MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1234839
Go and Draw! When you open up a document, you have a No. 2 pencil loaded and ready to sketch. It's a small thing but can explain why so many people get so quickly hooked on Fresco. It's a great way to start exploring. First, you'll notice that it behaves exactly like a pencil, responding not only to pressure but angle and never perfectly black. Rub the side of the lead along the paper and it shades just like real graphite. You can almost imagine the friction of the paper under the stylus. It's a good opening act for what lies ahead. Part of the foundation of Fresco's magic is its ability to work in both vector and raster graphics, something of a reprise of Freehand (or even SuperPaint, if you've been around that long). However, its vector brushes are in an entirely different realm than what one would expect—no Bezier tools or geometric shapes. Vector brushes work like, well, brushes. As vectors, they are infinitely scalable and behave like vector graphics when imported into illustrator. Vector brush settings provide a wealth of controls over how the brush looks and works. A very nice touch is how the settings panel provides a little sketchpad where you can test out the looks without having to go back to your artwork. Fresco uses the same pixel brush underpinnings as Adobe Photoshop. A collection that would be the envy of any art store can be downloaded from Adobe, shared from Photoshop, or purchased through Adobe Stock. The brush performance on the iPad at least equals, and in some ways surpasses that of Photoshop, according to Adobe. Adobe's resident master, Kyle Webster gave MacDirectory a demo with a tablet loaded with over 1,000 brushes (many, we should note, of his own creation). And, of course, you can use Adobe Capture to create more of your own from real-world inspirations. Hand-fitted Adobe Fresco was literally made for the iPad Pro and takes full advantage of its powerful graphics processing capabilities. But that's really under-the-hood stuff that you probably just take for granted. All you'll notice is that everything responds as quickly as you would