Adobe Fresco

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Adobe Fresco is a app that replicates the real-world experiences of drawing and painting. Between its exceptional brush options, simple animation tools, and superb help resources, it's a must-have for artists of all levels. Best of all, it no longer locks features behind a paid subscription. Adobe Fresco easily earns our Editors' Choice award for its unbeatable ability to make digital art creation feel authentic and satisfying.

How Much Does Adobe Fresco Cost?

Adobe Fresco is now free for everyone. That means that you can import brushes, use thousands of Fresco's previously premium-only brushes (including seasonal ones from prolific brush creator and artist Kyle T. Webster), access your Creative Cloud brush and color libraries, draw premium shapes, and take advantage of 5GB of cloud storage, all at no cost.

Upgrading to the Fresco + Photoshop for iPad plan ($9.99 per month) gets you the latter app, 100GB of cloud storage, premium Adobe Fonts, and access to Adobe Portfolio (a web platform for showcasing your work).

As excellent as Fresco is for sketching, illustrating, and painting, there is another tablet-only app worth mentioning—Procreate ($12.99, one-time purchase). As with Fresco, Procreate was designed natively for iPad and the Apple Pencil. These two drawing apps are currently in a class by themselves. Fresco has the upper edge, however, because of its singular Live Brush technology and vector capabilities.

As for platforms, Adobe Fresco is available on Apple's iPads and iPhones, Windows devices with an Intel, Nvidia, or AMD processor, and select Microsoft Surface devices with Arm processors (9 and X). Android and ChromeOS users are out of luck. I tested the app on an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil Pro.

What's It Like to Use Adobe Fresco?

When I first reviewed Adobe Fresco more than four years ago at its premiere, it was already extraordinary. But Adobe has introduced more than 100 new features since then. That is a direct expression of Adobe’s plan for the app’s continuous dynamic development, coupled with consideration of user suggestions.

An Inviting Interface

Fresco’s simple and intuitive interface makes using the app enjoyable for pros and beginners alike. It’s very easy to get going. The home window shows your recent work and has sections for learning (quick tips, hands on, and YouTube tutorials), discovery (watch live as artists create in Fresco and see a curated gallery of others’ work), and sharing your creations.

Fresco’s learning curve is low, while in-app help and easily accessible user guides make learning about more advanced features like masking or reusable shapes a breeze.

Useful Creative Cloud Connections

When you draw with a vector brush, Fresco creates and saves a new vector-only layer directly to , which you can access and edit in the desktop or iPad versions of Illustrator. The process is similar for bitmapped layers and Photoshop. In Creative Cloud apps, teams and individuals can share their work for comments and invite others to edit; all this feedback conveniently stays in one place. Adobe continues to expand its collaboration and connectivity features across Creative Cloud apps.

Additional export options mean you are just one step away from importing your work into a variety of competitor applications as well.

Some Accessories to Consider

Although Fresco does an excellent job of recreating the drawing experience, there's still a drawback to using the Apple Pencil (or any stylus) on a glossy tablet: You feel like you’re ice-skating. For a more natural feel, I use the ESR Paper-Feel Magnetic screen protector ($9.99), which emulates the friction of paper tooth (surface texture). It’s not a perfect solution, but it certainly offers a more realistic experience than the slick glide of pencil-on-glass. A second helper is a pack of  (10 for $5.99), which add a silent friction. They require just a touch too much effort at first, but you get used to it. Finally, a third solution is to replace the factory Apple Pencil tip with a slightly softer plastic tip. I like the Soft Paperfeel Damping Tip Replacements (two for $9.99).

Too Many Standout Features to List

Whether you want to sketch, paint, or ink, Fresco’s rich feature set—from customizable brushes to powerful layering options—makes it difficult to identify all the top features. Nonetheless, I discuss a handful of options that bedazzle below.

Magical Brushes

Fresco has four brush categories, not including pixel and vector erasers:

• Pixel brushes (bitmap, including advanced Photoshop brushes)

• Scalable, resolution-independent vector brushes

• Smudge brushes

• Live brushes (watercolor and oil)

Under Pixel brushes, you get Basic, Comics, Dry Media, FX, Ink, Lettering, Marker, Mixer, Multi-color, Painting, Rakes, and Sketching, along with any Photoshop or Kyle Webster brushes you want to import. Under Vector brushes, you get 11 Basic Brushes and new sets—Jitter, Manga, and Outline. Vector brushes behave as they do in Illustrator. Smudge brushes are a little different than Mixer Brushes in the Pixel Brushes menu—they smudge with no color, just like a finger might. Mixer Brushes spin or flop around in your pixels, adding the color you’ve selected while mixing it all up. Their attributes behave exactly like their non-smudging counterparts. Finally, the Live brushes include six Watercolor and seven Oil Brushes. Under each section is the option to access your library brushes.

