# Value Study > Value Study is a reference app for artists that converts photos into simplified grayscale value studies, helping artists see light, dark, contrast, and composition more clearly. Value Study is available for iOS, macOS, and Android. It is designed for artists, art students, teachers, and illustrators who want to study value, simplify references, and improve their understanding of tonal structure. ## Quick facts - Platforms: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android - Developer: Shane Hudson (independent) - Pricing: 1.99 USD per year or 6.99 USD lifetime - Free tier: included sample images plus a daily allowance of imports and live filter time - All image processing happens on the device. No ads. No tracking. - Not to be confused with Scale Study, a separate sibling app from the same developer ## FAQ Source: https://valuestudy.app/en/faq/ ### What is Value Study app? Value Study is an iOS, Android, and macOS app for people who are learning to draw or paint. It helps you see where light and shadow appear in photo references or live from your camera. One of its core features is value selection. When you pick a value, the app highlights all areas of the image that fall into that same light or dark range. This makes it much easier to spot which tones are similar at a glance. That might sound simple, but being able to judge value is a key part of drawing and painting, and it can be surprisingly difficult, especially with complex colour images. Value Study is designed to make that learning process a little clearer and less overwhelming. ### Which platforms is Value Study available on? Value Study is available on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, and macOS. You can download it from the appStoreLink for Apple devices and googlePlayLink for Android devices. ### How much does it cost? Value Study has two low-cost payment options. A one-time purchase (around $6.99) for lifetime access, or an annual subscription (around $1.99 per year). Prices are set by the app stores and may vary slightly by region. Schools can contact me for volume licensing. ### Does the app collect or upload my artwork? No. All image processing happens locally on your device. I never upload, store, or have access to your images. Your artwork stays private on your device. ### What is a notan and why is it useful? Notan is a Japanese design concept that uses only black and white (no grays) to create compositions. It's incredibly useful for checking if your design "reads" from a distance and for understanding the fundamental light/dark shapes in your composition. Learn more in the glossaryLink or explore artFundamentalsLink. ### Can I use my own photos or only from the camera? You can use both! Import photos from your gallery or take new ones with your camera directly in the app. ### What skill level is this app for? Value Study is useful at all skill levels. Beginners use it to learn what "correct" values look like and train their eye faster. Intermediate artists use it for quick reference checks during painting. Advanced artists use it for composition planning and to catch muddy values before they become problems. ### How is this different from just desaturating in Photoshop? You can do this in Photoshop, and many people do. In fact, seeing artists recommend that was what made me realise a simpler, purpose-built tool would be useful. Photoshop can convert an image to grayscale, but Value Study is designed specifically for studying values. It lets you quickly simplify an image to 2, 3, 4 or more values and isolate matching tones. This makes it useful whether you are painting digitally in Photoshop or working with traditional mediums such as watercolour. ### Is this app useful for beginners? Yes. Value Study is a very good starting point for learning to see values. It gives you clear, consistent feedback about how light and dark an image is, which can be especially helpful when everything feels overwhelming at first. It is not about finding a single "correct" answer, and it can sometimes be more mathematical than creative, but it helps train your eye and build confidence so you can make your own decisions more easily. ### Can I use this for digital painting? Yes! Many digital artists use Value Study to check their reference photos before painting, or to analyze their work-in-progress by taking screenshots. It helps you catch value problems early, before you've spent hours rendering. ### Can I export the simplified images? Yes! You can save and export your value studies to use in another app or to print. There are no limitations to exports. ## Recent updates Source: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/ ### You asked, I built it *2026-04-09 · platforms: ios, android · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/export-blink-recent-sessions/ When building Value Study, I have to carefully choose where to put my effort. I have so many plans and ideas, but it usually comes down to what people are asking for. ## Export tool The old "Add to photos" tool has been replaced with the Export tool. While these are two names for the same thing, this one is far more advanced. It gives you the option to save straight to photo gallery (which is what "Add to photos" did too) as well as the ability to share the image to any app that accepts an image share, or sends it to a printer connected to your phone. The printer one was the most asked for. A lot of people were screenshotting the app and printing the screenshot. ## Recent sessions A common workflow is to work on an artwork across multiple sessions, therefore Value Study now has another highly requested feature to save the state of the app across sessions. These are saved on device locally. A future update will enable syncing across devices. You can access recent