How to Record a Speedpaint in Photoshop

•6 min read

A speedpaint is not the same thing as a screen recording that has been sped up. It is a performance: the viewer wants to see a painting appear, in a form short enough to finish. That distinction drives every decision below.

Capture the canvas, not the screen

Photoshop has no speedpaint recorder built in, so the default answer people reach for is OBS. It is the wrong default here. A speedpaint audience is watching for brushwork, and a screen recording gives them your layer panel, your tool options bar, and — worst of all — every zoom and pan you made while working.

That last one is what ruins most speedpaints. Painters zoom constantly: in to render an eye, out to check the silhouette, in again. At normal speed that is invisible. Compressed 60x, it reads as the camera being thrown around the room. Nothing in your edit fixes it, because the movement is baked into the footage.

A canvas-level recorder sidesteps the whole problem. PSFlow records the document itself, so the exported frame is always the artwork at a fixed size, regardless of what your viewport was doing.

Setting up

  1. download PSFlow and install it, then restart Photoshop.
  2. Open the panel from Window → Extensions and press Record before your first stroke.
  3. Paint. Close the panel if it is in the way — recording continues without it, and the plugin pauses itself while you are idle.
  4. Press Stop, then export the session to MP4 from the History tab.

Screenshots for each step are in the setup guide.

Pick the length before you pick the speed

The most common speedpaint mistake is exporting the entire session at a uniform speed. Sessions are not uniform: the first twenty minutes of blocking in shapes are far more interesting to watch than the two hours of rendering that follow.

Work backwards from where the video is going:

  • •YouTube: 2–5 minutes. Long enough to show the painting develop, short enough to hold attention. Add music and a before/after at the end.
  • •Instagram Reels / TikTok: 15–60 seconds, vertical. Lead with a two-second flash of the finished piece so the viewer knows what they are waiting for.
  • •Portfolio or ArtStation: 60–90 seconds, embedded next to the final image.

Export settings

  • •30fps. A timelapse is a sequence of discrete edits; 60fps adds file size and no smoothness.
  • •1080p on the long edge. Exporting at your full canvas size just means every platform re-encodes it down anyway.
  • •Match the aspect ratio to the destination. Export once per destination rather than letting TikTok letterbox a landscape video into a vertical frame.

Three things that make speedpaints better

Start recording before you think you need to

The blank-canvas-to-first-shapes moment is the most watchable part of any speedpaint, and it is the part people habitually miss because they start recording once the drawing is “worth recording”. Press Record first, decide later whether to keep it.

Let the idle detection do its job

Reference hunting, coffee, a phone call — these produce long runs of identical frames that pad the file and stall the video. PSFlow pauses when the canvas stops changing, which is why its output is usually much smaller than an equivalent screen recording.

End on the finished piece

Hold the final frame for two or three seconds. Cutting the instant the last stroke lands is jarring, and the still is the frame people screenshot and share.

Still deciding whether you need a plugin at all? See whether Photoshop has built-in timelapse recording for what the History and Timeline panels can and cannot do.