Atelier Easel

Paint, draw, and edit images with layers, brushes, and filters, by touch or with Apple Pencil on iPad.

Easel is an image editor for iPhone and iPad. Paint with your finger, or with an Apple Pencil on iPad that responds to pressure and tilt. Work in layers with masks and groups, and edit photos directly from the Photos app.

Files

• Open Easel images, PNG, JPEG, HEIC, Photoshop (.psd), and Pixelmator Pro (.pxd) files
• Save as an Easel image, PNG, JPEG, HEIC, or Photoshop (.psd) with layers, masks, and groups
• Export presets that save a format, a quality, and a maximum size, and export several at once
• Edit a photo from the Photos app's Edit menu
• Preview Easel and Pixelmator Pro images in Files

Painting and Drawing

• Brushes, an eraser, fill and gradient tools, and an eyedropper
• Round, pencil, calligraphy, airbrush, and chalk brush tips, with paper grain
• Save your own brushes by name, alongside a few built-in ones
• A ruler you move, turn, and stretch with your fingers, so you can draw straight lines along it
• Vector shapes, lines, and arrows, plus a pen tool, node editing, and combining shapes by unite, subtract, intersect, and exclude
• Text, including text along a path
• Symmetry drawing: vertical, horizontal, or both
• Swatches saved with each image

Apple Pencil on iPad

• Pressure and tilt shape each stroke
• Shade with a tilted pencil, and turn the calligraphy nib as you lean it
• See the brush outline under a hovering Apple Pencil or pointer

Retouching

• Smudge, blur, mosaic, heal, and clone
• Liquify to push and pull pixels
• Fill a selection from its surroundings
• Remove the background, keeping the subject
• Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, temperature, tint, hue, sharpness, and vignette

Selecting and Transforming

• Rectangle, ellipse, lasso, color-based, and object selection, including selecting a subject
• Move, crop, rotate, and flip
• Distort a layer in perspective or warp it on a grid
• Guides, rulers, and snapping to help line things up

Layers

• Layers with blend modes, groups, and masks
• Filters and adjustments on a layer: black and white, sepia, saturation, brightness, contrast, levels, curves, color balance, gradient map, mosaic, noise reduction, and Gaussian, motion, zoom, and lens blur
• Change the canvas size, and place the artwork by an anchor, scale it to fit, or stretch it to fill

Shortcuts

• Resize images, convert their format, and remove their background with Shortcuts actions you can chain together

Working Faster

• Keyboard shortcuts with a hardware keyboard to copy, paste, nudge layers, size brushes, and zoom
• A history panel to go back to any step and compare with the original