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This article is from January 29, 2016, and is no longer current.

Adobe’s Mobile Creative Apps

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A good majority of Adobe users have moved to the subscription-based Creative Cloud versions of their favorite software. In my experience, many people migrated because they had to and some did so begrudgingly. But what I also found was that a large portion of that group was won over by all of the extras offered to Creative Cloud users. Whether that was extra software—letting users try out apps they might never have dared to attempt—or full use of Typekit’s library of fonts, or the nearly seamless integration of assets via the integral Creative Cloud Libraries, by and large people have found something to love about Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

Some gems that often go unnoticed are the many mobile apps that are helpful tools on their own, but can add so much to productivity when used with a Creative Cloud subscription. There are quite a few mobile apps, yet somehow not all creatives are familiar with them, or even are aware that they exist. Some of the apps have overlapping functionality and app names are constantly being changed as apps merge or simply fade away. Let’s take a look at the mobile apps that creative pros like yourself can use to enhance your production, and how they integrate (or don’t) into your desktop app workflows. The feature lists are not comprehensive, but rather presented to give you an idea of what each app does and how it might fit in your particular production puzzle.

CAPTURING ELEMENTS

ICN_CaptureADOBE CAPTURE CC
Adobe Capture CC combines several of Adobe’s previous capture apps, namely Brush CC, Shape CC, Color CC, and Hue CC (which has now been renamed Looks) into one complete capture app. The tools that make up Adobe Capture grab elements from the world around you for use in other Adobe apps.
Brushes
Brushes lets you capture images from your device’s camera or its camera roll, and create brushes for use in the mobile app Adobe Photoshop Sketch, and Illustrator or Photoshop on the desktop. After selecting and cropping the starter image, refinements are made to the brush by altering size, scatter, and repetition of the base element. Further adjustments can be made to the color, opacity, and start/end points, depending on the type of brush you are creating. Each brush can be taken for a quick trial run in the testing area as changes are made and further refinements are tweaked.
USE IN: Sketch, Illustrator, or Photoshop (you’ll need to save according to intended app).
Shapes creates vector shapes captured from photos, either ones already in your device’s camera roll or one you take within the Capture app. Use the slider to set the fidelity, then further refine the shape by deleting any unwanted elements. Once saved to a Creative Cloud library, you can use that shape in the Draw and Comp mobile apps as uneditable stamps or shapes, or as editable vectors in Illustrator and fully-functional Smart Objects in Photoshop.
USE IN: Draw, Comp, Illustrator, Photoshop.
Colors lets you create 5-color themes from your images, captured from an existing image or your device’s camera. You can also import one of your Creative Cloud assets or an asset found on CC Market or Adobe Stock. Move the selector points around to actively select which colors you’d like to incorporate into your palette. Once you’ve perfected your palette, name it and save it to Adobe Color CC (the service formerly known as Kuler) and optionally make the theme public for others to use. You can further edit and refine your theme according to color theory rules, or simply by adjusting the RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSB, or HEX values. While you’re on the Adobe Color site, you can explore other public themes and download them into your own Creative Cloud library.
USE IN: Comp, Draw, Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign
Looks captures the essence from photos or images taken within the app. That essence—color and light—is then saved as a look that can be overlaid onto video. Think of it like an Instagram filter for your video projects. The preview is a bit confusing, as it uses a stock image, and not the photo you load up when starting. Hopefully, this is just a starting point for Looks and will eventually be something that can be applied to images, either for a Photoshop/Lightroom workflow or just to control the look of Instagram images.
USE IN: Adobe Premiere Clip, Premiere Pro, After Effects.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad/Android

