The Apple Pencil

Gus Mueller, creator of Acorn:

I find that when using the HB Pencil in Procreate, I get something that is very, very close to what I feel when I’m drawing in my sketchbooks. But of course now I’ve got layers and many colors and a perfect eraser to work with. And endless pages. I love it. I’m drawn to it. It’s wonderful. You should absolutely try one if you haven’t already.

Myke Hurley, an avid note taker & self-professed pen geek, penned this:

In my testing, I used the Notes app and two other apps — Notability and GoodNotes. With these I was able to freely write on the screen, at practically any size I wanted, and I got the results I would have normally expected from pen and paper. The Pencil was able to keep up with me, and I was genuinely surprised at just how small it would let me write. Without a shadow of a doubt the Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro is a comparable and comfortable solution for digital note taking. I will definitely be using this going forward.

I have yet to read on how the iPad Pro + Pencil combo would work from a photographer’s point of view, and hardware availability aside, there’s a software side to this that can make, or break the Pencil’s true potential.

As of this writing, Astropad seems like an ideal compromise to bridge the software gap to a photography-centric use case for a photographer like me: masking & local adjustments. I don’t use Photoshop, and I limit my editing to what’s available on Aperture Adobe Lightroom, which mostly are masked adjustments.