Creative technology can do great things, but sometimes glitches and design can get in the way of that intuitive experience. When feeling the #iamcreative spirit, it’s important that the tools you’re using on screen are as simple as picking up a paint brush or pencil IRL. With their new set of mobile apps, Adobe took what we love about creating with our hands and made it into a batch of tools like we’ve never seen before. With these apps DLed it’s going to be easier to tackle your creativity cravings on the go to save you hours of computer time. Seriously.
It’s only been a few months since their last update, but today at Adobe MAX we got to witness firsthand the Creative SDK 1.0 unveiling. These apps all connect seamlessly and get a boost from the Creative Profile, Adobe’s seamless solution to file sharing between projects and people. The apps are currently available on iOS and a set is being created for Android phones. Get the scoop on all nine new apps below — and get ready to get excited.
CC Capture Apps
1. Color CC: We’ll start with one of our favorites. Adobe Color captures and saves swatches and palettes by simply snapping a pic. It’s awesome. Are you super fond of your new flower arrangement? Maybe you want to use those colors for your wedding invites. Just snap a pic and Adobe Color will pull swatches from the image for instant color scheme action. Whoa.
2. Shape CC: With Shape, your iPhone turns into a photo-to-vector machine. This one is a total showstopper. Your phone will open a black and white camera to capture high contrast versions of whatever you’re looking at. From there, it gives you the option to delete any parts of the image to simplify your vector. It even smoothes the curves to ease up on your reliance of the tedious pen tool. Thank goodness.
You can use this on beautiful typography you see on signage when you’re out and about. You could even make an icon from a photo of your favorite bridge or landmark. We can’t wait to start experimenting.
3. Brush CC: Will the cool photo capabilities never stop? We hope not. Brush let’s you make brushes from images of textures and shapes that you capture with your camera. If you fancy the shape of a fall leaf or an accidental paint splatter, this app will simplify it to a black and white brush tool and gives you the option of editing it to the size, spacing, style and color that you like. No joke, it only takes a few minutes.
It’s a fantastic way to create backgrounds and textures all from an image that you created yourself. Pretty much anything you can capture with your camera, you can turn into a brush and draw with it. We’re thinking of trying a new-wallpaper every single day. Are you seeing a trend here? Making off-screen art easy to put on your screen via mobile devices is the way to go. So many new ways to feel the #iamcreative love, right?!
ILLUSTRATION
4. Illustrator Line: Your digital line work is going to get way easier with this mobile app. We’re talking parallel lines, perfect circles and French curves all with a few easy taps. You can go beyond line work, to create entire portraits with precision drawing technology and move them over to Adobe Illustrator easily with the layers you’ve created. You don’t even have to smash your file down into a jpg to take it from the app to your desktop.
5. Illustrator Draw:Draw takes all of your Illustrator tools and makes them mobile and easy to share. You can bring in your creations from Shape and Brush to take full advantage of the mobile capabilities.
Imaging
6. Photoshop Sketch:This is your go-to drawing app to use the fancy brushes and swatches you’ve made with Brush and Color. The images you can create here have the potential to look like an oil painting masterpiece. It’s ideal for creating a single image that’s part of a larger design. What’s better, you can share it right with your social networks or Behance from the app.
7. Photoshop Mix:If you’re a fan of the Capture Aware tool in Photoshop, you’ll love this one — it puts Capture Aware on steroids. The technology is much more aware of your image and gives you the capability to do tons of new things, most notably:
– Take a foreground image of a person and isolate it from its background, or vice versa.
– Select and delete distracting parts of the image and fill it in with the same colors and textures as what’s around it.
– Swap out parts of one image with parts of another.
These are all things that you could do without the app on desktop Photoshop, but this mobile capability can really save you hours. With the more sensitive technology, you can select these objects with just your finger and edit with parts of the image seamlessly.
8. Lightroom Mobile: This app adds a social aspect to the Lightroom you love, plus you can synchronize the GPS metadata for a record of where the pics were taken.
VIDEO
9. Premiere Clip: With Clip, it’s way easer to use professional tools for your social videos. When you’re recording on your phone or tablet, the snippets can go right into Clip without the need to upload or sync. They show up in the app in the order they were shot. You can cut, color and edit your whole project from the app on your mobile device, and even share it right from there. But if you want the real estate of a larger screen, take it to your desktop and, with your Creative Profile, the project will be saved right where you left off.
All of these apps are available to download now and included in your subscription-based Creative Cloud account (starting at around $30/month).
What’s your favorite new app from the mobile Adobe app lineup? Let us know in the comments!
