Thanks so much for working on this, its so much better when you enable Rotation and Roll in Brush Editor > Dynamics > Angle. It's exactly how I hoped it would work!

BUT- In order for that setting to work, you have to have barrel roll turned on in the prefs, which affects all other brushes
That setting gives all brushes the behavior from before with the brush stamp pop up window which I don't think is intuitive and can trigger unexpectedly, making brushes not enjoyable to use.
With the current arrangement, there is no way to use the brush editor's barrel roll setting without having the window rotation thing on everything else.

Personally, I would simply cut the window rotation feature- the hotkeys to rotate the brush stamp that you recently implemented quite nicely cover the more mechanical usecase I think you were imagining for this idea. This way, you could simply remove the roll option in the prefs- it would be simply the brush editor angle dynamics settings that control whether brushes use barrel rotation, which is intuitive and covers practically everyone's expected usecases.

But if you want to preserve the window rotation feature in addition to the brush editor rotation setting- here's how I would do it:
I would change the preference design to be opt in to the window feature- it should be called something like "Use Barrel Roll to Set Brush Angle." If this setting is on, then you would get the window rotation feature. And if you turn on roll in the brush editor that would always work, independent of this feature(even if this pref setting is off!). This pref should default off to not interrupt how people currently are used to their brushes working.
This arrangement would allow all the on/off states for what I see as two independent features-

• No rotation at all (default),
• Brush editor rotation angle on/prefs window rotation off, (<--what we are missing, and what we want! )
• Brush editor rotation angle off/prefs window rotation on,
• both on.

Additionally, changing the pref to work this way doesnt mean you cant also have a "killswitch" pref for barrel rotation to turn it on and off globally. They should just be separate options.

Thanks again for improving this, I hope these ideas are helpful in solving these design issues. It's turning out great.

Now that I have the new Apple Pencil Pro I’ve got some ideas for more things the squeeze action could do. I really like it opening the quick menu and switching to the eraser. But I think it would be really awesome if it could be set to do these things too (I’m most excited about the first two ideas here):

- open various panels- it would be great to map it to opening the color panel or the favorites panel or the brushes panel, which would appear right under the cursor.
Apple has a similar option in its settings, to open a color palette. They knew this was a useful idea!
It might even be neat to have repeatedly squeezing it cycle through several panels.

- toggle clear blending- this is similar to toggling the eraser, but more powerful- it would allow you to switch between drawing and erasing with not only brushes, but also lasso fill. That would be awesome!

Before getting the new Apple Pencil pro I was using double tap to open the quick menu- it would be great if the above options could also be added to that and other gestures so people could mix and match them however they like.

- undo - back when I used a Wacom more, I always had the pen button mapped to undo which was really quick and nice. Two finger tap undo on iPad feels great, but this would be a great intuitive option to have. would work great with setups where you essentially turn off all touch inputs, and are using keyboard shortcuts for navigation etc.

- pick layer- this is a really nice function, would work great on the squeeze action.

- toggle lines mode - quickly switching between drawing in Freehand or line mode would be really cool! Could be fantastic for drawing.

- keyboard shortcut- allowing the squeeze action to essentially send a user defined keyboard shortcut would let it trigger basically anything in the app’s keyboard shortcuts commands, which would be super powerful!

- brush size - sort of like the control+option+move gesture to control brush size, you could hold the squeeze and move the pencil up and down (while hovering?) to change the brush size.

The Apple pencil pro is so new it seems like there’s a whole lot of unexplored potential. It’s awesome that you guys got support for it in already, faster than basically all the other apps! I’m excited to see its functionality get extended and refined.
Thanks for considering these ideas, they would be really cool to see! Especially the panels and the clear blending toggle!

I just got the new apple pencil pro and am very excited to use the barrel roll feature in ArtStudio Pro.

I wanted to echo pluskid's comment above- thank you for getting support for the new features so quickly! However-I do think the current barrel roll implementation is not quite what I was hoping for yet. Please make barrel roll trigger a real time rotation of the brush tip, just like in apple notes with the highlighter tool.


I find the current implementation to have a lot of lag before registering, and the brush stamp window popping up is distracting. It seems that the stamp angle is locked once a brush stroke is started. It would be more intuitive if there was no window pop up and the brush angle rotated in realtime, even as you draw. The hover brush cursor should simply constantly rotate in realtime as you twist the pencil without delay. It's a much better angle preview indicator for this than the pop up window. I am sure this is how other apps like Procreate will implement support for barrel roll, and is what most users will expect.


It looks like theres an option in the preferences to turn on barrel rotation- is this a global setting for all brushes? I really think it should be an option per brush- I was expecting to find a setting for it in the Brush Settings->Dynamics ->Angle section, next to the Pressure, Rotation, Stroke Direction and Initial Direction options. I would like some brushes to use it and others to not, and this arrangement would allow that.

Please implement this stuff, barrel roll is going to be so helpful and intuitive with these tweaks! The Apple Notes implementation is a great reference for how this should behave and feel. I have the beta installed and will happily test updates and provide feedback. Thank you!

Clear blending does nothing on pigment layers, but works on regular layers. Tools still draw instead of erase. It seems like it should work regardless of whether the layer is set to pigment or not.

You could also try this gesture option that lets you adjust the brush size and opacity by holding hotkeys and dragging anywhere up and down or left and right.

Hey I’m finally updating this issue with repro steps and examples- the bug still exists. I’m on iPad Pro (12.9-inch) (6th generation).


1 make an image that is 2048 x 2048.
2 use filter- render- clouds to make some black and white shapes.
3 use levels to increase the contrast a bit to make the issue easier to see.
4 use filter- distort- offset, and set the horizontal amount to 2048. Edges should be set to repeat (seamless).
5 zoom in and observe that despite the fact that this operation should result in the image being unchanged (because we shifted it the same amount as the width of the canvas), every other column of pixels is now duplicated from its neighboring column. The image has lost data.


Attached is a close up showing the issue. The left side shows what happens when you do an offset filter, and the right side shows the original pixels.

Pick layer is already available in the double and triple tap gesture options, but I already use those for other things! It would be great if you could map it to long press

I hope this gets addressed!