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Concepts review: Sketching and productivity in one app

Concepts Hero Source: Windows Key

Procreate may reign supreme on iOS for digital illustration, but Concepts has besides managed to solidify its place as an effective sketching and productivity app. Concepts has a history of beingness used by professionals in a range of creative endeavors and the apps "projects" settings certainly let information technology to be flexible in form and part. Unfortunately, sometimes streamlined functionality that works well for tablets and 2-in-ane devices does non e'er find a style to fit in with desktop devices where users tin discover the lack of options too limiting. Concepts falls into this category, sadly, where it is a lightweight app that tin can be useful for on the go, simply if you're looking to use it as a primary drawing app then you may exist left wanting.

Concepts App Reco Block

Concepts

Description: Concepts is a productivity app that is suitable for both notetaking and light sketching or doodling.

Compatibility: Concepts is bachelor on Windows 10 devices via the Microsoft Shop.

Lesser line: Concepts has features that tin make it incredibly useful for productivity, but from a digital artist's standpoint it is pared downward too much to exist ideal across general sketching. Locking away even the most mundane features similar importing your own images behind paywalls farther serves to limit the app'southward usefulness.

Highlights:

  • Space canvas size
  • Copic marking color matching
  • Diverseness of digital newspaper types

Concepts: Price and availability

Concepts Payment Screen Source: Windows Key

Concepts is a freemium app from TopHatch Inc. that is currently available on the Microsoft Shop. While it is free to download and utilise Concepts for bones sketching and note taking, there is a hefty paywall that blocks almost of the prominent features of the app. Elementary features like infinite layers, importing your own images, and exporting in standard formats that would exist present in most other Windows 10 art-centric applications are all limited by Concepts' paywall.

To unlock all of Concepts' features, you lot would need to pay $5 a month to "get pro" and unlock all of the express features. There is too an annual subscription option that is heavily discounted at $30 for 12 months. Individual themed brush packs tin be purchased for $2 each if yous'd rather forgo a subscription, merely purchasing brushes alone will still leave you limited on the feature front.

Concepts works beyond a diverseness of Windows devices that support bear on functionality, as well as Windows 10 PCs and HoloLens.

Concepts: What's adept

Concepts Copic Colors Source: Windows Central

There's a lot to like about the Concepts app. For stream-of-idea doodlers the nearly space canvas size can be a wonderful tool for doodling and re-sketching until yous accomplish a concluding analogy that you may then want to have into another plan to properly render. If an infinite canvas is not to your liking, and then in that location is the selection to restrict your canvas to a certain size, as well as options for customizing the canvas' advent to mimic a variety of papers and effects.

For someone looking to exam out bullet journaling, for instance, the dot paper layout can exist utilized to create a digital journal for notation keeping, to-exercise lists, and decorative doodling. These journal layouts could effectively be saved as is with the dot layout or every bit a transparent epitome so that they could be printed for use in a traditional journal. Concepts also provides grid layout papers, along with an actual perspective grid tool that tin can make it useful for sketching projects similar floor plans or interior design layouts.

Concepts Workspace Settings Source: Windows Primal

Concepts boasts a color bike that is designed around the popular Copic alcohol marker brand, making it an ideal application for a traditional creative person who wants to create color story thumbnails. It is easy enough to import a scanned prototype or photo of a traditional drawing and then indistinguishable, although be warned that the gratuitous version only allows for five imported images per account.

Concepts' color cycle doesn't only feature Copic colors, the swatches are actually labeled to match their advisable mark counterpart. I thing to keep in mind with this, while it is a perk, is that your monitor'southward color accurateness tin can vary which may atomic number 82 to slight differences in how Copic colors are displayed on your screen versus how they announced in real life.

Concepts Brushes Source: Windows Central

The free version of Concept comes stocked with several tools including 11 standard pen and pencil brushes, almost of which support force per unit area sensitivity and pen tilt. Additionally there are selection, pan, nudge, slice, and masking tools available for free. There are 11 extra brushes available to be purchased a la bill of fare. Among these additional brushes are watercolor effects, ink textures, halftones and crosshatching. Brushes purchased individually have a reasonable cost of $2 a pack with packs containing anywhere from five to 21 variants. Pro subscriptions unlock all castor packs at no extra cost.