PHOTO EDITING AND MANIPULATION

ICN_LightroomLIGHTROOM FOR MOBILE
Lightroom for Mobile is, not surprisingly, the mobile version of Adobe’s photo editing software Lightroom. The more portable version of the photo editor lets you organize your photos across devices from your tablet, to your smartphone, to your desktop. Lightroom for Mobile has a wide array of presets to adjust an image’s lighting and color and tools to add effects and clean up your images. After making any necessary adjustments, you can refine these changes even further back at your desktop in Lightroom. Further edits can be made to your images in Adobe Photoshop Mix, Adobe Photoshop Fix, and Photoshop Express mobile apps. And though not editable, the images can be used as is in other mobile apps (see below).
USE IN/SEND TO: Adobe Photoshop Fix, Adobe Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Express, Adobe Voice, Adobe Slate, Adobe Photoshop Sketch, Adobe Illustrator Draw, Adobe Comp CC.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad/iPhone/Android
ICN_FixADOBE PHOTOSHOP FIX
Fix is a photo retouching and image repair app. Pull in assets from your device’s camera, camera roll, Creative Cloud assets, Lightroom, Facebook, or Dropbox to make edits. You can crop the image, apply healing, liquify, and smoothing effects, adjust the light, color, saturation, exposure, contrast, as well as shadows and highlights. Fix even has facial adjustment presets when working with the liquify tools. All the effects created in Fix are layered, non-destructive, and fully-editable, even after sending to Photoshop on your desktop!
SEND TO: Photoshop, Lightroom, the device’s camera roll, Facebook, Instagram, Behance.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad
ICN_PSMixADOBE PHOTOSHOP MIX
Mix is a photo compositing and editing app that also lets you enhance your composite image further. Select two or more images and blend them together adjusting attributes such as exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows, clarity, and saturation as you work. You can then apply the included looks—which are similar to filters you find in Instagram—to the image as a whole, or selectively to components. Saving to your Creative Cloud library creates a native PSD file with all of its layers and effects intact that can be further edited in Photoshop on the desktop.
SEND TO: Photoshop, Lightroom, the device’s camera roll, Adobe Photoshop Mix, share on Behance, Facebook, and Instagram.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad
ICN_PSexpPHOTOSHOP EXPRESS
Photoshop Express is way more than just a scaled down version of the Photoshop desktop application. And while there is some overlap with the functionality provided in Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix, PS Express does so much more. To start with, file formats aren’t limited to PNG and JPEG. Express handles these files well, but also lets you import and edit completely in RAW. No matter which format you’re working in, you can manipulate your image’s crop, temperature, tint, and vibrance, and add noise reduction, de-haze, and other effects.
SEND TO: The device’s camera roll, Instagram, text message, Facebook, Twitter, email, CC assets, Flickr, jump directly to Fix or Mix. Strangely, there is no direct export to Photoshop and saving to your CC assets creates a flattened JPEG file.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad/iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile
ICN_PreviewADOBE PREVIEW CC
Preview is a companion app for Photoshop, that gives you real-time feedback on how your images will look on devices. This tool is geared to creatives working with digital designs that need to view those designs across multiple devices. The preview app—in wifi mode, when it co-operates—can even show previews simultaneously. Using the wifi method and choosing multiple devices in the Device Preview panel, you can be working in Photoshop on your desktop, creating a website wireframe or mock-up. Images in your Photoshop file will be streamed to the chosen devices so you can see how it will appear on those devices. I was only able to get the wired USB option to work (and from what I read on the Adobe forums, I’m not alone), so I was limited to one device at a time. Still though, being able to cut out all the middle steps of saving an image and somehow getting it on your device is a huge timesaver.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad/iPhone

DESIGN CREATION

ICN_SketchADOBE PHOTOSHOP SKETCH
Even though it has Photoshop in its name, this app doesn’t really focus on photo images, but is a drawing tool that creates raster images. Sketch has five distinct drawing tools, including markers, pens, and pencils, each of which has multiple choices for brush type. You can set each one’s size and flow amount and choose from three blending modes. Using a pressure-sensitive stylus gives you even more variance among the tools, which also includes an eraser. You can import assets from Creative Cloud, the now-absent Adobe Line, Draw, Lightroom, Mix, Fix, your device’s camera, CC Market, or Adobe Stock to use as an image layer, if you so choose. Sketch has integrated Line’s shape tools such as basic geometric shapes and French curves that you can use as a tracing template. Choose from the app’s built-in brushes or ones you created in Adobe Capture CC’s brushes feature.
SEND TO: Creative Cloud as a PSD file, Photoshop CC or Illustrator CC, publish to Behance as a work in progress, even copy to your device’s clipboard, or save to the camera roll.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad
ICN_DrawADOBE ILLUSTRATOR DRAW
Like Sketch, Adobe Illustrator Draw gives you five distinct tool types to create artwork with. The main differences being that Draw creates vectors (as the full name might suggest). The other major advantage is, in addition to a base photo layer (that could be used for tracing, among other uses), you can add and re-arrange layers to your heart’s content. Each drawing tool lets you set its size, opacity, and color (which you choose from your color themes or the built-in color picker). Draw also lets you pick trace shapes, including stamp shapes (which can be double-tapped to “stamp” onto the canvas) and any shapes saved from Capture or the old Shapes CC app.
SEND TO: Photoshop on the desktop (raster) or Illustrator (as filled vector shapes à la the Blob Brush, not editable paths), publish to Behance as a work in progress, copy to the device’s clipboard, or save to Creative Cloud.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad/Android
ICN_CompADOBE COMP CC
Use Adobe Comp CC to quickly mock up websites, print layouts, and mobile apps. Think of it as a digital cocktail napkin where you can start to jot down ideas when creativity strikes. Create shapes quickly and crudely with your finger—a quick, lopsided circle, for example—and Comp will create a perfect vectorized circle shape that you can move, re-size, and manipulate the stroke and fill on. Creating an image frame is as simple as drawing an “X,” and a text frame is created with a simple line and dot combo. You can also add text frames in pre-sized blocks of headers, subheads, and body text, complete with placeholder text that keeps the frame filled, even as you re-size the frame. Further lay out your design by bringing in assets from your device’s camera roll or camera, Creative Cloud assets (including those from Lightroom, Draw, Line, and Sketch), the Creative Cloud Market, or Adobe Stock. The biggest features, in my humble opinion, are having access to all of the TypeKit fonts and being able to export to your desktop apps in native format. That means sending it to Photoshop as a layered document with Smart Objects and editable text, Illustrator as vector and raster images, and InDesign complete with text frames, image frames, editable text, and vector images. It’s disappointing that vector images from Adobe Draw are still being converted to PNG on the way to InDesign, and I still hold out hope this changes in a future version.
SEND TO: InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, or publish on Behance as a work in progress.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad/iPhone

