Procreate vs Photoshop – Which Program Should You Get?

Graphics can be a powerful tool in your online course. When used appropriately they not only add aesthetic appeal to your course but also enhance your written content.  

We would recommend that you use Procreate or Adobe Photoshop to add illustrations to your online course. 

However, it can be hard to decide which program to get due to the similarities in their tools and features. 

In this Procreate vs Photoshop review, we will go over their features, benefits, pros, and cons to help you decide the best software for you. 

Features	Procreate	Adobe Photoshop
Price	Costs $9.99 as a one-time payment	Comes with the Adobe Creative Suite for $20.99/mo
Ease of use	Simple and easy to use	Overwhelming for amateurs
Illustrations	Provides excellent illustration features including 130 brushes	Gives you access to custom brushes, variable fonts, etc for digital paintings
Photo Editing	Photo editing tools are limited compared to Adobe Photoshop.	Provides you with a dozen tools for editing and retouching images.
Compatibility	Limited to Apple devices such as iPad, iPad Pro, iPad mini, iPhone, etc.	Works on many operating systems including Windows and Mac OS.

Now that we have established a brief overview, let’s continue with our review where we will analyze Procreate vs Photoshop in detail to establish which one could be more suitable for you. 

Procreate Review – Go-to Software for Digital Painting

If you are unfamiliar with Procreate, it is an iPad exclusive app to create digital art and illustration for creative professionals. 

It gives designers the benefits of working digitally while they recreate a familiar experience of using a pen and paint on paper. 

So, you can use it to sketch, paint, and edit images to incorporate into your online course. This will help you connect with your audience and engage your students. 

Features of Procreate

• Customizable brushes
• Color drop 
• Animation assist tool 
• Layer based models 
• Smudge tool
• Alpha lock for adding texture 
• Quick line 
• Content Library
• Perspective blur
• Time lapse-recording

Pros	Cons
• Cheap • Has many essential features for creating digital art like masks, layers, etc • Can record your drawings as videos and export them in full HD • Works with PSD, TIFF, PDF, and many other file formats • Easy to share your work online • Smooth workflow • Work gets saved automatically in the background	• Only available on iPad/iPhone • Cannot create high-resolution pictures in large print • Lags or gets slower after some time

Benefits of Procreate

We tested out Procreate for months to fully understand its functionalities.  

One thing we particularly liked was the responsiveness of the software, especially when we used the Apple Pencil. It gave us a very natural feel as if we were drawing on paper. 

We were able to correct, delete, and create art faster. 

We found Procreate’s animation feature extremely easy to use.

Features like onion-skinning, hold frame, etc were built within the app. 

This means you do not have to go and purchase an entirely different software if you want to incorporate animations into your online course

Procreate has other features like Digital Lettering. 

You can use it to:

• Create realistic projects for your online course that resemble real medium 
• Export lettering with transparent background 
• Move things around and easily resize them

You can use Procreate’s quick adjustment tab for any tweaks in your project without redoing the rest of it. 

There are 12 options under the tab including: 

• Gaussian blur 
• Noice adjustment 
• Cloning 
• Color balance
• Sharpening

All of them are incredibly easy to use and help you work quickly without sacrificing quality. 

Procreate offers time-lapse recording so you can see how much time you have spent on a particular piece. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Procreate

Price

If we compare Procreate vs Photoshop pricing, Procreate takes the cake. 

You can buy Procreate for as little as $9.99. This is a one-time purchase.

After this, there are no subscriptions, hidden fees, or additional charges for you to pay. 

Ease of use 

When we tested out Procreate, our team found its interface relatively simple. So you can easily start using Procreate even if you are a novice. 

The buttons are quite straightforward to use. 

For example, the two buttons on the left adjust size and opacity. While all the main buttons for brush settings, smudge, layers, etc are located at the right. 

Unlike other design programs, we found zero stroke lag while painting in Procreate. This was a huge plus for us. 

Illustrations

If you have an iPad, Procreate is a better option to create illustrations for your online course than Photoshop. The app’s configuration to Apple Pencil makes the illustration process seamless and easy. 

The app also offers 130 Procreate brushes. 

You can either use the existing ones for your illustrations or create your own brushes from scratch. 

We loved how the brushes were organized in the brush library. The similar brushes and mediums were grouped, which made it extremely easy to look for the brushes we wanted to use. 

