Adobe Digital Painting App Similar to Procreate Is Now Free for Everyone
Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator are widely known among creative professionals on Mac and PC (though Affinity struggles to lure away paying customers ). But now Adobe is targeting the drawing and painting market on tablets by making its digital painting app Fresco completely free .
While Photoshop and Illustrator are available on the iPad, Procreate has instead become a popular tool for digital creators. This touch app was designed to create digital art and simulate real materials. You can switch between hundreds of brush or pencil styles with a single swipe of the Apple Pencil, and while there are other competing apps like Clip Studio Paint (also available for desktop), the $12.99 one-time fee makes it an attractive buy.
Released in 2019, Fresco, Adobe’s drawing app for iPadOS, iOS, and Windows, attempted to level the playing field where Photoshop failed, but only provided free access to basic features. A $10/year subscription gave you access to over 1,000 additional brushes, more online storage, additional shapes, access to Adobe’s collection of premium fonts, and most importantly, the ability to import your own brushes. Now you get it all for free on all supported platforms.
Even with this move, Adobe is still fighting an uphill battle with other tablet apps that are already wildly popular in the digital art and social media communities. Procreate makes it easy to share, import, and customize brushes and templates online, giving it a wide community of support. Procreate is also vocal about not using generative AI in its products and keeping it user-friendly for app creators. Given the influx of generative AI tools in other parts of the Creative Cloud , Adobe can’t make such promises, which may put some off, even if Fresco itself has yet to gain any AI functionality.
Fresco offers the Adobe ecosystem. It uses an interface very similar to other Adobe tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator, making Adobe users feel right at home. You can even use Photoshop brushes with it. Files are saved to Creative Cloud storage and automatically backed up, ensuring you never lose data. Procreate, on the other hand, stores files locally, making them easy to lose. Procreate is also exclusive to iPad and iPhone (via the stripped-down Procreate Pocket), and Fresco works on Windows too.
It’s unclear whether all of this is enough to help Adobe overtake years of heavy-handed support for Procreate, but given how popular Photoshop is among artists in other countries, Fresco may now start to see some use as a lighter, free alternative to Photoshop. In any case, it’s worth a try, although there’s no word on Android or MacOS versions.