A First Look at the Upcoming 'Adobe Fresco' Drawing and Painting App [Video]

Adobe offered a first look at its upcoming Adobe Fresco drawing and painting app today. Initially teased as 'Project Gemini', the app now has an official name. It will be released for iPad later this year with versions for other devices to follow.

For generations, artists have distilled pigments from plants and minerals and created through the physical interaction of chalk, oils, and watercolors with paper, canvas, and plaster. Adobe Fresco will replicate those organic interactions and expand on them. Adobe scientists have studied the chemistry of common real-world pigments like cobalt and ochre. They’ve looked at the physics of how watercolors are absorbed into thick, cotton-based paper. And they’ve examined the ways that a thick slash of oil paint dries to add dimension to a painting.

The result is Live Brushes, which use the artificial intelligence of Adobe Sensei to recreate the behavior of oils and watercolors in an amazingly lifelike way. When you paint with a watercolor Live Brush, you’ll see the color bloom into adjacent areas of the paper. Use red and yellow next to each other and they’ll naturally blend into orange at the border. You can even recreate painting with water to dilute some colors and encourage tints to mix. With an oil Live Brush, you can slather on a thick coat of paint and see the ridges and brush strokes that give the painting dimension. And you can mix different oil colors together to create a varied swirl of color that no digital color wheel could ever provide.


In addition to Live Brushes, you'll be able to use all your favorite Photoshop brushes in Fresco and get access to thousands of additional brushes by Kyle Webster. Fresco also includes vector brushes which creates clean, crisp, and scalable lines and shapes. Using Adobe Capture, you can create your own brushes as well.

Fresco includes pro-level features like layers, masking, and selection in a customizable workspace. It works seamlessly with Photoshop and lets you export to PDF for editing in Illustrator.

You can apply to be part of Adobe's pre-release testing here. Check out the video below for more details...

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