Layers For iPhone - Review
Right away the advantages of Layers over all previous iPhone painting applications is apparent from the name. iPhone art programs have been limited to a single layer until now. Brushes and Colors! have been the iPhone art apps of choice, both make great use of the iPhone to allow you to paint or sketch on the go digitally. However both lack layers.
I took most of the day, between things, working on the above painting as my first test of Layers. Once you get used to the interface it’s actually easier to work with than Brushes (my favorite iPhone art app — until now?). Now that I’ve gotten the hang of Layers I’m sure my next painting will be better and take less time.
Anyone who has used graphics programs with layers before will know that layers allow for greater control, detail, and depth in an image because you can edit each layer independently. For example backgrounds can be easily added to paintings of objects or characters without worrying about not painting over the edges of your object or character. Layers supports up to 5 separate layers and a 512x512 pixel canvas, and with the Mac Replay Viewer (very similar to the Brushes Viewer) can export up to 4096x4096 pixel JPEGs or layered PSDs.
In addition to exporting larger format images, the Replay Viewer can play back the painting process and export the video to QuickTime format. So far the only negative experience I’ve had is with the Mac Replay Viewer… There are a few bugs with the first version of the viewer that should be fixed soon according to the the official Layers Twitter. UPDATE: The Replay Viewer has been updated to fix the issues I was having.
Layers will easily replace Brushes as my new favorite mobile art application. It would be hard to go back to working on a single layer. [$4.99 on iTunes]
UPDATE #2 (07-23-09): I’ve been having a few more issues with the Replay Viewer. The below image illustrates the difference in quality between the native 512x512 images and exported higher resolution images.
