Value Study

Value Study is a free iOS app, aimed at people learning to draw or paint, for visualising where shadows and highlights appear within photo references or directly from your camera. One useful feature is selecting a value, which will highlight all areas of the image that matches the selected value... this is useful because at a glance you can see which tones are similar. That may sound simple but perception is a crucial skill which can be very hard, especially in complex colour references. The hope is that Value Study will help to ease the learning curve.

Value Study Pro

While Value Study is a free app and always will be, there is a very affordable one-time Pro upgrade available as an in-app purchase. This unlocks some additional features that may be useful to some people. It's completely optional but helps development of the app so I appreciate the support!

What is a value study?

Value studies are usually greyscale drawings with very little detail, a technique artists can use to practise both composition and lighting. They are particularly useful for beginners as exercises for learning to draw or paint, traditionally or digitally.

A Notan is a common type of value study that uses just two values, usually black and white. Value Study lets you make notans by pressing the "-" button until there are just two values showing. However, it also allows for far more shades to help with seeing how details are formed.

Why use an app?

As with most things, it could be better to just work hard and practise drawing value studies without any help. However sometimes you just need a helping hand to progress, this is what Value Study is for. You can use it to help visualise values in everyday things, as a reference image before you start or to have something to compare your own value studies with after you've drawn them.

Privacy statement

There are no adverts, trackers, analytics or any other form of privacy concerns with the Value Study iOS app. All functionality takes place directly on your device. Naturally the app requires a reference photo to be useful, so it does let you select from your photo library and optionally you can allow access to your camera to directly capture the reference image. You can also, optionally, allow access to save the value studies you create back to your photo library. But these go nowhere else.
Zero images or metadata are uploaded or accessed by anyone other than yourself.

Many apps use third-party tools to analyse usage to make the app better. Value Study does not do this. While useful, it goes against our values (pun intended) to send data to other companies when it's not required. So we use the limited analytics provided to all developers directly by Apple.
For the rest, we rely on feedback directly from you via email or by writing a review on the App Store.

Download

Value Study is freely available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.