![]() ![]() In the meantime, the original Astropad is still available for more casual users, the developers are continuing to support it under the name Astropad Standard. Ideally, one also needs a Bluetooth pressure-sensitive stylus – preferably an Apple Pencil - to get the full sketching experience in apps like Photoshop.Īstropad Studio builds upon the promise of the original Astropad by designing the app around the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and by not only maintaining a minimal-lag second-screen experience for the iPad but adding full pressure compatibility with Apple Pencil and customizable settings across the board. It works either connected via USB or via Wi-Fi alone – a nice bonus when I’m sitting on my living room couch and want to sketch directly on a Photoshop canvas on my MacBook Pro. One could mirror a laptop screen to the iPad, but the connection wasn’t always smooth, sometimes crippling productivity and turning drawing sessions into troubleshooting nightmares… Furthermore, the lack of pressure-sensitivity wasn’t a deal-breaker yet when working on the roman fresco textures, but it became a burden as soon as I needed to do digital penciling!įast forward 3 years and I couldn’t even imagine life at Luxor temple without my Macbook Pro connected to my iPad Pro by Astropad Studio, the professional-oriented second iteration of Astropad! It is every bit as innovative and smart as its predecessor, adding must-have features for true professional graphics artists - and making me wonder whether I'll ever need to buy a new Wacom tablet again!Ī few things one should know about Astropad Studio if unfamiliar with the original Astropad: It turns an iPad Pro into a second-screen experience for one's Mac (Astropad only favors Apple’s hardware at the moment), providing practically lag-free drawing, sketching, or photo retouching using the company's patented Liquid rendering engine. One could set up a few shortcuts but not command sequences. To tell the truth, the original Astropad – although it had a lot of features that helped our documentation work – always felt a bit like an experiment. ![]() Obviously, I would never recommend pulling out one's pricy equipment when lying in the sand documenting a multi-ton block under direct sunlight! Luckily, at Luxor temple we could provide the right amount of artificial shade to be able to see our computer screens and the scaffolding had plenty of space to securely accommodate both computer and iPad – so the experiment with Astropad could begin! (I wrote about my inital impressions using Astropad in the digital Epigraphy Manual, which you can find here.) At the end the possible advantages slowly started to outweigh our concerns. However, as we brainstormed about speeding up the process, the idea of using Astropad as a vehicle to let us work on final (studio grade!) layers in the field kept coming up. ![]() Knowing the conditions when working at Egyptian monuments, taking one’s laptop computer to the temple was never really considered as an option before. Working on a pencil drawing section of the roman fresco at Luxor temple Although we could occasionally use a digital pattern on large homogeneous surfaces, the lack of any satisfying digital equipment in the field made most of the studio work repetitive and rather tedious. Once a section was done and the photograph was scanned, this pencil pattern needed to be meticulously reproduced – stroke by stroke – digitally. When the photographs were developed in 1:4 the remaining traces of the roman pigment were traced directly on the photos by using regular pencil and a special crisscrossed pattern. ![]() We’ve already documented one of the most complicated walls applying a unique hybrid method that still involved using a large format camera as the crucial initial step. In October 2015, the Epigraphic Survey was in the middle of an ongoing project developed to document the roman frescoes in the King’s Chamber at Luxor temple. I have been aware of Astropad since it was released, however, I only started experimenting with it when the first iPad Pro with Apple Pencil came to life. Don’t forget, however, that it was 2015, there was no Apple Pencil on the market yet and – although iPad was used for quick sketching by many – second party digital styluses were plagued by imprecise screen mapping and couldn’t replicate pressure. While its immediate competition, Duet Display aimed to enthrall second-screen enthusiasts, Astro HQ had a mightier goal: replace your Wacom tablet entirely. Back in 2015 Astro HQ released an iPad app called Astropad with a unique mission: to map the iPad to your Mac’s screen! At that time Astropad filled a unique space for creative pros. ![]()
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