lot of brushes or if there's a style where you need this set of brushes, you can create a library for that. If you have another style that requires this type of brush, you can create a library for that. I think for that sort of thing, this kind of way of organizing your brushes is just going to make a lot of sense. And I can see if you use this board that they could carry out this idea further. I would love to see them play with like the colors. Imagine like pinching out on this and all of a sudden seeing like all your different palettes. I mean, you can create palettes in here and whatnot, but being able to create them for different projects and stuff like that. That could be a lot of fun.
So, I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer here. One of the things that I noticed with a lot of these brushes is that they are really taking advantage of some of the things that the Apple Pencil does like barrel rotation. Um, some of these are doing some really cool stuff with that sort of thing. I love to see them just going in there and just going full blast with some of the features that Apple's letting them play with.
Now, another thing is is if you bring in your own brushes, I'm going to tap on one of these. There's this little icon here that says select icon and it just brings up a bunch of icons. So, if you want to differentiate your brushes, like right now paints has a paintbrush icon on it. Watercolors has like a watercolor palette on it. here. I can like say, "Hey, I have my own witch brush set uh that I use for that. I'm going to add a witch's hat. I'm going to add a game controller or a fish or a bell." Uh I don't know how many are in here. It doesn't look like there's a ton in here right now, but there's enough to differentiate it. So, those little icons can make it a little bit easier to differentiate some of your groups while you're in there.
Now, if I come in here and just like pull down anywhere, you're going to see our search. So, yes, you can now search through your brushes. A lot of people are going to love that. It's going to give me a reason to actually label my brushes properly. Um, so that's a nice little feature, too. Let me pull that down. I'm going to tap into one of these brushes and take a look at some of the other things that they've added in here.
Now, this is an area that I'm not super familiar with cuz I don't make too many brushes. I just modify things a little bit to make things a little smoother, maybe a little jitterier if I need them to be. So, they have added some features like lateral jitter, uh, linear jitter. Here's another one. They called this out in one of the bullet points and I'm not sure what it does, but this is alpha threshold and it looks like it changes like the actual transparency of the brush you're using based on the texture and that sort of thing. That's kind of interesting. So anyway, the more features that you can use to build your own brushes, the better.
So that's it. That's what's going on with this new version of Procreate. Not a ton here. Just really adding a lot of brushes, which is cool. Seems like they're working a lot on Procreate Dreams. There's going to be some big Procreate Dreams updates probably coming out later this year and I'm going to have a video on that when they're ready to kind of announce that and roll those things out. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the features that we see in Procreate kind of making their way over to Procreate Dreams or vice versa, that sort of thing, cuz it seems like they want to bring those programs more online. We're just going to have to wait and see on that.
What would you like to see in Procreate? Is there anything here that's not there yet that would make this a killer app for you? Let me know down below in the comments. Thank you all for watching.