Move What You’ve Drawn, Keep It Sharp — DM Warp Is Coming to the App Store

You finish the face and one eye is sitting lower than the other. Every drawing app gives you two ways to fix it, and both are bad: cut and paste leaves a hole with a hard edge, and the nudge brush turns the eye to mush. DM Warp is a drawing app for iPad built around a third way. Loop the eye, drag it into place. It keeps its shape exactly, the skin around it stretches to follow, and nothing goes soft.

Move what you’ve already drawn

Pick Move, draw a loop around anything, and drag. Inside the loop the pixels travel as one piece. Outside it, a feather band you set in real pixels stretches the surroundings to meet them. There is no hole, because nothing was cut out, and no seam, because nothing was pasted.

Nudge does the same thing with a brush instead of a loop. Its middle moves as a solid core while only the outer ring bends — the control the nudge tools in other apps are missing, and the reason theirs soften while this one doesn’t. Protect lets you paint over anything that must stay put.

It stays sharp because it never resamples twice

Smudge and liquify tools blur because they redraw the pixels on every step of the stroke. Two hundred steps is two hundred rounds of interpolation, and detail dies a little each time. DM Warp never redraws the pixels at all. Your strokes build up a map of where each pixel should go, and the picture is read from the untouched original through that map exactly once. However many times you push something around, it is as crisp as the day you drew it.

Measured, not claimed: on a 30-pixel move applied in 200 stroke steps, DM Warp keeps 94% of the original’s fine detail. The conventional approach keeps 24%.

Your Photoshop brushes come with you

DM Warp reads Photoshop .abr brush sets directly. Drop a file into its folder in Files and every tip in it is ready to paint with — its shape, size, spacing and angle intact. It also reads the brush panel file Photoshop keeps in its own settings, so the brushes you already have loaded come across without exporting anything.

A library that fits the job in hand

Twenty-two brushes are built in — pencils, inks, markers, paint, textures and erasers — grouped the way you would expect. Star the handful a project needs and switch the panel to Favorites; the rest get out of the way. Each brush remembers its own colour, so moving between a dark liner, a pale shader and the eraser does not mean picking the colour again every time.

Every slider has a live stroke preview above it, painted by the same engine as the canvas, so you can see what spacing, roundness or scatter will do before you touch the paper.

Layers, the way you already know them

Layers with all sixteen standard blend modes, opacity, reorder, duplicate and merge. Each layer carries its own warp, so you can shift a feature on one layer while the sketch underneath sits still.

Every move stays a move

A DM Warp document does not bake your edits into the pixels. It keeps them as the strokes that made them. Open a drawing a week later and the eye you moved is still a thing you can move again, or undo — not a flattened picture of where it ended up. Documents are small for the same reason; a full canvas of warping is a few kilobytes on top of the image.

Private by default

There is no account and no server. The app contains no networking code at all, so it cannot send your work anywhere. Drawings live on your device or wherever you put them in Files, and the only thing that ever leaves is a file you chose to export.

Coming to the App Store

DM Warp for iPad is being submitted to the App Store now, and it’s free. A Mac version follows.