sessions by clicking "Continue" for the most recent, or the history icon next to it to see the full list of saved sessions. Currently there are limits on how many are saved, these may be tweaked in the future as needed. ## Highlight blink The two features above were highly requested. This one I intended from day one of building Value Study then decided it was too hard and useless. Fast-forward five years and all the work I've done on performance has paid off as it was simple to add. So, is it still useless? For many people, yes. But I received feedback which included some images and videos... in which I realised the artist was using a physical auto-clicker to press the value selection in app to make the selected value blink. This was then being projected onto the canvas, so they could see the area on the canvas they needed to paint a certain value. I guess that means this one wasn't requested... but I saw someone add a feature of their own and I believe if one person finds something useful others will too. So now, in the settings, you can adjust the blink speed (0 to disable blinking). Three new features, all because of people sending me messages of feedback and requests. I always appreciate how excited many of you are for Value Study and I continue to work hard to make it better. So please continue to write reviews and send emails to me at: shane@valuestudy.app ### Zooming is fixed *2026-03-08 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/zoom-and-projector/ Zoom and pan should feel predictable. For a while they did not, with the canvas occasionally resetting when you did not want it to. This update reworks that, so a pinch or a drag stays where you left it. There is also a specific improvement for fullscreen mode (which is available in the tools menu). You can now zoom much further out than before. This is for the people running Value Study through a projector, where the image needs to fit a wall (or match the grid on a canvas) rather than a phone screen. ### Android leaves early access *2025-12-28 · platforms: android · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/android-1-0/ Value Study for Android is officially out of early access today. Version 1.0. The iOS version has been around for several years. Android arrived later in a kind of "soft launch", it was full of bugs and had less features. That gap is now closed. Every feature that exists on iOS now exists on Android, including the eyedropper, the histogram, shape simplification, and grid overlay. I have also worked through a long backlog of Android-specific bugs over the past couple of months. If you tried the app early on and found a problem, this is a great time to take another look at it. Thanks to everyone who sent crash reports, screenshots and feedback while it was still in early access. The app would not be at 1.0 today without that. ### Value Study for schools *2025-12-24 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/edu-version/ A growing number of art teachers have been picking the app up for their classes. The fact that art teachers recommend my app is something I am very proud of. Currently it requires students to purchase their own copies, so I've been increasingly keen to work with schools to license across all of their devices. It's a bit awkward to do this with the way the app is set up, Apple do not allow in app purchases to have volume licensing. So I've created a separate hidden version that I can share directly with schools. If you are a teacher and are interested in volume purchase for Value Study, the [schools page](https://valuestudy.app/en/schools/) is the place to start. You can also email me directly at shane@valuestudy.app. Thank you! ### Attribution arrives, and Collections gets ready for more *2025-12-10 · platforms: ios, android · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/attribution-and-collections/ This update is a small one on the surface, but it lays groundwork for things I want to add next year. There is now an Attribution tool in the tools menu. When you are working from one of the included reference images, it surfaces the credit and source for that image where the data is available. The Collections page has also been refactored to handle multiple collections cleanly, rather than assuming there is only one. You will not see a visible change today, but expect more on this front soon. ### The business side of indie development *2025-10-23 · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/onboarding-paywall/ Most updates here are about features, performance improvements or bug fixes. This one is a bit more business-ey. I am incredibly grateful for everyone who supports Value Study through subscriptions, lifetime purchases, reviews and word of mouth. The app would not exist without that. This update is about making sure that artists discovering the app for the first time see what it can do straight away. I have reworked the onboarding flow and the paywall to better introduce the app and show its value from the very start. I am also putting more time into the [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@ValueStudy/featured), making videos that help newcomers get started and that highlight new features as they arrive. Every review, every email, every shared screenshot helps Value Study reach more artists. Thank you for keeping an independent app going. ### Value Study is now available in many languages *2025-09-19 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/more-languages/ It means so much to me that anyone uses Value Study... but the fact that it has reached across the world is humbling. So I've added translations for a bunch of languages: Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Simplified Chinese. Of course this is a massive change to how the app is made, and I only speak