Using iMac Handoff With Procreate

Have you ever tried using iMac Handoff with Procreate? I have a few quick tips on how to set it up and way you can use it to streamline your Procreate workflow.

Video Transcript: Using iMac Handoff With Procreate

Today I want to show you a few cool ways I use my iMac and iPad Pro together to make navigating and organising my Procreate files a bit quicker.

Did you know that if your computer is running Ventura or later you can drag your mouse off the edge of the screen and onto your iPad, both within Procreate as well as all the other apps? How cool is that?

You can even use the keyboard as well. Just your normal iMac keyboard. You can use that to type on your iPad.

I remember seeing this a while ago when all the new features were announced for Ventura, but I completely forgot all about it. And then one day when I was playing around by accident, I just kind of did this move to off the edge of the screen, and it blew my mind!

Using iMac Handoff With Procreate: Setup

To check if you can do this with your devices, go to your system settings, scroll down and click displays, and then click the advanced button at the bottom of the settings window and make sure you have these two settings toggled on. Then on your iPad, open the Settings app, tap general and then tap airplay and handoff. Turn on cursor and keyboard at the bottom there. If you don’t see these settings on either of your devices, then they unfortunately probably aren’t compatible with this feature.

You can then push through the edge of your iMac screen and over onto your iPad and use your mouse and keep up with it.

Using iMac Handoff With Procreate: Organising Files

Some of the ways I use this feature is when I’m tidying up things in Procreate. I’ve got these three files here that I started in Procreate and then finished over on the computer in Photoshop. But I want to go back, update the file names with the same final names that I’ve chosen on the computer. So I can click onto this file name here and copy that ⌘ C and then push over the edge onto my iPad. Click into this one and press the ⌘ V and paste that name into there, and that is now renamed with that same file name.

Using iMac Handoff With Procreate: Transferring Files

You can even drag files backwards and forwards between your iPad and your computer. So if I want to bring this one over onto the computer, I can click it and drag it, pull it over and drop that in here. It might open up here on the iPad, but that’s okay. We’ve now got this file up here on our computer. We can click on that one and open it in Photoshop.

Let’s just go back into our files again and then go back into the gallery on our iPad. It works both ways. You can take stuff from your computer over onto your iPad. So let’s drag this dark sunset floral off the edge here and we can drop it straight into our Procreate gallery.

It’s going to take a while to come over and for this bit to load, it’s going to look wrong to start with like it’s corrupted, but you can still click on that. It will load. And if we click on the layers, you can see it’s got all of my layers in there. And then when you come back out into the gallery, the thumbnail will look as it’s supposed to look.

It will have a funny file name, but we can go back onto the computer, grab the file name from over here, copy it, and then paste it back in Procreate like we did before. So you can just click on that and paste the correct name into that. And now we’ve got a nice quick and easy copy of that in our Procreate if we wanted to go and add some other bits to that illustration using Procreate instead of Photoshop.

Using iMac Handoff With Procreate: Navigating the Drawing Interface

You can even use the mouse to navigate within the drawing interface. Let’s click on this one here and you can see we can toggle all of these menus. I can share, I can export different parts of it. On the Layers panel, we can click on the layers and do things like rename them if we want to, and we can also drag and move layers around.

The one thing you can’t do is draw! This works just like a mouse and you’ll still need your Apple Pencil to do the drawing.

Using iMac Handoff With Procreate: Keyboard Shortcuts

There’s even a few keyboard shortcuts you can use, which you might already be familiar with from other design software. You can view a full list of all the shortcuts by holding down the ⌘ key, and that will bring up this menu here, which you can then use your mouse to scroll through and see all the different keyboard shortcuts you’ve got there. For example, pressing L will open up the Layers panel and you can do things like change the brush size with the brackets keys like you can in Photoshop.

All of these features aren’t necessarily things that I use when I’m illustrating because I prefer to do that on the sofa, (which I know isn’t great for my posture!) But if you’re a desk illustrator, then these might be useful for you. I tend to use the mouse and keyboard more when I’m cleaning up Procreate files in Photoshop at my desk and I need to quickly take it back onto Procreate to add something.

I really hope you find this video useful. If you are already using iMac Handoff with Procreate, let me know in the comments if you’ve got any other ways to use it in your workflow.

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Have fun and stay creative!