I tried Apple Creator Studio to see if it's worth the subscription

Apple Creator Studio brings together ten apps into one subscription. The cost is $12.99 per month or $129 per year, or if you're a student or educator, then it's a real bargain at $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

The good news is that a subscription isn't the only way to get these apps. If you choose to, you can still download Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage from the Mac store and get all the updates included. Unfortunately, there's no such option for the iPad.

With this release, it does feel like Apple is prioritising Mac and iPad users over those who are creating quick films or music on their iPhones, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This feels like an offering for the more serious creators out there, who want to be able to flip between using Mac and iPad and aren't so worried about editing on the iPhone.

Most of the apps have been upgraded for this subscription, I spent a couple of weeks with them on the iPad Pro M5 and MacBook Air M4, as well as with Keynote, Numbers and Pages on my iPhone. Here are my thoughts.

Creative imaging

Pixelmator Pro was bought by Apple back in 2024. It's like a Photoshop or Canva alternative in that it does a lot of the same graphic design, image editing and art functions (also see our digital art software post for other options). There are plenty of great templates to work with, making it ideal for beginners, and there are the features you'd expect from the likes of Photoshop in terms of image editing, adjustable brushes, masking and layering. There are also AI features such as automatic background removal and Super Resolution for upscaling images.

However, I found that lots of the brushes aren't as nuanced as they are in other programs like Photoshop or Procreate. For example, you can adjust softness, blend mode, and smoothing – settings that stay changed when you switch between brushes – but some brushes lack pressure sensitivity.

Pixelmator Pro works well for designing logos, and has SVG support so your designs are always scalable. It's also ideal for illustrating, although I found not being able to turn the canvas like I can on Procreate a bit of a drawback.

In terms of what's new in Pixelmator, there's a brand new Warp tool, enabling you to reshape layers and you can now mock up your designs on products using pre-existing templates, ie. on a tote bag or T-shirt.

Pixelmator is also new to the iPad, and has been designed specifically for touch-first editing and Apple Pencil.

Overall, the app works well but doesn’t feel particularly revolutionary. It definitely makes a good addition to Apple Creator Studio, and will work well for most creative imaging endeavours. If you've already got Procreate and just want to illustrate, however, then you don't need Pixelmator Pro.

Video editing

Video editing app Final Cut Pro is on our list of the best video editing software and now has several new features.

If you've ever spent hours trawling through footage to try and find a specific clip then you'll be happy with Transcript Search, which does what it says on the tin. You can type in the search bar to find exact or related results; visual Search does the same but for images within clips. I found that the Visual Search works better than the Transcript one. When I tried searching for 'keyboard' in a video review of ours it came up with no results even though I knew 'keyboard' was in the transcript. It did throw up the right visual search results though.

You can also create a Montage using the iPad. To do so you can select a range of footage and then click 'create montage', Final Cut Pro will create a montage for you and then allow you to rearrange it, set the pace and add music. I tried it with some footage of a trip to Morocco and it worked really well. Crucially, I didn't have to faff around with it hardly at all, it did all the hard work for me.

Elsewhere in new features, there's Beat Detection. Once you click Enable Clip Beat Grid you get lines on your timeline to show where the beats are, so you can line up your clips accordingly.

On the iPad, you can now also connect an external monitor to see your edits more clearly on a big screen, there's also Multiple selection support, which means you can make batch edits to several clips at once. This is super-handy when working with lots of clips.

Overall, as a newcomer to this app, I found Final Cut Pro pretty intuitive to use. I'm sure I only used some of the features it has available as there are so many.

Apple Creator Studio also includes Motion, a motion graphics tool for creating cinematic 2D and 3D effects. It has handy features like Magnetic Mask, which isolates and tracks people and objects without a green screen.

There's also Compressor, which integrates with Final Cut Pro and Motion to customise output settings for distribution. I'm not totally clear why this requires a separate app and couldn't just be integrated into Final Cut Pro but you get both in this subscription.

Music making

I was also new to Logic Pro, though I have used Apple's Garage Band and other similar software to record music before. I found it pretty easy to use though a little fiddly on the iPad.

New features include Synth Player, where you can add a new Session Player to your music, who plays synth keyboard and synth bass. These players are built on performances from the pros.

One really useful feature I found is Chord ID, this enables you to see what chords you are playing from your original music. I'll now consider recording any new songs with a capo on Logic Pro before I bring them to my band, so that we can know what chords I'm using without having to work it out. Also, if you don't have a band, then Session Players in Logic Pro will follow along.

An upgrade to the Mac is the Sound Library, which was previously only available on iPad.

Elsewhere, there's Quick Swipe Comping on the iPad, where you can group together many individual recordings where you didn't capture them in a single take. This is super-handy although I didn't find it that intuitive.

If you're looking for loops, then it's now easier than before to search for them on the iPad. You can describe the type of loop you're looking for in the Sound Browser and Logic Pro will display all relevant results. I tried looking for a 'low-key funk' loop and got various viable results.

There's also MainStage, which brings together MIDI hardware and plugins to turn your Mac into a live rig.

Productivity

Keynote has some improvements in Creator Studio, including several clever AI integrations. First of all, you can feed Keynote a list or some brief notes and it will make a presentation out of them. The results are bare bones, but it's a good start.

You can also generate images within Keynote, which you can easily Autocrop, and you can generate speaker notes. I tested this and created a basic presentation about dinosaurs and I have to say I was impressed with the results. You can also clean up slides with one click, which is handy.

If you wanted to create, say, a shot list, you could also get that going in Keynote from Notes, generate images for each shot based and then pull your shot list across into Numbers, for example.

There are lots of templates you can use in Pages to get you started making reports, cards and posters. There's a new toolbar on iPad that you can swipe down to use. That's where you can send layers to the back or front, and is where I must admit, I ran into a spot of trouble at first, but I soon got the hang of it.

I managed to create a poster with a generated image based on a photo (sent to the back after some back and forth!). But that really is just one of the things you can create on Pages, there are lots of possibilities, especially within the new Content Hub, which has an array of assets.

You can also increase the resolution of images, which is super handy if you're creating something for print. I'll be honest, I didn't realise there was so much I could do on Pages.

Numbers isn't the sexiest of apps but it has had some upgrades for Creator Studio. You can now generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition with Magic Fill, this makes working with large documents a lot easier, assuming that the Magic Fill gets it right, of course (it worked fine when I tested it on something quite basic).

Buy it if

• You want to use several different apps
• You like working between iPad and Mac
• You're a student or educator (it's a bargain!)

Don't buy it if

• You don't like subscription models
• You work primarily on iPhone

Find out more about Apple Creator Studio.