Procreate lets you create your custom color palette. 

We were able to create 3 different color palettes and switch between them for different projects. 

You can also use Procreate to import and export a Photoshop file. This will allow you to illustrate your design in Procreate and fine-tune it in Photoshop.

Photo Editing 

If you want to edit pictures for your course, we would recommend Adobe Photoshop. Procreate has some of the same features for editing images but on a limited scale. 

Procreate app offers: 

• Resizing and cropping images 
• Adjustment layers to adjust the color and lighting of your image 
• Filters and special effects 
• Liquify features that are similar to Photoshop

Compatibility

Procreate was designed for professional illustrators that work within the Apple framework. Therefore, it is limited only to Apple users. There is no desktop version of Procreate. 

You can install it on the following Apple devices: 

• iPad Mini 
• iPad Air
• iPad Pro
• iPhone 

Accessories that work great with Procreate include: 

• Apple Pencil
• iPad Pro
• Artist Glove 

What Do the Customers Think?

We searched the internet and found many positive reviews for Procreate. It has 5 out of 5 stars on www.g2.com

Many people used it for their professional work. They claimed it to be a great app if you want to create graphics but don’t have tons of experience. You can use Procreate to make PNGs with transparent backgrounds and quick edits. 

Customers were also satisfied by its easy-to-navigate interface and the fact that it integrates well with iPad pro. If you are a professional illustrator you will appreciate its brush collection. 

One of the best features of Procreate app is that it allows you to bring any image to your artboard and zoom independently of your project. 

Here are some of the reviews we came across: 

Go-to Software for Digital Painting

The go-to software for digital painting is Procreate thanks to its customizable brush options and working layers. You can use it to create graphic designs for your online course as well as record your lecture through its time-lapse recording feature.

Adobe Photoshop Review – Best Photo Editing App

If you have ever worked with image creation on your computer, you may have heard of Adobe Photoshop. It is one of the most powerful image editing software in the market. 

Photoshop is a part of the Creative Cloud Suite of the Adobe System, originally created for image editing. 

But, you can use it for everything from graphic design and image compositing to creating typography, infographics, and illustrations to add to your online course. 

These will help you connect to your audience and make your lectures more interesting. 

Features of Adobe Photoshop

• Layers
• Selection tools 
• Vector masks
• Pen tools
• 3D modeling
• Slice tool
• Smart objects
• Retouching tools 
• Website graphics 
• Document navigation

Pros	Cons
• Images of different formats can be easily edited • Easy transfer of files between different programs • Ability to edit videos and animation layers • Photoshop templates are readily available •  Easy rendering Integrated stock library	• Cannot purchase Photoshop outright • Takes up a lot of space • The toolbar is less detailed

Benefits of Adobe Photoshop

The benefits of Adobe Photoshop are endless. It is a versatile software that has everything from photo editing, web design, and illustrations. 

If you want to create a course on photography, you can use Photoshop to retouch photographs to produce better quality images for your online course. 

It lets you alter the hue, saturation, and lighting of the photographs. You can also liquify, mask and use various effects on your images. 

As discussed before, adding digital illustrations like infographics greatly improve the quality of your online course. You can do so by utilizing Photoshop’s huge variety of brushes. 

You can also use Photoshop to draw a neat vector shape or a precise vector mask for your layers. This feature is absent in Procreate. 

If you work on complex projects, Photoshop lets you utilize hundreds of layers. 

These come in handy for highly detailed drawings. When you use these layers, you are free to edit these layers at any point without redoing the rest of the project. 

Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts helped us work faster on our project. 

We found a lot of premade shortcuts that were already a part of the app. There was also an option to create our own shortcuts. You can do this by going to Edit > Keyboard shortcuts or Alt+Shift+Ctrl for iOS. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Adobe Photoshop

Price 

To purchase Photoshop, you must get an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. 

You can either purchase Photoshop as an individual app for $20.99/month (Adobe Fresco included) or opt for a Creative Cloud bundle. 

Here’s a list of different Adobe bundles: 

• The Photography bundle for $9.99/month

It includes Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 20GB of cloud storage 

• The full Adobe suite for $52.99/month 

It includes the full suite of Adobe apps. 

Ease of use  

Since Adobe Photoshop was created for professional use, it has a bit of a learning curve. 

We found the desktop version overwhelming for new users. There were tons of options and buttons all over the interface which made it hard for us to navigate the tools. 

