Adobe Fresco

About this release

Fresco is a drawing application rather than a photo editor that happens to have brushes. It was designed around a pen and a screen you can draw directly on, so the interface stays out of the way, the canvas responds with very low latency, and pressure, tilt and rotation all behave the way a physical tool would rather than approximating it.

The distinctive part is having three brush types in one document. Raster brushes cover the familiar pixel painting, vector brushes produce strokes that stay resolution independent and can be reshaped after the fact, and the live brushes simulate oil and watercolour with real pigment behaviour, so colours blend on the canvas, water spreads into wet areas and paint builds up thickness where it is layered.

The rest of the tooling is what an illustrator needs and nothing more. Layers with masks, clipping and blend modes, selection tools, transform with warping, symmetry and perspective guides, and a colour system with harmonies and saved themes. Frame by frame animation is built in for short looping sequences with onion skinning.

Documents move on to the larger applications without flattening, so a drawing started here can be finished in a full editor with layers intact, and the brush libraries are shared between them. Time lapse recording of a session exports as a video, which illustrators use for process posts.

What it does

Three brush types in one document

Raster, vector and pigment simulating live brushes side by side on the same canvas.

Live oil and watercolour

Colours blend wet on wet, water spreads and paint builds thickness where layered.

Low latency pen input

Pressure, tilt and rotation with a stroke that keeps up with the hand.

Illustrator tooling

Layers with masks and blend modes, warping transform, symmetry and perspective guides.

Frame animation

Short frame by frame sequences with onion skinning built in.

Layered handoff

Documents open in the larger desktop editors with layers preserved.

Changed in this version

• Lower stroke latency on pen displays.
• Live brush blending improved on large canvases.
• New brush packs added to the default library.
• Animation timeline gains frame duplication and reordering.
• Faster document open on files with many layers.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive to a short path.
2. Install the tablet or pen display driver before the application.
3. Run the installer to completion.
4. Open the application once so the brush libraries build, then check pressure response in a test document.

Worth knowing before you start

File details