Value Study: art reference
Analyse light and shadow
Free · In-App Purchases
If you’re learning to draw or paint, understanding value—how light or dark something appears—is one of the most important art fundamentals. Good shading, realistic form, and confident drawing all begin with value.
Value Study is an artist’s reference tool that helps you learn how to draw, improve your shading, and understand light and shadow through clearer value studies. Instead of a simple greyscale filter (or squinting!), the app breaks any reference photo into clean tonal steps so you can focus on shapes, structure, and depth without getting overwhelmed by detail or colour.
Start with pure black and white to block in the biggest shapes (Notans are one of the classic exercises when learning to draw) then gradually add more values to refine your study. You can also highlight every area that shares the same value, making subtle shifts in shadow and highlight much easier to see. This is especially useful for portrait drawing where small tonal differences matter.
The new Grid feature is built for the Grid Method: divide your reference into manageable sections so you can place shapes and proportions with confidence. It’s a helpful way to build accuracy, improve your block-ins, and understand composition while drawing or painting.
Value Study is designed to sit quietly alongside your drawing or painting process. It helps you make sense of your reference—spotting shapes, tones, and proportions more easily—whether you’re working traditionally or in apps like Procreate and Fresco. It’s a small, focused tool made by an indie developer who is always keen to help make the app better for all artists.
Whether you’re a complete beginner learning how to draw or an experienced artist refining your fundamentals, Value Study helps you see your reference more clearly so you can draw it more confidently.
Try it for free with fully unlocked sample images from Unsplash. When you're ready, upgrade with a yearly or lifetime purchase across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Annual: Renews yearly
Lifetime: One-time purchase
Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
more The old Add to Photos has been replaced with Export. You can now use Export (in the tools menu) to save to Photos, use the Share Sheet, or print your value studies.
This new system will allow more export customisation in future. If there’s something you'd like added, let me know: shane@valuestudy.app
Also includes improved zoom-out behaviour (helpful for tracing) and a new Blink setting to make the selection highlight easier to see, especially when using a projector.
3.21.0 16 Mar
This update brings improvements to the zooming and panning, so it should feel more robust and not reset randomly. In Fullscreen mode it will now let you zoom much further out, for use with projectors.
3.20.3 9 Mar
This fixes the issue with image loading on some iPads. Many people were seeing blank screen or a single line of the image. I appreciate your patience while I figured out the cause!
3.20.2 16 Feb
Some more improvements around image loading and error handling.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.20.1 16 Feb
Today I've got a bunch of behind-the-scenes improvements. This tidies the code up and hopefully will prevent crashes around image loading.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.20.0 14 Feb
This update fixes a crash that affected some people.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.19.3 26 Jan
A small update to support schools that are using Value Study. This also includes a bug fix for some people who were wrongly seeing French instead of English.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.19.2 27/12/2025
Just a small update today to ensure MacOS is updated with all the latest features from iOS version.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.19.0 23/12/2025
Today's update is a small one but lays groundwork for more to come! The collections page now is more well-suited to multiple collections rather than just the one currently shown. There's also now an Attribution tool in the tools menu that will show the credit and source of the image where possible.
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.18.0 11/12/2025
New features!
1) Fullscreen mode. This has been heavily requested, find it in the tools menu. It will hide all UI until you exit the fullscreen mode.
2) Browse files. You can now browse your iPhone/iPad and iCloud directly from Value Study! On the right of Choose image you will see a ... menu. You can access the browse files from there. I've also moved the Take photo option to there.
I've also updated the Information page to support videos. Currently it just has the one I was previously linking to, I need to re-record that as the app has improved a lot since I made the video!
As always please email me (shane@valuestudy.app) with any issues, questions or feedback.
3.17.0 05/12/2025
Small bug fix for photos that have been edited/cropped in photo library. It should now show the most recent version!
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Usually my work on the app focusses on new features, performance improvements or bug fixes.
This update is a bit more business-ey. I’m incredibly grateful for all of you that support Value Study through subscriptions and lifetime purchases, not to mention reviews and word-of-mouth. I’m working to make sure new people who discover Value Study see its worth straight away and want to join in too.
I’ve made some changes to improve how the app introduces itself to new users and to better show what it can do from the very start. I’m also putting more time into YouTube, creating videos that help newcomers get started and highlight new features as they’re released.
As always, every App Store review, bit of feedback, or question sent to shane@valuestudy.app
is really appreciated. Thank you for continuing to support an independent app. You’re helping Value Study grow and reach more artists around the world.
3.16.2 01/11/2025
Usually my work on the app focusses on new features, performance improvements or bug fixes.
This update is a bit more business-ey. I’m incredibly grateful for all of you that support Value Study through subscriptions and lifetime purchases, not to mention reviews and word-of-mouth. I’m working to make sure new people who discover Value Study see its worth straight away and want to join in too.
I’ve made some changes to improve how the app introduces itself to new users and to better show what it can do from the very start. I’m also putting more time into YouTube, creating videos that help newcomers get started and highlight new features as they’re released.