STORYTELLING AND SHARING

ICN_ClipADOBE PREMIERE CLIP
Adobe Premiere Clip is a mobile video editing program that offers the first steps in putting your video story together. Start by bringing in video clips from your device’s camera or camera roll, or by importing assets from Lightroom collections or your Creative Cloud files. Next, drag and drop to re-arrange those clips, trim them, assign a specific clip length to still shots and optionally zoom in with a Ken Burns-like effect. Add titles, transitions, and effects and overlay one of the Looks from the Capture app—or built-in Looks—and finish by adding a soundtrack. When exported to Premiere Pro on the desktop, all clips and tracks are intact, available for further editing.
SEND TO: Premiere Pro, Creative Cloud, Camera Roll, YouTube, publish to the Adobe Premiere Clip online gallery.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad/Android
ICN_SlateADOBE SLATE
Adobe Slate provides a simple way to create and tell a story with pictures, text, and pre-built themes, then share the finished story easily with everyone. The app has been available for a while as an online app, but is now available for the iPad. Import images for your story from your device’s photos, Dropbox, Lightroom, from anywhere on your hard drive (web version), and even search on the web for images under a Creative Commons license. There are nearly a dozen themes available and all formatting is controlled by the theme, without room for much customization. Add images, captions, pullquotes, headlines and format how images appear onscreen. Slate’s “glideshow” is particularly-fun, if not a little queasy-making. When your story is ready to be told, it’s just a matter of hitting the publish button.
SEND TO: Adobe Slate gallery page, directly to social media, share directly with custom URL.
COMPATIBILITY: iPad and web interface
ICN_VoiceADOBE VOICE
Adobe Voice is an app that makes it simple to create an animated presentation with voice-over. Unlike well-entrenched business presentation tools we’ve know for years, Adobe Voice forgoes the “build by slide” model. With Voice, you record a part of your story, then bring in images to help move that story along visually. Start with one of the included structures like selling a product, telling a story, or creating an invitation and use the prompts to guide your content (prompts include “Challenge,” “Call to Action,” “Resolution,” “Reward,” and “How You Can Help”) then choose one of 32 themes for your presentation’s look. Tap and hold the microphone to say what you need to say, then bring in images from Lightroom, Creative Cloud files, the device’s camera or camera roll, Dropbox, or even your Facebook account. In addition, you can search for icons to further help illustrate your tale. All of the images are affected by the chosen theme and integrate well into the overall look of your story.
SEND TO: Camera Roll and the Voice public gallery via the provided link, share on social media.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad
ICN_BehanceICN_BehanceDisplay2BEHANCE AND BEHANCE DISPLAY
Behance is Adobe’s online portfolio service, though it’s much more than that. Not only is it an online showcase of your completed work, but a place to put works in progress to receive feedback. Behance provides a network of creatives off of which you can bounce ideas, and also lend support and feedback to other creatives. Many of the mobile apps can share directly to your Behance portfolio to get that feedback even quicker. Behance Display is a separate mobile app to easily display your Behance portfolio, without the need to be online. Nothing is more frustrating than to attempt to show someone your work, only to encounter connection issues. Behance Display’s customization settings let you decide what to show—and what to hide—so that you can custom tailor your work to each potential client. Using AirPlay, you can easily display your Behance portfolio on a client’s Apple TV-enabled display, making it easy to show several people all at once. Adobe very recently introduced Adobe Portfolio, which is an online portfolio builder in the easy-to-build-with-no-coding style of Squarespace. You can create a customized portfolio using the provided themes, which can integrate with your Behance account. It’s very much a newborn app, so I’ve only given it a cursory glance, but some of the feedback has included complaints of having little to no classification and category drill down ability (like having a “logos” subset in your “illustration” category), no way to upload video, and not many themes that would showcase specific types of work. Keep in mind, the paint is still wet on this app, and Adobe will undoubtedly continue to make refinements in the months to come.
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad/Android

