![]() Unlike Duet Display, Astropad focuses solely on mirroring your Mac's screen - you can't use it as a true second monitor. (We'll talk about Duet Pro in just a little bit.) Duet Display's standard version still offers no drawing tools or pressure sensitivity, however.ĭuet Display - See on the App Store Astropad StandardĪstropad was the first app that offered iPad users a truly great drawing tablet for their Mac: It was built specifically for working in certain Mac programs, like Photoshop, and offered ultra-low latency for drawing through smart hardware optimizations. ![]() In late May, Duet at last offered a solution: an in-app Duet Pro subscription, which enables pressure sensitivity and line prediction for artists, among other tools. In the years since, Duet has improved its original app with options like a digital Touch Bar (for Macs without access to Apple's own hardware version), even faster rendering, and iPhone support - but no drawing capabilities, despite competition from newcomer Astropad. Unfortunately, where Duet initially lagged was with the art community - users who wanted that second screen for drawing on a digital Photoshop canvas (or mirroring the Mac's display to draw upon it): The otherwise speedy 60FPS screen had issues displaying Photoshop documents and vast-delayed strokes, making the drawing experience uninspired as a whole. After connecting iPad to Mac via USB, it delivered users a Retina-quality second display at 60 frames per second, with minimal to no lag.įor those who wanted to view extra information - Twitter or work apps from their Mac on a second screen, for example - Duet was an excellent choice, and remains so today. For those that need an efficient and accurate graphics tablet, however, Wacom is still the way to go.Though not the first second-screen app for iPad, Duet Display was one of the first to truly offer a usable second-screen experience. If you already own an iPad Pro and do not have a Wacom graphics tablet, or you are a nature photographer that is not doing pixel-level retouching, then this could be a viable solution. Other aspects of the iPad Pro such as the smoothness of the Apple Pencil, the inability to calibrate the display, and the difference in screen aspect ratio make this setup not ideal for professional, full-time retouchers. Where the specifics tend to go astray for retouchers, is with the lack of built-in hover with the use of the Apple Pencil.Īstropad Studio does include a three-finger gesture that enables a workaround hover, but if you are repeatedly healing or cloning and sampling areas of an image, those additional gestures can add up to a lot of extra time. The cost for using Astropad Studio is either $79.99 annually, or $11.99 a month, which means adding a subscription fee to your retouching tablet of choice.Īdmittedly, Astropad Studio performs well, with minimal lag, making it an excellent option for illustrators and designers. However, the performance of Astropad is leaps and bounds above the competition. Before Astropad, there were similar applications such as Duet, which enabled using your iPad as an external display or input device. In the above demonstration, Michael has a 12.9″ iPad Pro running Astropad Studio, plugged into a MacBook Pro via USB, with an image open in Adobe Photoshop. But can it replace a Wacom Intuos or Cintiq? In this video, Michael Woloszynowicz reviews retouching on the iPad Pro with the use of Astropad Studio. If you were to take Apple’s marketing at face value, you might think that the latest generation of the iPad Pro could be a true computer replacement.
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