English myself. So you spot something that does not read naturally in your language, or a piece of UI that still falls back to English, please drop me a message at shane@valuestudy.app and I will get it fixed as soon as possible. ### Grid tool in Value Study *2025-09-19 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/grid-mode-launches/ Grid mode has been on the wish-list since day one. It's the most requested feature I've ever had. Every early attempt at it was too slow, or too clunky. With recent performance and code improvements, it finally feels right. So I'm so thankful to finally announce Value Study has the ability to overlay grids. This works on photos as well as the Live Filter mode. You can now overlay a grid on any reference, jump focus to a specific cell with a centred zoom, and adjust opacity and thickness from a pair of side by side sliders. I've also added a nice to have feature, the ability to select multiple cells and to hide non-selected cells. Imagine painting a face and wanting to focus just on the eyes, you can select the cells with the eyes in and ignore the rest. This is a large feature and it will continue to improve. If anything feels off in your workflow, please send me feedback or a screenshot. ### Combine Values mode *2024-02-23 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/combine-values-mode/ A small advanced feature went live today. When you have picked a value scale, you can now combine adjacent values to see how the image looks at a coarser grouping, without changing the underlying scale. This is useful for example in situations where you want 3 values but you want to see more mid-tones than lights and darks. You can use it by toggling the combine values on then selecting the two values you want to combine. Update 2026: I've decided to remove this feature. Since adding it, I've added the Histogram tool. This is far more powerful at customising the value ranges. So the Combine Values tool can instead be replicated by adjusting the width of the range of a value in histogram. ### Customise the value scale *2023-06-24 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/customise-value-scale/ Different artists, different conventions. Some people number their values 0 to 9, some 1 to 10, some go light to dark and some go dark to light. This update lets you set how the value scale displays at the bottom of the app. Within the settings, you can flip the direction so the lightest value is on the left or on the right, start the numbering at 0 or at 1, and toggle the value numbers. None of this changes how the image is simplified. It just lines the scale up with whichever convention you already use in your sketchbook. ### Value Study Pro *2023-03-08 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/value-study-pro/ Value Study has had in-app purchases enabled in this release. The free version of the app keeps the core Value Study functionality. Pro unlocks some new features. The cost is intentionally low. Pricing is set up as a one-off lifetime purchase. The reason for adding Pro is straightforward. Value Study is an independent app and it takes a lot of time to update and support. I would like to work on the app long-term and invest into its future. Thank you to all of you who have already chosen to support it. Update 2026: Please note that Value Study Pro was extremely successful. It ended up being that people using the free mode were missing out on a far better experience without realising. Pro was extremely affordable to everyone. So I made a very hard decision to remove the free tier and ensure everyone that uses Value Study have access to all features. The current pricing model has subscription and lifetime options, both very affordable. ### Dark mode *2022-12-23 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/ios-dark-mode/ Value Study now has a dark mode which you can enable in the settings. There's the options between light, dark and system. If it's set to system then it will follow your phone's preferences. ### Value Study Live Filter *2021-12-30 · platforms: ios · audience: artist* Permalink: https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/live-filter-mode/ Previously, Value Study worked only for photos you imported into the app. From this release, you can also use it live from your phone camera. Point the camera at your subject, pick a value, and the camera feed shows the selected value just as it does for photos. Useful when you are out sketching, when you want to study how the light is sitting on a still life on your desk, or when you want to see how the values shift as you move the light source around. To achieve this I've drastically improved the performance of the app, so this will speed up all of the app value conversions and selections. ## Key pages - [Home](https://valuestudy.app/en/): Product overview, demo, store links, and pricing - [Download](https://valuestudy.app/en/download/): App Store and Google Play install links - [FAQ](https://valuestudy.app/en/faq/): Common questions about Value Study - [Privacy Policy](https://valuestudy.app/en/privacy/): Privacy details - [About Shane](https://valuestudy.app/en/about-shane/): About the independent developer behind Value Study - [Contact](https://valuestudy.app/en/contact/): Email line for feedback, questions, and bug reports - [Reviews](https://valuestudy.app/en/reviews/): App Store and Google Play reviews - [Schools](https://valuestudy.app/en/schools/): Volume licensing for art teachers and schools - [Blog](https://valuestudy.app/en/blog/): Release notes and posts from the developer - [iOS and macOS app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/value-study-art-reference/id1546616127): App Store listing - [Android app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.valuestudy): Google Play listing