CONS

• Only available for Apple iPad and Apple Pencil at this time.

The Magic of Live Brushes

The sparkling gem in Fresco’s crown is, doubtless, the Live Brushes feature. These watercolor and oil brushes look, feel, and behave like the real deal. In Adobe Fresco , “It’s so real, it’s unreal.” To pull off the wow factor of this organic interaction, Adobe partnered with scientists who study pigment chemistry, particle physics, liquid absorption on cotton substrates, and viscosity emulation. They asked professional painters and illustrators what they wanted in a tablet-based painting app, and how they would use it. Then they had those same artists offer iterations of beta-testing feedback.

Adobe’s deep homework allowed them to recreate the behavior of real-world tools, pigment, water, and oil on paper and canvas. Now anyone with an iPad and Apple Pencil can benefit from having Adobe Sensei’s artificial intelligence in their pocket.

Live brushes include Watercolor (Round Detail, Wash Soft, Wash Flat, and Wet Spatter) and Oil Paint (Flat, Round, Filbert, Detail, Glaze, Chunky, and Short). The Oil is luscious and gooey, slightly dimensional, and very realistic. You almost forget that you can Undo a misguided stroke. The settings offer you considerable control over your designated brush.

The Watercolor Live Brushes are even more thrilling to watch. As with the Oil Brushes, you have a full, contextual range of control over brush behavior.

You can see staining pigment flow from the brush and penetrate the fibers of the paper, or you can see a non-staining wash settle and glow on the surface as it awaits your addition of water or more pigment. You can watch the osmosis between the paint, water and paper—the color blooms into another wet color, or on dry paper, it pools slightly and darkens perfectly around the edges. It’s amazing.

Other Brushes, Vector Brushes, & Adobe Capture

With 1,000 brushes—each of which is infinitely editable—it’s easy to find yourself experimenting in ways that would be difficult, expensive, or impossible with traditional media. I love lettering, so I was especially eager to try some of their inky brushes. I drew the alphabet below with a rake brush. The brushstrokes have a natural and organic feel.

Brushes are organized into the following categories: under Pixel Brushes you get Basic, Comics, Dry Media, FX, Ink, Lettering, Marker, Painting, Rakes, Sketching; the choices under Live Brushes are Watercolor and Oil; and under Vector Brushes there’s Basic Round, Basic Taper, Basic Flat, Basic Chisel, and Basic Terminal. Under each section is the option to access your library brushes.

Vector Brushes behave as they do in Illustrator. Although we can’t yet create or access Illustrator brushes, I have high hopes it will come down the road.

Adobe Fresco a member of Adobe’s suite of 15 iOS apps, lets you use any image on your device (or take a photo) as a source for creating derivative color palettes, brushes, patterns, and several other useful assets. Happily, this underrated tool integrates with Fresco so you can create a bevy of creative building blocks for your projects.

Pro-Level Tools and Interesting Features

If you are familiar with Photoshop or other raster editors, you’ll be comfortable with Fresco’s layers, masking, precise selection tools, and 28 blending modes. Layers are drag-and-droppable to reorder level, group, and delete.

Fresco’s Selection tool is unique because, with a single tool, you can make selections lasso-style and polygonal lasso-style (rubberband).

A novel tool is the Touch Shortcut, the circle under the import tab. Think of this like the Option or Alt key—it allows an alternative action for the tool you are using. For example, you can use it to change your tool to an eraser version, constrain the Move Tool, amend an active selection when you’re panning the canvas, or toggle the visibility of layers.

I’m fond of Fresco’s live preview window in the brush settings. As you make changes to the parameters, you can either see the changes in the swatch as you make them, or you can test out a stroke or two in that same preview window. I’m hoping that in future releases there will be an option to add color to the jitter options.

Creative Cloud Integration and Output

Files transfer between Fresco and Adobe Fresco seamlessly, and you can set preferences to have your project open automatically in Photoshop on your desk or laptop. When you draw with a vector brush, Fresco creates a new vector-only layer, which you can open and edit in Illustrator.

Projects save by default to Creative Cloud, and you can export or share files several ways. If you want to share your image, you can tap Quick Export and the app will send a snapshot to your choice of AirDrop, Print, Message, Notes, Mail, and many other options. When your masterpiece is finished, you can save your file as a PSD, PDF, JPG, or PNG (in high or low resolutions)—and you can even do a direct export to the portfolio site, Behance. Finally, you can export your project as a time-lapse movie, detailing your every move just as you made it.

Since Fresco is a citizen of Creative Cloud, all your files, brushes, colors, and content libraries are always available if you are a subscriber.

The Future of Fresco

Even though Fresco was built as a natural media emulator, I have a modest, more digital wish list for future incarnations of Adobe Fresco For example, it would be great to have more Live Brushes, and other generative brushes like a particle, flame, or morphogenic brush. Additionally, it would be great to have a nudge or liquify feature, but perhaps we only need to wait for the upcoming built-for-tablet version of Photoshop where we’ll be able do that.

Whether those wishes come true or not, the company has created an exciting new experience with Fresco. While there is some competition, Fresco hits it out of the park with Live Brushes and a productive workspace that’s simply easier to use than most of the competition. Look for our full, rated review when the final version of Fresco launches.

Conclusion

Adobe Fresco 5.5.0.1380 contains the largest collection of raster and vector brushes in the world, in addition to the revolutionary new live brushes, to ensure a completely natural drawing and painting experience.