To clean up lines in Procreate, work on a canvas large enough for your final output, raise StreamLine and Stabilization on a duplicated ink brush, and redraw over a low-opacity sketch layer instead of fixing the sketch itself. Then tidy the strokes that remain with small selection and transform adjustments, and export at the size you need. Most "pixelated" or wobbly lines come from canvas size, global smoothing settings, or scaling raster art after the fact, not from your hand control.

Why Procreate lines look rough in the first place

Procreate is a raster app, so every stroke is made of pixels. Zoom in far enough and you will see stair-stepping on any brush, which is normal and not a bug. What matters is how the line looks at the size it will actually be viewed.

Three causes account for most complaints:

• The canvas is too small. A 1704 × 1900 px canvas looks soft once it fills an iPad screen and gets zoomed. Raising DPI alone does not add pixels to a canvas defined in pixels; it only changes the print size metadata.
• Smoothing is fighting you. Global stabilization set too high makes the pencil feel laggy, and too little leaves visible tremor.
• The art was transformed after inking. Scaling or rotating a line layer resamples it and softens the edges.

Fix these first, because no later cleanup step recovers resolution you never drew.

Set up the canvas for clean line work

Before you draw, decide where the lines will end up. For video and motion work, that is usually a fixed frame size such as 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160, possibly with extra room for camera moves in After Effects.

1. Work at or above your delivery resolution. If you plan to push in on the artwork in a comp, draw larger than the frame.
2. Check your actual dimensions. Open Actions (wrench) > Canvas > Canvas Information > Dimensions to confirm pixel size.
3. Judge at actual size. Use the QuickMenu's actual-size view to see one canvas pixel per screen pixel. This is the honest preview of how the line will look in a 1:1 comp. Deep zoom exaggerates pixels.
4. Avoid resizing line layers. Decide scale early. If you must transform, do it once, and consider redrawing the lines instead of stretching them.

For print-bound inking, some illustrators go for roughly 600 DPI at final size. For screen-based animation, pixel dimensions matter more than DPI.

Tune smoothing: StreamLine and Stabilization

Procreate offers smoothing at two levels, and knowing which one you are adjusting saves a lot of confusion.

Global smoothing

Go to Actions > Prefs > Pressure & Smoothing. The global stabilization slider overrides brush behavior everywhere. A low value, around 10–15%, is a reasonable starting point for cleanup passes. If your pencil suddenly feels delayed on a new task, check this slider first, because it is a common culprit.

Per-brush smoothing

Open the Brush Library, tap a brush to enter Brush Studio, and go to the Stabilization tab:

• StreamLine reduces wobble and shake, giving long curves a confident arc.
• Stabilization smooths and straightens the stroke by averaging the path.

Duplicate the brush before editing it by swiping left on it in the library. That keeps the original intact and lets you build a dedicated "clean ink" brush. If you ruin the settings, About this Brush > Reset Brush returns it to default.

When to turn smoothing down

Heavy stabilization rounds off corners and removes energy. Lower it for gesture sketches, sharp mechanical edges, deliberate texture, and anything where the wobble is part of the character. A common approach is two brushes: a loose sketch brush with little smoothing, and an ink brush with more.

The sketch-then-ink workflow

The most reliable way to get clean lines is not to correct the sketch. It is to trace it with a purpose-built inking pass.

1. Rough on its own layer. Use a technical pencil or any sketching brush, loose and fast. Don't polish.
2. Lower the sketch layer's opacity so it reads as a guide.
3. Create a new layer above it and ink with a dedicated brush, such as the stock Dry Ink or your duplicated clean-ink brush.
4. Ink in deliberate strokes. Pull one confident stroke per contour rather than building a line from many short ones. Undo if a stroke misses; redrawing is faster than repairing.
5. Hide the sketch and check the result at actual size.

Keep character parts, props, and background elements on separate ink layers. That separation pays off later when you animate or composite them independently.

Correct individual problem areas

Even with good smoothing, some strokes need touch-ups.

• Selection + Transform. Select a single stroke, then nudge it with the transform tools. Keep transformations small to limit softening.

Prepare lines for After Effects, Nuke, and other tools

Clean lines only help if they survive the handoff. A few habits keep them intact.

• Export with transparency. Hide the paper color layer and export in a format that preserves transparency.
• Keep the comp scale at or below 100%. Scaling up softens hand-drawn raster lines. If a camera move zooms in, build the source art at the larger size.

Where Styleframe fits after the lines are clean

Once your linework is clean, you may want to take it further in motion without redrawing every frame. Styleframe is one option for that step, and your cleaned frames can serve as references. Your compositing pipeline stays where it is.

A quick troubleshooting checklist

If your lines still look wrong, run through this list:

1. Check canvas dimensions under Canvas Information.
2. View at actual size before judging quality.
3. Confirm global stabilization isn't left high from a previous task.
4. Compare StreamLine and Stabilization on a duplicated brush.
5. Verify you haven't scaled or rotated the ink layer.
6. Redraw the offending stroke instead of repairing it.
7. Export with transparency and test the file in your comp at 100% scale.

Final thoughts

Clean lines in Procreate come from a stack of small decisions: a canvas sized for delivery, smoothing tuned per brush, a sketch-then-ink process, and light corrections only where they are needed. Get those right, and the artwork holds up when it moves into After Effects, Nuke, or an AI-assisted step in Styleframe. Start with the canvas and brush settings, since they affect every stroke you draw afterward.