As always, every App Store review, bit of feedback, or question sent to shane@valuestudy.app
is really appreciated. Thank you for continuing to support an independent app. You’re helping Value Study grow and reach more artists around the world.
3.16.1 27/10/2025
Usually my work on the app focusses on new features, performance improvements or bug fixes.
This update is a bit more business-ey. I’m incredibly grateful for all of you that support Value Study through subscriptions and lifetime purchases, not to mention reviews and word-of-mouth. I’m working to make sure new people who discover Value Study see its worth straight away and want to join in too.
I’ve made some changes to improve how the app introduces itself to new users and to better show what it can do from the very start. I’m also putting more time into YouTube, creating videos that help newcomers get started and highlight new features as they’re released.
As always, every App Store review, bit of feedback, or question sent to shane@valuestudy.app
is really appreciated. Thank you for continuing to support an independent app. You’re helping Value Study grow and reach more artists around the world.
3.16.0 24/10/2025
Those bug fixes just caused more bugs... apologies to anyone that got locked out of Value Study! Should all be fixed now.
3.15.6 17/10/2025
Improving the offline mode with a few more bug fixes.
3.15.5 17/10/2025
A bunch of bug fixes today. Especially around improving image support and performance.
3.15.4 14/10/2025
Here's another small update to the new Grid feature. As requested by Howard, we can now adjust the colour of the grid, from the Line appearance section of the Grid settings.
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GRID MODE IN VALUE STUDY APP!!
This update brings one of the biggest feature requests Value Study has had since day one, Grids. In fact it was on my original wish-list of features when I started building the app! Every approach I took early on was too slow and clunky... but with all the performance and code improvements, it's now ready for launch.
I always say to send me feedback but this update is more important than others, it's a very large feature that will improve over time. So I need your help to ensure it is perfect for you all, please do email shane@valuestudy.app with feedback (reviews are always helpful too).
3.15.3 25/09/2025
Here's a little update to the brand new grid feature to introduce multiple cell selection and an option for hiding non-selected cells!
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GRID MODE IN VALUE STUDY APP!!
This update brings one of the biggest feature requests Value Study has had since day one, Grids. In fact it was on my original wish-list of features when I started building the app! Every approach I took early on was too slow and clunky... but with all the performance and code improvements, it's now ready for launch.
I always say to send me feedback but this update is more important than others, it's a very large feature that will improve over time. So I need your help to ensure it is perfect for you all, please do email shane@valuestudy.app with feedback (reviews are always helpful too).
3.15.2 24/09/2025
A quick update to translate the app to more languages.
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GRID MODE IN VALUE STUDY APP!!
This update brings one of the biggest feature requests Value Study has had since day one, Grids. In fact it was on my original wish-list of features when I started building the app! Every approach I took early on was too slow and clunky... but with all the performance and code improvements, it's now ready for launch.
I always say to send me feedback but this update is more important than others, it's a very large feature that will improve over time. So I need your help to ensure it is perfect for you all, please do email shane@valuestudy.app with feedback (reviews are always helpful too).
3.15.1 21/09/2025
GRID MODE IN VALUE STUDY APP!!
This update brings one of the biggest feature requests Value Study has had since day one, Grids. In fact it was on my original wish-list of features when I started building the app! Every approach I took early on was too slow and clunky... but with all the performance and code improvements, it's now ready for launch.
I always say to send me feedback but this update is more important than others, it's a very large feature that will improve over time. So I need your help to ensure it is perfect for you all, please do email shane@valuestudy.app with feedback (reviews are always helpful too).
3.15.0 20/09/2025
Okay, it's here... iOS 26. This update to Value Study ensures it works well for the new version of iOS. It's only subtle changes, I have not gone heavy on the glass effect!
As always please review on the App Store, share with friends and send me and questions and feedback to shane@valuestudy.app
3.14.0 18/09/2025
Just a small fix for the new toolbar on smaller screens.
3.13.1 29/08/2025
This adds Portuguese, Polish and Dutch languages and improves how translations are handled generally.
3.13.0 27/08/2025
A small improvement to the toolbox today. You now have 5 shortcut tool icons next to a Tools menu where all tools are available. This is really useful because it means I can show the name of the tool not just the icon! So you can now click the star (if you have remaining spaces out of the 5) to add to the toolbox at the bottom of the screen.
As always please shout if you have questions or feedback: shane@valuestudy.app
3.12 21/08/2025
This update improves performance for the collections and information pages.
3.11 30/07/2025
The old Add to Photos has been replaced with Export. You can now use Export (in the tools menu) to save to Photos, use the Share Sheet, or print your value studies.
This new system will allow more export customisation in future. If there’s something you'd like added, let me know: shane@valuestudy.app
Also includes improved zoom-out behaviour (helpful for tracing) and a new Blink setting to make the selection highlight easier to see, especially when using a projector.
more Version 3.21.0 16 Mar
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