Procreate® Compatibility
A word of caution
Ochre Paint is in no way associated with Savage Interactive Pty Ltd, the makers of Procreate. Neither the Procreate drawing format, nor the Procreate brush format is standardized or documented in any way.
By systemic experimentation within the Procreate app, along with rigorous examination of the drawing and brush files, we have implemented our own support for these formats, often at a level where Ochre Paint behaves virtually indistinguishable from Procreate.
There are however some features that we don't support yet, along with some brush ressources embedded in the Procreate App, that cannot be used in Ochre Paint. See below for the details.
The makers of Procreate can and do make changes to the formats without any advance notice. This means that supporting their formats is always going to be on a best-effort basis. In principle, they could make changes that would make it impossible to remain compatible. There is a theoretical risk that this could even happen for features that are currently 100% supported in Ochre Paint. We cannot completely guarantee that this won't happen.
However, in reality the formats have been stable for a long time. And even though some major changes are coming to Procreate, we expect to be able to support them now and in the future, with only brief delays after major releases to add support for new features.
Procreate® Drawing Compatibility
Paintings on 3D models
These are currently not supported at all, nor do we currently have it on our roadmap. But if this is important to you, we would love to hear from you, especially about how you are currently using it.
CMYK drawings
The way most modern drawing programs support CMYK color spaces, is by having an underlying RGB-colorspace drawing, and then letting the user optionally (and non-destructively) show a CMYK "soft proof" (i.e. a preview) of what the image would look like limited to what can be printed within a given CMYK color-profile.
We plan to support this type of CMYK soft-proofing in Ochre Paint.
The way Procreate works with CMYK color spaces is somewhat different: Here you have to decide if you want a CMYK colorspace when you create the drawing, and you cannot change it later. However, Procreate also internally keeps an RGB-colorspace drawing, but with no way of ever reaching it directly. We are not convinced locking you into CMYK in this way is super helpful, and at the same time, also not completely convinced of the soundness of how Procreate applies the colorprofile when the CMYK painting is shown on screen.
When we add support for soft-proofing in Ochre Paint, we will try to be compatible with how Procreate uses CMYK color profiles, to the extend that it's possible.
This is still a somewhat open subject for us, we would like to hear from your about your experiences with using CMYK drawings in Procreate.
For now, Ochre Paint will show and edit the underlying RGB drawing of Procreate CMYK drawings (i.e. the colors will be far too vibrant.)
Text Layers
Text layers cannot yet be created or edited in Ochre Paint. You can however copy and paste them, and turn them into normal raster layers.
We plan to support adding and editing text layers in the future.
Saved Selections
Saved selections are not yet supported, and will be lost when you save in Ocre Paint. Support will be added in an upcoming update.
Animations - Timeline View
Animations are fully supported, however editing them is somewhat clumsy at the moment. We do not yet have a proper timeline view of the animation, so you have to work with the frames within the Layer sidebar. Nor do we have onion skins or similar to help you draw animations.
This is a priority feature and will be added in an early update.
Background Color Application
Ochre Paint draws the background color as if it was a real layer. That is how drawing applications generally work, and what we believe users would expect.
Procreate applies the background color after all the layers have been drawn, as a background behind the rest of the drawing. The difference is subtle, for most layer blend modes there is no difference at all. But a layer with a blend mode like Vivid Light ends up being completely transparent on the background in Procreate, as it is effectively being applied to nothing.
We are still evaluating if we should do the same as Procreate, in the name of maximizing compatibility. If so, we would at least give you the option to use the background color as a real backing layer, by making it configurable.
Timelapse
The timelapse video is not expanded while drawing in Ochre Paint, nor can you see the stored timelapse. Writing to the timelapse video and letting you see and extract the timelapse is on the roadmap.
Procreate® Brush Compatibility
Builtin Grain and Shape Images from Procreate's built-in Library
This is by far the biggest issue you are likely to experience when using Procreate Brushes, and the direct reason why you sadly cannot expect all your Procreate brushes to work without modifications.
The shape and grain of a brush are either embedded within the brush itself (this happens if you use a file or a photo on your iPad), or simply references to images stored within the Procreate App itself. In the latter case, we sadly cannot include these same images in Ochre Paint - they are copyrighted material.
It is possible to create replacement images, that have similar enough content so that brushes that make use of them will work effectively identically. But it would be extremely time consuming to do that for all of the images included within Procreate, and we are unlikely to ever do that for all of them.
The built-in brushes in Procreate all of course depend on these built-in images, but high-quality brush-sets by third parties generally only sparingly use them. They instead have their own custom images embedded in the brushes.
We are focusing on creating replacement images for the most popular built-in Procreate images used in third-party brushes. At launch we will have replacements for the basic round shapes, noises and some basic grains that are useful for many different types of brushes. This is enough to cover all resources used by a popular brush collection like "Jingsketch Procreate Brushes".
Long term, we do plan to strategically expand which Procreate images we have replacements for, but even more importantly, we hope to convince brush creators to consistently use images that can be used everywhere.
When using built-in images available in Ochre Paint, the images are always included in the brushes themselves, and you can freely use them to create brushes that have completely identical images in both Procreate and Ochre Paint.
Also note that our replacements of the round shapes are editable within Ochre Paint's "Simple Shape" editor, so you can easily modify how hard and how large the shape is. These shapes are included in the exported brushes as images, and can also be used identically within Procreate.
For the resources where we don't have a replacement, you will see red warning icons on the brush, and in the editor you will see requests to change the missing resource to something else.
Blur and Blur Jitter (Wet Mix)
Blur is not yet supported. We need a little more time to make sure we have a consistent and performant implementation across all the GPUs we need to cover.
Stabilization
Only StreamLine is supported. Stabilization and Motion Filtering are not yet supported, but are on the roadmap.
Barrel Roll
There is sadly only a limited number of pens/tablets available with Barrel Roll support. We are holding back support for Barel Roll until we have more experience with the quality of data we are likely to get from these devices.
Burnt Edges
The Burnt Edges effect is very, very subtle, making it difficult to conclusively replicate the exact effect. It is also quite rarely used. Support for it is planned, but for now the priority is relatively low. We would love to hear from you, if this is something you are urgently missing.
Luminance Blending
Luminance Blending is not yet supported, but it is on the roadmap.
Hidden Properties
Some Procreate properties have extra, hidden properties available by pressing on numerical settings. This allows you to e.g. edit pressure curves for a specific setting. Thesse settings are not yet supported in Ochre Paint, but they are on the roadmap.
Features added in Procreate 5.4
New features added in Procreate 5.4 are not yet supported, but are on the roadmap. As they are quite new, we have haven't had much time to examine them, but an initial guess is that they should be relatively straight forward. Expect them to be supported before the end of 2025.
These are primarily the following features:
- Jitter Linear / Jitter Lateral / Spacing Jitter
- Roundness Vertical Jitter / Roundness Horizontal Jitter
- Alpha Threshold
- Classic Normal Combine Mode
(i.e. any dual brushes with the combine mode 'Normal' will work like before 5.4)
The new shade/darker blend modes are however supported.
Procreate® Palettes
Support for custom palettes is on the roadmap. We will support reading and writing Procreate palette files.
Procreate® Dreams Files
We do not currently support Procreate Dreams files. We expect to support them in the future, but maybe as a separate app.