Good news for artists of all stripes: Adobe has added a collection of useful tools to three of its key apps. The updates, for Adobe Express, Adobe Fresco and Adobe Photoshop for iPad, cover everything from social media to smarter image tools – and they're all free for existing users. Here's what's new.
What's new in Adobe Fresco
Adobe's powerful drawing and painting app for touchscreens and styluses has been given some seriously useful new tools that you may recognise from its high end sibling, Photosohop: you can now distort any area of an image with the new Liquify tool, and the newly arrived Magic Wand makes it easy to quickly select a particular coloured area. There are also new accessibility features that make it easier to navigate with the keyboard and locate content in your projects. If I had any drawing talent whatsoever I'd be all over the new Manga Vector Brushes, which are designed to make drawing manga even easier than before.
Fresco's also getting a price cut: you can now get it for just $9.99 / £9.99 a year.
What's new in Photoshop for iPad
Photoshop needs no introduction, and this upgrade adds some more desktop-class features including Content-Aware Fill, which enables you to select an area and replace it with the same contents as its surroundings, a feature that feels awfully close to magic. New tools also enable you to select and refine small details in a portrait with a single click, and you can now quickly and accurately remove the background of any photo.
One of the cleverest features in Photoshop for iPad is also one of the most subtle: Select Subject uses AI to identify photos of people and process the little details such as wisps of hair and the edges of clothing so that you get much more accurate selections and processing.
What's new in Adobe Express
Adobe Express isn't as well known as the illustration and imaging apps, but the app formerly known as Spark is much loved by social media creators for its effortless animation and high quality templates. Its new Content Scheduler for both web and app users is designed to help those creators better manage their social media workflows so that they can use a single app to create, plan, preview and publish content.
The upgrades are all available from today and you can find out more about each one at the Adobe Blog.
