Must Have Art Tool

Had to share this, and I'm probably late because I've known OF this software for years, but never bothered downloading it. Now I'm wondering what the hell I've been doing with my life.

So this is PureRef it's a free reference viewing app. It just goes to show how much of a difference UX makes. I've usually just made a second PSD in Photoshop that had my reference in it, but that has always been a bit clumsy. I didn't really think about there being a much better solution though so I never really thought about it.

There's also this app that I've used in the past called kuadro. It's another reference viewer app as well but PureRef definitely takes the cake. It baically works on an infinite canvas that you just drag and drop images into, then you can pan and zoom all around your reference and it's incredibly fast and responsive, even with hundreds of images that are high resolution, it's pretty nuts.

It also has really nice features like being able to drag in multiple images and it auto arranges them for you. In this image above I dragged in 60 images all in one go of various sizes and it arranged them really tightly automatically.

Also once you've made a great reference canvas, you can save it and choose whether you want to save the images in the file(so it can be portable) or reference the images(so it can be a small file size).

I feel like I could spend a whole day just making reference sheets for various subjects and coming up with a structure to organize them all so they'd be ready anytime. Sounds like a weekend project.

So if you do anthing creative where you need photo reference or inspiration, check out PureRef.

I'll catch you all on the next post.