Touch support is heavily ingrained into Concepts with gestures being used for nearly every option tool. Information technology is beyond articulate that Concepts was designed with touch interfaces in heed, and while information technology works well on touch-screen devices it does not interpret quite as well to utilize on a desktop with a stylus.

Concepts: What's not good

Concepts Payment Screen Source: Windows Primal

To further elaborate on the aforementioned affect support, it's really of import to drive home that Concepts is entirely designed with touch support in heed to the point that it is detrimental when attempting to apply the application on non-touch devices. When using lasso, selection, or stretch tools on a non-touch device, Concepts has no alternative input methods, so the application only doesn't respond. If you lot're but trying to resize your image, zooming in can be sufficient just for doodling, but the disability to resize properly without bear on actually takes abroad from the productivity.

Concepts Free Limitations Source: Windows Central

Concepts too struggles with the divvying up of its pay-to-utilize tools. While marketing for the app focuses on its "Infinite Layers," that feature is really only bachelor if you lot subscribe to Concepts' service. Also, uncomplicated features that you would expect to just be readily available, such as importing your own images, have caps on how many times a complimentary user can access them. If y'all're attempting to use Concepts for creating colour thumbnails or idea boarding you will unfortunately run through those five gratuitous imports very quickly. Exporting images is also heavily capped, with merely JPG format existence available to free users, despite the fact that the application is capable of exporting PDFs, lossless PNGs, and SVGs, among other formats.

As nice as the inclusion of the Copic color wheel is, the absence of an space colour palette or colour mixer feature does not get unnoticed. With productivity in listen these may be fine to omit, but again if you are an illustrator or looking to create more than painterly images then you will certainly struggle to go some desired effects. This is magnified by the absenteeism of blending tools, even as paid brush add together-ons. These really are just bare minimum features that anybody would await in an application that centers itself effectually art productivity. Without them, Concepts doesn't actually lend itself to being an integral part of your workflow.

Concepts: Should y'all get it?

Concepts Dot Journal Layout Source: Windows Central

There's a lot to like about Concepts from a productivity standpoint. The application tin can exist incredibly useful just for elementary note taking and even for complex designs. Information technology does slack in functionality for digital illustration due to its limited brush options and lack of color range. The tradeoff is the express but authentic Copic color palette, which can make it easy to motion from working traditionally to working digitally and vice versa.

If I were to recommend Concepts to anybody, it would be those focused on artistic productivity over those who are interested in but creating art without it being tied to something like interior design, production development, or architecture. I would likewise exist very adamant that you lot accept a touch-enabled device, because trying to use Concepts without it will only lead to heartache.

Concepts: The bottom line

It is easy to get wrapped up in simply clicking the "Get" button and downloading Concepts for gratis, simply because the awarding locks away and so many of its bones features behind a subscription paywall what you're truly getting is a modified free trial. The extent of that free trial's limitations is dependent upon how yous intend to the use the application itself. It is difficult to imagine, however, that anybody would be able to find themselves using Concepts in any capacity without eventually hitting one of its many roadblocks.

For all the good that Concepts has to offer — especially with that Copic color wheel — it ultimately boxes itself into a corner with its overall limitations. Information technology'south difficult to justify a monthly or yearly subscription, fifty-fifty at a discount, for such limited illustrative software when in that location are a variety of other free drawing apps, like Krita and Burn Alpaca, that work simply as well on tablets and 2-in-i laptops as they do desktop systems without touch support.

Concepts App Reco Block

Concepts

Bottom line: Concepts is an incredibly useful productivity app for sketching and idea boarding. That said, information technology is not necessarily ideal for artists who may exist wanting to do more than intensive painting and illustrating or those who are using a desktop device without touch on input.

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/concepts-review

Posted by: carmonaoffirest1957.blogspot.com

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