When you think of Adobe, does the word “free” come to mind? It’s known for its suite of premium tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, Premiere, and Illustrator. Some Adobe tools offer core features for free, while others require a subscription to use. You can imagine my surprise and skepticism when I learned that Adobe offers a premium drawing app, Adobe Fresco, at no cost.
I normally use Krita for Android and Windows for my drawing needs, but I had to try Adobe Fresco on my PC—that’s where I do most of my drawing. I wanted to see how free it really is from the perspective of a sketcher, and whether I would encounter any paid gotchas along the way. To my surprise, though, I walked away thinking just how unbelievable it was that Adobe was giving it away.
Adobe Fresco is welcoming to all artists
Feels good to use and provides endless possibilities
Adobe Fresco is often marketed as a digital art app for artists of all levels, and I’m inclined to agree. This was apparent the moment I saw the interface, which was intuitive and clean, allowing me to get started easily without the steep learning curve of alternatives like Krita. It’s simple and streamlined, without multiple toolbars and panels cluttering the canvas, making it welcoming for beginners while still offering a wide selection of tools for professionals to explore.
I really like the Touch Shortcut, a button that appears in the bottom left corner of the canvas. Pressing it unlocks alternate functions for the tool you’re using. For example, if you activate it with a pixel brush selected, you enable the eraser. It’s a handy button that increases the efficiency of any workflow.
I was using a basic XP-Pen drawing tablet with no touchscreen for my test. It works fine with Adobe Fresco, but it’s obvious the app was ultimately designed with touchscreens in mind, so I couldn’t use its full range of touch controls, especially gestures like double-tapping to undo.
Luckily, it supports keyboard shortcuts, and I can activate the Touch Shortcut by pressing the backtick key (`) or clicking it with the stylus. If you have a pressure-sensitive stylus that supports tilt, you can use Adobe Fresco without issues.
When it comes to the brush engine, Adobe Fresco has a modest selection of over 200 pre-installed brushes. You have your pixel brushes for sketching, inking, and texturing; live brushes for realistic watercolor and oil paintings; and vector brushes for clean, scalable drawings. I love the sketching, inking, and dry media brushes, which consist of beautifully rendered pens, pencils, and charcoal options.
You can customize the brushes by adjusting settings such as hardness, spacing, angle, and stylus pressure to create your own unique look. Some apps lock this feature behind a paywall. Another feature paywalled by other apps that is free in Adobe Fresco is the ability to import brushes from Photoshop or Kyle Webster. There are even thousands of high-quality brushes available in its library that you can add for free.
Premium features aplenty
Other apps ask you to pay for what Adobe Fresco gives away for free
I can’t discuss all the features of Adobe Fresco–one article is not enough. However, I can discuss the few I’ve tried, in addition to the standard unlimited layers, color management, and selection tools.
Adobe Fresco features powerful transformation tools that allow me to freely scale, rotate, skew, distort, or change the perspective of any shape I create. The vector sketches in particular are non-destructive, meaning I can reshape and resize them without sacrificing quality or crispness. There’s also a dedicated Liquify tool that lets me warp, twirl, pucker, bloat, or reconstruct shapes. This is great for adjusting, fixing, and refining drawings without permanently altering the underlying work.
Then there are the precision tools and drawing aids, which I use when I need fine control of lines, curves, and other shapes I draw. Adobe Fresco also has snapping, grid, perspective, and symmetry tools. The app makes it easy to go from a free-flowing, messy sketch to a clean technical illustration.
Users who do more than sketching can create multicolor swatches with the eyedropper tool. The Paint Inside tool confines painting or coloring to the inside of any closed shape. The area outside the shape is locked and can’t be painted, which prevents bleeding. There’s also a smudge tool that simulates using a finger to spread paint around, blend colors, and soften edges.
Another thing I liked is the cloud sync feature, which includes 5 GB of free storage. Adobe Fresco automatically syncs my artwork with the Creative Cloud for free, allowing me to access it on other devices. My favorite use so far has been adding finer details to my sketches using the iPhone version after starting a sketch on my computer.
I also love how Adobe Fresco makes animation accessible. In addition to your typical frame-by-frame animation, it also has layer-based animation. I can animate each layer separately, with tools such as timelines, onion skinning, playback options, and motion paths. For the motion, I can create my own complex path or use presets (e.g., bouncing and spinning).
How free is Adobe Fresco?
Paid plans and a major caveat
I wasn’t surprised to find out that Adobe Fresco used to be a freemium app with basic features like premium brushes and the ability to import brushes locked behind a subscription. Luckily, Adobe discontinued this plan. However, an Adobe ID is required to use the free version.
Your Adobe ID will be associated with an Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) membership, though. Adobe Fresco works with the free membership automatically attached to your Adobe ID, which is where the limited storage comes from. You can subscribe to premium plans, such as the Adobe Design Mobile Plan ($14.99 per month) and the Adobe Fresco + Photoshop Plan ($7.99 per month). These give you access to other Adobe Premium apps and 100 GB of cloud storage.
So, no matter how you look at it, you can’t avoid that Adobe lockdown that so many people hate if you want to use Adobe Fresco. I don’t recommend it for people who prefer privacy and control over their data, as offered by open-source alternatives to Adobe apps.
Adobe may have made one of my favorite drawing apps of all time
They say Adobe Fresco is better on an iPad, especially with its support for the Apple Pencil Pro. I’m hoping it eventually comes to Android with S Pen support for Samsung Galaxy tablets. With that said, it’s still notable that Adobe Fresco remains intuitive to use with a standard drawing tablet.
So far, it has been a great app for my drawing journey, which is why it’s sometimes hard for me to believe it’s free. The best part is that Adobe continues to develop it–they didn’t just make it free and abandon it. Adobe Fresco regularly gets new features and performance improvements. It can only get better with time.