Photo Manipulation in Procreate: A Full Walkthrough

Most people assume photo manipulation belongs to Photoshop. Procreate quietly has every tool the job needs: automatic selections, layer masks, a clone tool, blend modes and warp transforms. What it doesn't hand you is a workflow, and that's what Freya builds in two Masterclass lessons, a surreal "floating woman with a poppy" scene and an Italian travel collage.

Freya's framing is useful before any button gets pressed: think of photo manipulation as a blend of die-cutting, editing and retouching, where the finished product has to blend smoothly and coherently enough to tell one story.

Three decisions before you open Procreate

Plan the concept. List the elements the idea needs, or do it Freya's way: choose a background photo first and let it suggest the scene. Either way, a plan keeps a multi-photo project from wandering.

Match perspectives. When two photos were shot from different heights or angles, no amount of blending will marry them. Pick source images whose perspectives already agree.

Match colors and light, and prefer simple backgrounds. You can adjust colors later, but starting near the target color scheme saves hours, and an object on a plain background takes minutes to cut instead of an evening. Freya's lesson photos come from Unsplash, which is free to use for any kind of project.

Set up the scene

Freya works on a 4000 x 3000 px canvas in sRGB or Display P3. The background photo comes in through Actions, Add, Insert a file, sized so there's more sky than ground, because the sky is where the floating elements will live.

Then a step that feels optional and isn't: on a new layer, she sketches the whole concept in blue directly over the photo with the Freya Eaglehawk brush: the new pose, the giant poppy, the clouds. She exports that sketch as a JPEG and loads it into Procreate's Reference window (Actions, Canvas, Reference), so the plan floats beside the canvas the whole session while the sketch layer itself gets deleted.

Replace the sky with a layer mask

The first surgery is swapping a dull sky for a dramatic one, and it's a clean introduction to masks.

Take the Selection tool in Automatic mode and tap the sky. Drag your pencil left and right without lifting to tune the selection threshold until the whole sky is covered, area by area. Set Feather to 1% for a softer edge, then tap Invert, so everything except the sky is selected. Now tap the background layer and choose Mask: the sky disappears, hidden rather than erased.

That distinction is the point of masks. On the layer mask, black hides and white reveals, so Freya paints with a pure black Soft Brush to tidy the horizon line and hide the original figures. Nothing is destroyed; a stroke of white would bring any of it back.

The new sky image slides in underneath the masked layer. One refinement sells it: with the Transform tool's Warp mode, she drags the grid's lower nodes so the clouds bow gently outward, the way a wide lens would render them, instead of sitting flat.

Clone out a whole person

The original photo's subject has to vanish so a new floating pose can replace her. This is the Clone tool (bottom of the Adjustments menu), and it's the patience section of the lesson.

A circle appears on the canvas: that's the area being copied from. Paint elsewhere and the circle's contents flow from your brush. The whole craft is in managing that circle.

"Make sure to keep moving the clone circle in small increments as you work. Use your Apple Pencil to paint over her. Work your way up her legs and be mindful to match the area you're working on. The trick is to have the clone circle close to the right or left side of where you are painting so that the area you're covering looks the same."

Freya, in Photo Manipulation Part 1, Procreate Masterclass

Busy textures like grass and shrubs forgive almost anything. Structured objects don't: to erase the woman where she crosses a wire fence, Freya finds a matching stretch of fence, anchors the circle there, and redraws the wire through her silhouette stroke by stroke, switching source areas as the light changes so the copies never repeat obviously. Her own description is honest: labor-intensive, go slow, take your time.

Recolor with a blend mode

To freshen the dry grass, Freya doesn't touch the photo layer. She adds a new layer, paints green over the grass with the Soft Brush, and sets the layer to Soft Light (Overlay works too). The blend mode lets the photo's texture and shadow through while shifting its color, which is why it reads as greener grass instead of green paint. Shaded areas get a deeper green than sunlit ones, spills onto the fence get erased at tiny brush sizes, and she zooms all the way in for the gaps between fence posts. Her reasoning for the fussiness: details nobody consciously sees are what make the whole image look put together.

Four ways to cut anything out

The collage lesson is a tour of Procreate's cutting methods, one Italian landmark at a time. These four cover essentially every extraction job:

1. Geometric selection. Ellipse and Rectangle selection modes, combined, cut the Venice scenery into an arched window shape. Fastest when the shape you want is a shape, not an object.
2. The iOS cutout. In the Photos app (iOS 16 and later), press and hold on a photo's subject and the system lifts it off its background; drag it straight into Procreate with your other hand. Zero effort when it works, but it can't make judgment calls, like removing the fingers holding a pizza.
3. Automatic selection with Invert. For objects on clean backgrounds, select the background instead of the object, tap Invert, then Copy & Paste to a new layer. Adjust the threshold slowly; when it grabs too much, undo and try again.
4. Freehand selection. Trace the outline yourself, using + Add to collect several regions (a handful of the best flowers from one photo) into one selection. It's also the fix for method 2's fingers: lower the pasted pizza's opacity, trace the hand shape beneath it, and Clear the overlap so the hand sits in front.

After every paste, the housekeeping is the same: delete the imported photo layer, rename the new layer for what it holds, and add a touch of Noise from Adjustments so cut elements share a grain with the rest of the scene.

What to take from all this

None of these tools is difficult on its own. The skill is sequencing: plan, sketch, background first, big swaps before fine cloning, cohesion passes (color, noise, light) at the end. And the honest warning stands: the clone-and-clean stages eat time, and no tutorial makes them fast, only cleaner.

Both lessons live in Freya's Procreate Masterclass, alongside the selection, masking and transform fundamentals they build on. A few of the foundation lessons are free to watch if you'd like to see the tools moving before you commit an afternoon to a floating woman of your own.