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Suggestions, Ideas, Bugs / Re: News regarding ArtStudio Pro new version?
on: December 28, 2025, 07:15:18 AM
Would be interested too, it's been really quiet lately
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Secondary color will be improved in new Artstudio. It will be used as brush Aux color. UI will be changed so it will be not so easy to change secondary color by mistake.
Generative tools / AI are not planned. However you should know that current Edit > Inpaint is a very basic of generative fill - the difference is that it is searching for content in current image only, and AI generative fill is searching in mulitple images...
Draggable panels - of course we want to keep option to add custom tools, and we will have to make panels not only draggable, but also resizable. Panel system will be extended for new artstudio. And resizing option is on the first place of planned improvements.
Using groups as clipping mask - it is rather not possible to make such option directly because there would be unexpected results for Group using "Passthrough" blending mode. Besides we don't want to break PS compatibility. The plan is implementing "Smart Object" option, so you can convert group to smart object and then use it as Clipping Mask. Smart Object doesn't support "Passthrough" blending, it is treated rather like normal Layer with option to edit it content.
We want to work on all changes together to save time - i mean the big update will have both new UI, new engine and new features.
One more thing we want to change is the file system. Now we use iCloud Documents (like Pages / Numbers). Unfortunately it has very old system bug and sometimes you can see "Saving Problem" alert, mainly when working on large files. I reported that to Apple, but it was ignored. I'm sure the bug comes from system because i can easily repeat it in Pages / Numbers, i even repeated the during live conversation with Apple, with iPad screen sharing. Of course the only advice I had was "please reported the bug in our bug reporting tool - feedbackassistant.apple.com". I did that on March 2023 and have never receive any feedback. I'm not sure if anybody from Apple has ever read it...
So the only solution is to resign from iCloud Document and implement custom gallery, probably with option to synchronize using CloudKit. Documents will be stored on local disk, and will not be visible in Files anymore.
The open problem is how to make a transition from iCloud Documents to custom gallery... Maybe we will have to release new version as a separate app however i'm not sure if it is possible to keep full version for users who have already bought Artstudio Pro.
What will be the benefits/differences for Artstudio Pro once it's ported to the new graphics engine?
1. We wrote ArtKit engine from scratch, in pure Swift, while Artstudio Pro is written in obj-c. Here is the list of advantages:
- it is in pure Swift and supports both OpenGL and Metal, so it will be possible to make Artstudio for Windows / Android, but don't expect that soon
- faster - because Swift is faster than objc)
- faster and more memory efficient - we had a lot of experience from Artstudio so we made many thing in a different, more efficient way
- we separated stroke processing from other things so we have better control on stroke stabilization / smoothing / dynamics etc, we may add more options in brush editor
- we implemented texture compressing so the memory usage will be lower and it will improve performance in large documents (a lot of layer, big dimension) because it will first compress layer data on low memory, then save it to disk if there is still no free memory
- besides we learnt a lot of things when working on a new engine and on Notestudio which is vector based app
2. We switched to SwiftUI in Notestudio and wrote separate framework for the UI - ArtUI. It will improve UI a lot
- we made draggable panel mechanism (used in Notestudio), we are going to use it in Artstudio too
- SwiftUI has better support of localizations, light/dark mode, controls refreshing, small animation here and there etc
Things in iOS are changing very fast. To make Artstudio alive we had to make really big steps every few year. First Artstudio was released in 2010, then rewritten almost from scratch in about 2015, then rewritten almost from scratch again in 2019 and released as Artstudio Pro, it seems it's time for the next big step...

But why would anybody want to work in photoshop if you are using Artstudio pro? Seems like a bad idea to be like yeah here take this and leave the app so you can use the competition?
It is not possible, sorry.
We cannot implement that because in Artstudio we have a lot of brush parameters that are not supported by Photoshop, so they cannot be saved in abr.
I still get it constantly. I store locally and my file sizes are usually between 1gb to 4gb, if that matters. I can try saving to iCloud if anybody can confirm that it works better there
it was gone for a bit, but i suddenly started getting the "Document was not saved! Please close and reopen the document" popup every autosave or if i manually save