Value Study vs Pocket Easel

In art, value (or tone) refers to how light or dark a colour is. If you're learning to paint or draw, doing value studies is one of the best ways to improve. These small, loose sketches in greyscale help you understand where shadows fall and highlights appear—essential for capturing depth and form. Value Study is a simple, focused tool designed to help you see values more clearly in your reference images. Instead of just converting a photo to black and white, this app lets you break down tones step by step. Start with just black and white to map out the biggest shapes, then gradually add more values to refine your understanding. You can also highlight all areas of an image that share the same value, making it easier to see subtle shifts in tone. This is especially useful in complex references, like portraits, where different parts of the image might have the same level of shadow but look completely different in colour. Value Study isn’t here to replace traditional studies—it’s here to enhance them. Whether you're sketching, painting, or working digitally, this tool makes it easier to focus on the fundamentals of light, shadow, and form. Try it for free with all features enabled on sample images from Unsplash before deciding to unlock the full app with a low-cost yearly or lifetime purchase. All Value Study Pro upgrades count as lifetime purchase. Either option will unlock Value Study across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Annual: Auto-renews yearly. Lifetime: One-time payment, no fees. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Pocket Easel is a color-study app for painting from life, wherever you are. It works like a painter's palette: a gamut mask decides which colors are on your palette, and a simple gesture lets you mix as you paint — a little warmer, a little cooler, lighter, darker — without ever leaving the picture. The mask is what's on your palette. The gesture is how you mix. Pick Color Without Leaving the Painting Most apps make you stop, open a color panel and drag sliders to an exact value, then find your place again. In Pocket Easel you push the current color from the corner of the canvas, relative to where it is, the way you'd work a touch more paint into a mix. No numbers to hit, so adjusting often costs nothing. Gamut Masks Before you start, choose a mask shape on the color wheel — a preset, or your own triangle or quad. It limits your palette to colors that belong together, so the whole study stays in harmony. Mixing never steps outside it. Painterly Brushes Round and flat brushes, lines and shapes, all with a subtle painterly texture that varies the color as real paint does. Smudge blends the paint already on the canvas. See Your Values Value Check shows your study in grayscale. While you adjust brightness, a ten-step value scale appears beside the wheel. Master's Palette Import a painting you admire and see where its colors sit on the wheel — then fit a mask to its gamut. Color Studies Every study is saved as you go. Name them, duplicate one to try an idea, and pick up any of them later. Share Your Process Export your study with a frame that shows the gamut wheel and the colors you used, or a time-lapse that shows each stroke and where its color came from on the wheel. Made for Phone and iPad Turn your phone sideways to paint with both hands. Left-Handed mode, Dark mode, and the same tools on iPad. Pocket Easel is built for quick color studies, not detailed illustration — the constraint is the point. All painting tools and image export are free. Pocket Easel Pro, a one-time purchase, lets you turn off the frame, remove the watermark or use your own name, and export time-lapse videos.