Pochade vs Art Reference

**Pochade is free to try with included sample images. Unlock importing your own photos with a single one-time purchase of $9.99. No subscription, no ads, yours forever.** Pochade is a focused reference prep app for painters. Import a photo, study its values, compose your framing, and plan your grid — all before brush hits canvas. No AI generation. No social features. No clutter. Just the reference tools painters actually need, designed for iPad. STUDY VALUES WITH CLARITY The hardest part of painting from a photo is seeing the value structure. Pochade simplifies your reference into 2–9 tonal steps so you can map out your lights and darks before you start mixing paint. A live luminance histogram shows your overall tonal distribution. Select any value bucket to isolate it with a mask overlay, making it easy to see exactly where each tone falls in your composition. COMPOSE YOUR FRAMING Crop non-destructively with preset aspect ratios (1:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4) or use the original framing. Your source image is never altered — adjust your composition as many times as you need. OVERLAY A PLANNING GRID Add a customizable grid overlay to plan your drawing transfer. Choose your row and column count (2–12 each), pick a color that reads well against your image, and adjust line thickness. The grid respects your crop, so what you see is what you'll paint. TOGGLE GRAYSCALE Switch to grayscale to strip away color and focus purely on value relationships — the foundation of every strong painting. BUILT FOR HOW PAINTERS WORK Your sessions save automatically as you adjust tools. Come back tomorrow or next week and pick up right where you left off. Undo and redo are built in, up to 50 steps deep. A session library keeps your references organized with thumbnail previews and tool state badges so you can see at a glance what you've done with each image. Zen mode hides all controls so you can evaluate your reference without distraction. Pan, zoom, and rotate to inspect details. BUILT NATIVELY FOR iPAD AND iPHONE Pochade is built natively for iPad and iPhone. Everything runs on-device. Your photos and sessions stay on your iPad, nothing is uploaded anywhere. Privacy Policy: [link] Terms of Use: [link]

Art Reference: Value Study helps painters, illustrators, and traditional artists see any reference more clearly. Study values, simplify light and shadow, overlay grids, and paint side-by-side with your canvas. A value (or tone) is how light or dark a color is. Learning to see values is one of the fastest ways to improve your drawing and painting. But it's hard to read shadows and highlights through all the color. This app makes it effortless. SEE YOUR REFERENCE IN VALUES Instantly convert any photo to grayscale, or a 7-value posterized scale. Flick between levels of detail, start in simple black and white, then build up value by value to train your eye. CROP & FRAME TO YOUR CANVAS Match your reference's composition and aspect ratio to your canvas before your first stroke. GRIDLINES Overlay grids to lay in your under-sketch with correct proportions. CURATED COLLECTIONS Don't have a reference ready? Start with dozens of hand-picked photos across Animals, Architecture, Botanical, Figure, Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, Skulls, and Master Studies from the great painters. NO AI ART Every starter reference is a real photograph or artwork, attributed to the original artist with a link to their portfolio. No AI-generated images. And your own artwork stays private in your personal iCloud, never shared online, never used to train AI models. WORKS OFFLINE No connection needed. Perfect for the studio, plein air, or anywhere you paint. CLEAN, FOCUSED, NO ADS Just the reference tools you need.