Adobe has made its painting app, Adobe Fresco, completely free for all users. Previously, certain features were locked behind a $9.99 annual subscription paywall. These premium features included access to the full Adobe Fonts library, a wider selection of brushes, and the ability to import custom brushes.
Starting today, all of Fresco’s premium features are now available to everyone at no cost. Launched in 2019, Fresco is designed for touch and stylus-supported devices. It offers a variety of tools for digital art creation, such as sketching pencils and watercolor paints.
While not as well-known as Adobe’s more established apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, Fresco has unique functionalities. These include reflective and rotation symmetry, as well as the ability to animate drawings with motion presets like “bounce” and “breathe.”
Fresco faces competition from other digital art applications popular in the community due to their affordability and ease of use. Clip Studio Paint and Krita, for example, are widely used on iPads.
Adobe Fresco’s unlocked premium features
This hardware is often much cheaper compared to purchasing a professional drawing tablet and computer setup required for Adobe’s more complex apps. Although Fresco has not yet integrated Adobe’s generative AI features, it does have advantages.
It offers a desktop app and cloud storage support. By making Fresco free, Adobe hopes to attract new users to its platform despite the existing loyalty to competitors. This strategic move could potentially lead to an increase in Fresco’s user base.
It provides digital artists with more options within Adobe’s suite of creative tools. The app is available on iPhone, iPad, Windows PCs, and Windows tablets. Recent devices should be compatible, including iPhones and iPads released nearly a decade ago, such as the iPhone 6 and all iPad Pro models.
Interested users can download Adobe Fresco for free from the Apple App Store or the Adobe website. With this shift, Adobe appears to be positioning itself more competitively in a market where rival apps have increased their prices.