Live brushes are the sparkling gem in Fresco’s crown. These include Watercolor (Round Detail, Wash Soft, Wash Flat, and Wet Spatter) and Oil Paint (Chunky, Detail, Filbert, Flat, Glaze, Round, and Short). Both look, feel, and behave like the real deal. For example, the Oil Paints are 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 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 how a non-staining wash settles and glows on the surface as it awaits your addition of water or more pigment. In other words, you get to watch the osmosis between the paint, water, and paper. The color blooms into another wet color, or it pools slightly on dry paper and darkens perfectly around the edges. It’s amazing.

To pull off the wow factor you get with live brushes, 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. In the images below, you can see how Fresco replicates the luscious gooeyness of oil paint and how the watercolor brushes emulate real water-paper physics (wet or dry).

With thousands of infinitely editable brushes, it’s easy to lose yourself in an experimentation reverie that would be difficult, expensive, or impossible with traditional media.

I’m passionate about hand lettering, so I love playing with Fresco’s inky, organic, and unusual brushes. I drew the alphabet below with a rake brush to test it.

Still on my wish list are the options to create new brushes or access Illustrator brushes. That said, you can import custom pixel brushes in Photoshop or your own multi-color swatch or ribbon brushes (you can't save the latter). I also hope that Adobe adds other generative particle, flame, or bio-morphogenetic brushes.

Accessible Animation Tools

When I made my first little animation, I was thrilled with my new superpower (though the animation was far from portfolio-worthy). Fresco makes it less tedious to make frame-by-frame animations and greatly facilitates motion along a path (see the two animated images below). Animation is becoming a basic expectation of clients who think that if the thing doesn’t move, it must be dead. You get a lot of bang for your buck with Fresco. Below, see Adobe's example of a simple frame-by-frame animation and then the same art moving along a motion path line. New Motion Presets (which I discuss later) add to the fun.

Spectacular Multicolor Swatches

The Multicolor Swatches are high up on the cool scale. You can use the multicolor swatch eyedropper to capture a source mini image with which you can paint. All Live Brushes and Pixel Brushes support this, though Marker, Sketching, and Vector brushes don't.

Liquify

You can transform your friends or enemies into warped distortions of themselves by pinching, bloating, twirling, and pushing them (or any pixels) in Fresco. Now available for Windows, the Liquify tool works just like the Liquify filter in Photoshop. It has settings for brush size, density, pressure, and rate, so you can create exactly the effect you want.

Perspective Grid

Perspective Grid Capture is an example of Adobe Sensei AI magic. In addition to having a standard-yet-customizable graph paper grid, Fresco has perspective grids that constrain your line work and snap your objects to your choice of 1-, 2-, or 3-point perspective. Perspective grids also have adjustable opacity, density, and color. However, what’s new and remarkable is that, with the aid of AI, Fresco can capture and recreate perspective grid guidelines from any photo or image. Then, the grid lines snap what you're drawing into the correct perspective to match the source.

Adobe Capture

Adobe Capture (available for Android and iOS) lets you collect image assets with the camera on your phone. The app then vectorizes elements within your photos and converts them into options such as a color palette, awesome custom ribbon brushes, geometric patterns, and more. There are also options for PBR (physics-based rendering) materials, lighting, and textures for use in Dimension or Substance and with Illustrator’s 3D capability.

What’s New in Adobe Fresco?

Enhanced Motion Presets

Topping the list of new goodies are the Motion Presets. To activate motion on any layer, tap Path and pick from various options under Motion presets. Similar to the way object animation works in PowerPoint or Keynote, Fresco users now have motion preset options like Bob, Bounce, Breathe, Flicker, Jitter, Sparkle, Spin, and Sway. An alluring Custom choice rounds out the list.

Apple Pencil Pro Support

Adding to the already high level of mirth is the new Apple Pencil Pro's subtle but smile-worthy haptic feedback, which lets you feel your strokes for certain actions, like aligning objects during transform, using Snap to Shape, swiping through animation frames, and switching between Touch shortcut states. You can also roll the barrel of the Pencil to adjust Pixel, Live, and Vector brushes or squeeze it to summon a contextual quick.

Capable Symmetry Presets

The mandala craze isn’t over, and Fresco’s set of reflective (mirrored) and rotational symmetry presets is certainly fueling it. Via the tools under Grid in the taskbar, you too can now create perfectly symmetrical shapes and patterns—live. In the settings, you can specify the number of axes to your amusement.

Paint Inside Tool

Paint Inside works with any Pixel, Live, and Vector brushes to constrain your painting within areas that have clear boundaries—if drawing within the lines is important to you. No more messy coloring books.

Verdict: A Fantastic App for Digital Artists

You just can’t lose with Adobe Fresco. It's free, fun, and so satisfying to use that it's practically therapeutic. Those qualities don't make it any less useful for professionals who need to be productive, either. For its remarkable collection of brushes, approachable design, and seamless support for other Creative Cloud programs, Adobe Fresco unquestionably deserves our Editors’ Choice award among graphic design apps.