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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1234839
expect with real-world media and materials. What you will notice is that it's a program designed and built for a tablet, a surface designed to be held in your hand, a stylus in one and an available thumb on the other. Most of your work will be done with the Apple Pencil but then there's the Touch Shortcut, a floating circle that will modify the behavior of some of the tools with a thumb-press (you'll see a hint about what it can do with the tool you're using in the upper right of the screen). This all adds up to a user experience that is totally iPad. Artists moving into Fresco will soon realize that, with the live brushes, many of their techniques from physical media still work. In fact, they'll find themselves several steps ahead of those of us who have only worked in the digital realm. Their challenge will be discovering how easily the realities of the physical world, like paint drying and oils mixing, can be avoided and even reversed. Sensei, Adobe's moniker for its AI technologies, is clearly at work here, as well as a lot of detailed human research into the physics and chemistry of paint, brush, and paper. That's the only way you get watercolors that behave exactly like watercolors, with nearly all the organic variables that involves. Watching the virtual paint get absorbed and spread on the paper is Adobe's favorite demo, but pay attention to how the colors interact and, with oils, get picked up by the brush and mix on the canvas. Then again, you can easily and instantly dry the underlying paint and paint over it with a solid, untainted brush. You'll even see that paint mixes as it does in the natural world—not as easy to achieve in RGB technology as you may think. Live Brushes also has a gift for those of us who want or need to work in mixed media (sometimes, a nice way of saying that we don't have a lot of drawing skills). Live brushes, both watercolor and oil, do not actually need to carry any pigment. Call up a photo from your library and use the brushes to enhance what is in the image. This gives photographers and other media artists the ability to explore a whole new range of expression with a set of tools and a range of control that simply did not exist in this form before Fresco. (One could give their images a painterly look with Corel Painter, but Fresco allows you to work both with and around the colors and textures in the image with brushes rather than filters.) Tree by Kyle T. Webster