![]() ![]() To tell the truth, the original Astropad – although it had a lot of features that helped our documentation work – always felt a bit like an experiment. Obviously, I would never recommend pulling out one's pricy equipment when lying in the sand documenting a multi-ton block under direct sunlight! Luckily, at Luxor temple we could provide the right amount of artificial shade to be able to see our computer screens and the scaffolding had plenty of space to securely accommodate both computer and iPad – so the experiment with Astropad could begin! (I wrote about my inital impressions using Astropad in the digital Epigraphy Manual, which you can find here.) ![]() At the end the possible advantages slowly started to outweigh our concerns. However, as we brainstormed about speeding up the process, the idea of using Astropad as a vehicle to let us work on final (studio grade!) layers in the field kept coming up. Knowing the conditions when working at Egyptian monuments, taking one’s laptop computer to the temple was never really considered as an option before. Working on a pencil drawing section of the roman fresco at Luxor temple Although we could occasionally use a digital pattern on large homogeneous surfaces, the lack of any satisfying digital equipment in the field made most of the studio work repetitive and rather tedious. Once a section was done and the photograph was scanned, this pencil pattern needed to be meticulously reproduced – stroke by stroke – digitally. When the photographs were developed in 1:4 the remaining traces of the roman pigment were traced directly on the photos by using regular pencil and a special crisscrossed pattern. We’ve already documented one of the most complicated walls applying a unique hybrid method that still involved using a large format camera as the crucial initial step. ![]() In October 2015, the Epigraphic Survey was in the middle of an ongoing project developed to document the roman frescoes in the King’s Chamber at Luxor temple. I have been aware of Astropad since it was released, however, I only started experimenting with it when the first iPad Pro with Apple Pencil came to life. Don’t forget, however, that it was 2015, there was no Apple Pencil on the market yet and – although iPad was used for quick sketching by many – second party digital styluses were plagued by imprecise screen mapping and couldn’t replicate pressure. While its immediate competition, Duet Display aimed to enthrall second-screen enthusiasts, Astro HQ had a mightier goal: replace your Wacom tablet entirely. It supports almost every pressure-sensitive pen in the market, too, so it’s likely you’ll be able to stick with your favorite stylus tool.Īvailable now, the Astropad is offered as a free download for the iPad, although the Mac version is priced at $50.Back in 2015 Astro HQ released an iPad app called Astropad with a unique mission: to map the iPad to your Mac’s screen! At that time Astropad filled a unique space for creative pros. The software still supports regular touch controls, so you can use taps to customize shortcuts and even pinch to zoom and pan. Even better, the software’s proprietary technology, called LIQUID, cuts down the response time from the iPad to the Mac over Airplay to a 12ms delay, so everything you draw on the tablet is reflected on the computer screen almost at the exact same time. It creates an exact replica (scaled to size to the smaller screen, of course) that’s true to the source material, complete with color-corrected output, retina resolution, and no compression artifacts. While it’s not the first attempt to do this, it may be the first successful one, as it lets you use the iPad to draw on your Mac with the same ease and quality as an expensive rig from Wacom can provide.Īstropad, basically, reproduces whatever is on your computer’s display onto your iPad. But what if you can turn an iPad into a drawing tablet for interfacing with your favorite graphics software on the Mac? That’s exactly what Astropad does.ĭesigned strictly for iOS and OSX (sorry, everybody else), it transforms Apple’s do-it-all tablet into an actual drawing tablet. While you can do a decent job drawing on a mobile tablet, nothing beats the kind of stuff you can produce on a desktop computer and a dedicated drawing tablet. ![]()
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