Astropad turns your iPad into a miniature Cintiq

New graphics tool Astropad aims to turn your iPad into a miniature Cintiq – or at least, a working pen display – enabling you to hook an iOS device up to a Mac and draw directly in Photoshop.

Created by former Apple engineers Matt Ronge and Giovanni Donelli, Astropad enables users to control any Mac app from their iPad using either a stylus or standard iPad gesture controls.

The display on the iPad is colour-corrected to match that of the Mac, and the developers claim that Astropad’s Liquid tech framework provides solid 60fps performance and minimal battery drain.

The software supports many standard styluses, including pressure-sensitive models like Wacom’s Intuos Creative Stylus 2 and Adonit’s Jot Touch 4.

Obviously, you’re limited to the screen size of your iPad, but at $49.99, it’s considerably cheaper than buying a professional pen display.

Astropad consists of two apps, one for iOS 8 and one for Mac OS X 10.9+. You’ll need to be able to run both to get it to work.

Read more about Astropad on the product’s website


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About the author

Jim Thacker is a contributing editor for ArtStation Magazine.