Procreate file viewer: open a .procreate on a PC or phone

What it shows

• The picture at full size. Procreate saves its own flattened copy of the artwork inside the file; when it is there, that is what you see, exactly as Procreate drew it. When it is not, the visible layers are composited here over the background colour. When no layer can be decoded, the small thumbnail Procreate stores for the Files app is shown instead, and labelled “embedded thumbnail”.
• Canvas facts: width and height in pixels, the DPI set in Procreate and what that means in centimetres and inches on paper, the background colour (or that it is hidden), the number of strokes and the time Procreate tracked while the artwork was open.
• Every layer, top first as in Procreate’s Layers panel, with its name, opacity, whether it is hidden, its blend mode, and whether it is a clipping mask, alpha-locked or locked. Any layer can be drawn on its own, on a checkerboard so its transparent parts show.
• Save as PNG for the whole picture and for each layer separately, transparency kept: useful to put one layer into Photoshop, Krita or a slide without the rest.
• The time-lapse. If recording was on, the replay of the painting is inside the file as MP4 segments. Each one plays in the page and can be saved as an MP4.

What it cannot do

• It edits nothing and cannot save a changed .procreate.
• Brushes, adjustments and effects are not re-run. The page shows the pixels stored in the file; a Gaussian blur, Liquify or text exists in the file only as far as it was painted into a layer.
• Blend modes other than Normal are approximated when the page composites the layers itself. Multiply, Screen, Overlay and the rest use the standard formulas, which come close to Procreate’s own but can differ slightly; the page names the layers this affects. Files that hold Procreate’s flattened copy do not have this problem.
• Layer masks, canvas rotation and view flips are not applied when layers are composited here.
• It does not open Procreate Dreams (.dream) animations, Procreate brushes (.brush, .brushset) or swatches (.swatches). They are other formats.

Useful to know about Procreate files

What is inside a .procreate

A .procreate is a ZIP archive. Document.archive is an Apple “keyed archive” property list holding the canvas size, tile size, DPI, background colour and the list of layers with their settings. Each layer’s pixels sit in a folder named after the layer’s ID, cut into 256 × 256 pixel tiles named column~row.chunk, each compressed with LZO1X; tiles with nothing painted on them are not stored at all. QuickLook/Thumbnail.png is the preview the Files app shows, and video/segments/ holds the time-lapse. Renaming a copy to .zip and unzipping it shows the same parts; the tiles are not pictures you can open, which is what this page decodes.

A worked example

The MIT-licensed sample default.procreate from the procreate-voyeur project (274,423 bytes) reads as: a 1280 × 1280 pixel canvas at 72 DPI, one layer named “Layer 1” at 100% opacity in Normal mode, 25 tiles of 256 × 256 pixels, a white background, 29 strokes and about two minutes of tracked time. It stores Procreate’s flattened copy, a 1024 × 1024 thumbnail and four time-lapse segments of 82 KB in all. Each tile unpacks to 262,144 bytes (256 × 256 pixels × 4 bytes); a plain-colour tile is stored in 1,065.

Pixels, DPI and print size

DPI changes nothing in the pixels; it only says how large the picture is meant to print. Print size is pixels ÷ DPI: a 2048 × 2048 canvas at 300 DPI is 6.83 inches (17.3 cm) square, the same canvas at 72 DPI is 28.4 inches. For sharp prints, aim for 300 DPI at the size you want.

Without an iPad

Procreate runs only on iPad (and Procreate Pocket on iPhone). Without it the usual answer is to ask the artist to export a PNG, JPEG or PSD (Actions › Share › PNG in Procreate); a PSD export keeps the layers. This page gets you the picture and layers from the .procreate itself when you cannot ask, or want to look first.