The iPad app was a bit simpler to use. 

But we noticed a lot of desktop functions were missing in the tablet version. We had to relearn the software limits which proved to be time-consuming. 

On the upside, Adobe does offer tons of free online tutorials and other resources that you can use to learn Photoshop and get comfortable with the app. 

Illustrations 

If you have desktop or Window based products, Photoshop has tons of great features to create illustrations for your online course. 

However, if you use an iPad we would recommend you to replace Photoshop with Procreate. 

When we tested it to create our illustrations, we found no shortage of Photoshop brushes. We also took this opportunity to create some of our own favorite brushes in the Photoshop app. 

The brushes could also be transferred to Procreate which is a huge perk of using Photoshop. 

Moreover, we were able to change the colors of our entire artwork, not just the individual layers, using the adjustment layers feature. This saved us a lot of time since we didn’t have to go back and make changes to separate layers. 

Photo Editing 

Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing. 

You can use Photoshop to: 

• Crop and Resize images to fit perfectly into your online course 
• Change the lighting and color of photographs with adjustment layers at the same time
• Remove unwanted content with the help of the spot healing tool or the patch tool 
• Add filters and effects to pictures 
• Use the liquify feature to pull, push, bloat the pixels in your photo

Compatibility  

If we compare Procreate vs Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop wins in terms of compatibility. 

It is available for both desktop and mobile versions. The mobile version of Photoshop is limited but it is available for the iPad. 

Moreover, Adobe also has mini Photoshop apps for mobile including: 

• Adobe Photoshop Fix 
• Adobe Photoshop Mix 
• Adobe Photoshop Sketch 

All these apps are available on iPhone and some on Android. While the desktop application is available for both Windows and Mac OS.

Since Photoshop is available on most operating systems, you can also choose the monitor size to work on your drawings. This feature is absent in Procreate since it is only available on the iPad.

What Do the Customers Think?

We found no shortage of praise for Adobe Photoshop. 

Many customers use Photoshop as an illustration tool. While the others raved about its editing features. You can use it to change the background of the image or remove unwanted objects using the contact awareness tool. 

Professional creatives were impressed by the availability of brushes, textures, fine-tune, and filters to give you the desired look and feel for your artwork. 

They claimed Photoshop to be the best for:

• Creating logos
• Designing 3D models
• Composition
• Game development 
• Color grading 

Customers were also satisfied by its dynamic linking feature. It allowed them to switch between different Adobe products without exporting files every time. 

Here are some reviews we found: 

Best Photo Editing App 

The best photo editing app is Adobe Photoshop because it is easy to use and quick to learn. It offers a variety of features to retouch and compose images. You can also use it for animations and illustrations. 

Procreate vs Photoshop – Buyers’ Guide

It can be difficult to choose the right tools and program. Therefore, our team has created a buyer’s guide to help you look out for some of the features before you make a purchase. 

Those features are: 

Price

Before you purchase any software, it is important to figure out your budget beforehand. 

If you are new to online course creation, we imagine you don’t have enough money to spend on one single software. 

We would recommend that you either look for free editing software or opt for one that does not have a monthly subscription price.  

Ease of Use

Look for graphic design software that is easy to use so you can work efficiently. 

If you constantly run into issues and have to use tutorials to use the program, that will do the opposite. 

Illustrations 

If you plan to add illustrations to your online course, you must choose software with excellent illustration features.

Photo Editing 

Good image editing features are a must if you want to create an online course on photography. 

Make sure the features aren’t clunky and difficult to use so you can work quickly and efficiently. 

Compatibility 

Make sure your design software is compatible with all operating systems. 

Feel free to go for the one available on Windows, Mac Os, and Android so you can work easily on all platforms. 

Final Verdict 

We have reached the end of our Procreate vs Photoshop comparison.

Both Procreate and Photoshop are known software for editing and designing. Procreate is designed to be used on iPad with an Apple pencil to give you a traditional painting feel. It is powerful, intuitive, and has great illustration capabilities. 

While Photoshop is a professional graphics editor software. Due to its versatility, you can use it for anything including illustrations, animations, web design, etc. 

So the final decision comes down to what you will use the program for. 

If you are an amateur on a tight budget or own an iPad, you should go for Procreate. But if you are a professional artist, Photoshop might be a better option for you.