To clean up lines in Procreate, work on a canvas large enough for your final output, raise StreamLine and Stabilization on a duplicated ink brush, and redraw over a low-opacity sketch layer instead of fixing the sketch itself. Then tidy the strokes that remain with small selection and transform adjustments, and export at the size you need. Most "pixelated" or wobbly lines come from canvas size, global smoothing settings, or scaling raster art after the fact, not from your hand control.

Why Procreate lines look rough in the first place

Procreate is a raster app, so every stroke is made of pixels. Zoom in far enough and you will see stair-stepping on any brush, which is normal and not a bug. What matters is how the line looks at the size it will actually be viewed.

Three causes account for most complaints:

• The canvas is too small. A 1704 × 1900 px canvas looks soft once it fills an iPad screen and gets zoomed. Raising DPI alone does not add pixels to a canvas defined in pixels; it only changes the print size metadata.
• Smoothing is fighting you. Global stabilization set too high makes the pencil feel laggy, and too little leaves visible tremor.
• The art was transformed after inking. Scaling or rotating a line layer resamples it and softens the edges.

Fix these first, because no later cleanup step recovers resolution you never drew.

Set up the canvas for clean line work

Before you draw, decide where the lines will end up. For video and motion work, that is usually a fixed frame size such as 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160, possibly with extra room for camera moves in After Effects.

1. Work at or above your delivery resolution. If you plan to push in on the artwork in a comp, draw larger than the frame.
2. Check your actual dimensions. Open Actions (wrench) > Canvas > Canvas Information > Dimensions to confirm pixel size.
3. Judge at actual size. Use the QuickMenu's actual-size view to see one canvas pixel per screen pixel. This is the honest preview of how the line will look in a 1:1 comp. Deep zoom exaggerates pixels.
4. Avoid resizing line layers. Decide scale early. If you must transform, do it once, and consider redrawing the lines instead of stretching them.

For print-bound inking, some illustrators go for roughly 600 DPI at final size. For screen-based animation, pixel dimensions matter more than DPI.

Tune smoothing: StreamLine and Stabilization

Procreate offers smoothing at two levels, and knowing which one you are adjusting saves a lot of confusion.

Global smoothing

Go to Actions > Prefs > Pressure & Smoothing. The global stabilization slider overrides brush behavior everywhere. A low value, around 10–15%, is a reasonable starting point for cleanup passes. If your pencil suddenly feels delayed on a new task, check this slider first, because it is a common culprit.

Per-brush smoothing

Open the Brush Library, tap a brush to enter Brush Studio, and go to the Stabilization tab:

• StreamLine reduces wobble and shake, giving long curves a confident arc.
• Stabilization smooths and straightens the stroke by averaging the path.

Duplicate the brush before editing it by swiping left on it in the library. That keeps the original intact and lets you build a dedicated "clean ink" brush. If you ruin the settings, About this Brush > Reset Brush returns it to default.

When to turn smoothing down

Heavy stabilization rounds off corners and removes energy. Lower it for gesture sketches, sharp mechanical edges, deliberate texture, and anything where the wobble is part of the character. A common approach is two brushes: a loose sketch brush with little smoothing, and an ink brush with more.

The sketch-then-ink workflow

The most reliable way to get clean lines is not to correct the sketch. It is to trace it with a purpose-built inking pass.

1. Rough on its own layer. Use a technical pencil or any sketching brush, loose and fast. Don't polish.
2. Lower the sketch layer's opacity so it reads as a guide.
3. Create a new layer above it and ink with a dedicated brush, such as the stock Dry Ink or your duplicated clean-ink brush.
4. Ink in deliberate strokes. Pull one confident stroke per contour rather than building a line from many short ones. Undo if a stroke misses; redrawing is faster than repairing.
5. Hide the sketch and check the result at actual size.

Keep character parts, props, and background elements on separate ink layers. That separation pays off later when you animate or composite them independently.

Correct individual problem areas

Even with good smoothing, some strokes need touch-ups.

• Selection + Transform. Select a single stroke, then nudge it with the transform tools. Keep transformations small to limit softening.

Prepare lines for After Effects, Nuke, and other tools

Clean lines only help if they survive the handoff. A few habits keep them intact.

• Export with transparency. Hide the paper color layer and export in a format that preserves transparency.
• Keep the comp scale at or below 100%. Scaling up softens hand-drawn raster lines. If a camera move zooms in, build the source art at the larger size.

Where Styleframe fits after the lines are clean

Once your linework is clean, you may want to take it further in motion without redrawing every frame. Styleframe is one option for that step, and your cleaned frames can serve as references. Your compositing pipeline stays where it is.

A quick troubleshooting checklist

If your lines still look wrong, run through this list:

1. Check canvas dimensions under Canvas Information.
2. View at actual size before judging quality.
3. Confirm global stabilization isn't left high from a previous task.
4. Compare StreamLine and Stabilization on a duplicated brush.
5. Verify you haven't scaled or rotated the ink layer.
6. Redraw the offending stroke instead of repairing it.
7. Export with transparency and test the file in your comp at 100% scale.

Final thoughts

Clean lines in Procreate come from a stack of small decisions: a canvas sized for delivery, smoothing tuned per brush, a sketch-then-ink process, and light corrections only where they are needed. Get those right, and the artwork holds up when it moves into After Effects, Nuke, or an AI-assisted step in Styleframe. Start with the canvas and brush settings, since they affect every stroke you draw afterward.