CREATIVE CLOUD

ICN_CCCREATIVE CLOUD MOBILE APP
The Creative Cloud mobile app is a repository of all of your Creative Cloud assets. From the app, you can view your Lightroom photo collections as well as any of your stored CC assets. All of your CC Libraries and their assets—from shapes to color themes to text styles to brushes to looks—can be viewed by individual library. You can also directly add assets from your device’s camera or camera roll and further organize by creating new folders and moving the files among them. The search field makes it easier to find some files (though not all assets are discoverable, unfortunately).
COMPATIBILITY: iPhone/iPad/Android
ICN_TutorialsCREATIVE CLOUD TUTORIALS
After looking at all of the mobile apps here, you’re probably ready to check out a few in more detail. Luckily, Adobe has curated tutorial videos for many of the mobile (and desktop) apps in their CC Tutorials app. On the opening screen, you’ll see a list of “Popular Products” icons along the bottom. You’ll need to scroll to the right and choose “More” to see the full list, including “Mobile Apps.” Under the “Essentials” heading, you’ll find tutorials available for many of the products discussed above. Video comes from Adobe’s MAX conference, Adobe TV, Lynda.com, and other well-respected sources. If you want to learn how Creative Cloud works, there’s even a tutorial set for that, but my favorite is the rundown of new features for each release of the CC apps. The app keeps track of which videos you’ve watched, whether within the mobile app, or via an app’s welcome screen (as long as you were signed into your Adobe ID at the time).
COMPATIBILITY: iPad/iPhone

Whew! I know that’s a lot to take in, but hopefully this information will spark ideas on an app—or three—that could become part of your creative workflow. Mobile is the way many of us are going and I see these apps getting more powerful with mobile apps and devices in general becoming real powerhouses in how I get my work done. What about you? Do you have a favorite Adobe mobile app? Let us know in the comments which ones you’re using to bring your creative projects to life.

Erica Gamet has been involved in the graphics industry for over 35 years. She is a speaker, writer, trainer, and content creator focusing on Adobe InDesign, Apple Keynote, and varied production topics. She is a regular presenter at CreativePro Week, regular contributor to CreativePro Magazine, and has spoken at Canada’s ebookcraft, Adobe MAX, and Making Design in Oslo, Norway. Find Erica online at the CreativePro YouTube channel, CreativeLive.com and through her own YouTube channel. When she isn’t at her computer she’s probably daydreaming about travel or living in a Nordic noir landscape.

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  • Wow … fantastic recap, Erica. I’m bookmarking this one.

    • Erica Gamet says:

      Thanks, Anne-Marie! I have found Voice and Slate to be way more addicting than I had anticipated, and can’t stop making (mostly stupid) stories with them!

  • Julie says:

    Great article, again!!! I was a bit confused as to how to make use of these mobile apps, some seem redundant of others, etc… but I kind of now get that it has a lot to do with the assets and libraries, which I really need to research further!! thanks for the headstart…

    • Erica Gamet says:

      Glad to help. It can get confusing which app does which, for sure. I like that Adobe has combined the Capture apps into one. Fewer to keep track of!

  • Saphire says:

    Fantastic article! Files created in Adobe Comp cc can be export to desktop apps in native format, but is it possible to export it from desktop to mobile app in native format? As I want to send an Indesign layout file (All editable with text frames, image frames, editable text, and vector images, etc…) to one of the mobile apps, which one I can use? As I tried to send it to different mobile apps and it opened as a flattened file not editable. Can you advice please? Cheers

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