Are You Still Using Procreate? You Need to Watch This!

just gonna come right out and say it. Adobe Fresco is better than Procre. Now it's gonna make some of you mad and you can let me know in the comments, but it's just true. But now that I've gotten that out of the way, I will say that I have nothing against procreate. I think Procre is a great app and if you enjoy using procreate and it works for what you do, then stick with it. But what I will say is that a lot of people are sleeping on Fresco and don't know about a lot of the features that it ha

s that really makes it an amazing application. In this video, I'm gonna tell you all the reasons why I prefer Adobe Fresco as my drawing application of choice and why I think it's better than procreate in a number of different ways. As a professional illustrator for over 15 years now, I've worked with a lot of big clients like Nike, Google, Nickelodeon, Microsoft, and tons more. For most of those years, I didn't use Fresco or procreate because they didn't exist yet. There was a period before I s

tarted using Adobe Fresco full-time that I was using procreate for the majority of my work and probably spent a couple years using Procreate every single day. As I mentioned, I think it's, uh, a really great app. I think the user interface is really good. It's very natural and it does a lot of things really well. So if I think procreate is so great, why do I think Fresco is better? Well, the first main issue is Vector artwork. Adobe Fresco allows for the integration of both vector workflows and

raster workflows. If you don't know what that means, I have a whole video about it. You can check that up here after, after you watch this video. But just to quickly explain it, raster artwork is made up of tiny colored pixels that are pushed together to create an image vector. Artwork is made up of magical math in points. As a result, vector artwork is infinitely scalable and is wide, is used for logos and, and just anything that needs to be produced at, at a tiny scale and look perfect on a bi

llboard or, uh, the side of a building or just whatever, whatever you need to do, that's enormous. You need vector art for that. In the past, creating Vector artwork was not the best experience. Vector artwork in Fresco is just as natural as if you were drawing with any other brush. In fact, it's easier in some ways because of some little cheat codes that Fresco has built in that makes that process even better. One of the reasons why I love the fact that Fresco incorporates raster workflows with

vector workflows is that when I have to provide vector artwork for a client project or, or something that I'm doing, that sketching process is something that I can't do in Vector artwork. Uh, it's just too, uh, final for me. I don't know what it is. I, when I'm sketching, I need it to look like a pencil sketch on paper so I can do my sketch with a pencil brush in Fresco, get it the way I want it to be, and then start a new layer on top of that. It's a vector layer and do my tightened up vector

line work. And then when I'm finished creating that vector artwork, I can easily send it over to Adobe Illustrator if I need to clean it up or modify it or do whatever else, or I can just send it right from there using, uh, A PDF or something like that. And since I'm talking about vector artwork, I can't not mention my favorite feature, which is the vector trimming feature, which allows you to just get rid of extra lines that you don't want so that you can draw really, really sharp, crisp corner

s and just, you know, do things very quickly and smoothly. It's just the best feature. As someone who previously worked as a graphic designer and did countless logos and spent hours and hours and Adobe Illustrator, just like fine tuning things with the pen tool. If I had this vector trimming in Fresco back then, uh, it would've been a happy camper, a happy drawing on an iPad and a tent camper. Another reason Fresco is a superior application for me is it's Adobe Creative Cloud integration. This m

ay seem obvious because it's an Adobe application, but this actually is really important to me and makes my life a lot easier. As an illustrator who does this for a living, I'm constantly having to send files to clients and do edits and revisions and stuff like that. Adobe files are the industry standard, like Photoshop files or Illustrator files working in Fresco. I'm already working in a Photoshop file and I know you may be thinking, Hey, you can export a PSD from procreate. Yes you can and th

at's great, and I used to do that, but the difference is in Fresco, I don't need to do any exporting or importing or anything like that. The the file is the file. So when I'm working in Fresco, I save that file, I go over to my computer, open up Photoshop, that file's there, I can open it, I can send it, I can make changes in Photoshop and then go back to my iPad and they're already there updated. So that back and forth workflow is so seamless and so convenient. I'm not having to import and expo

rt and duplicate files like I used to have to do when using procreate. I mentioned before in the vector section that when I'm creating Vector artwork, I can open that directly in Illustrator. That process is very seamless as well. No importing or exporting. I just simply click on the option to open it up an illustrator and it opens up an illustrator. As I mentioned earlier, I worked for many, many years in Photoshop prior to anything with an iPad. And over that time I accumulated lots of brushes

and all of those Photoshop brushes just work naturally in Fresco. And this is huge for a lot of people. Photoshop being this like industry standard for so long there's been just millions and millions of brushes developed. And aside from these everyday benefits of that creative Cloud integration, there's also little things like the Adobe Capture app where I can just take out my phone and capture a color palette or something and have that immediately be available in Fresco when I go over to my iP

ad. The next big reason I prefer Fresco is because of its motion features. Although you can do simple frame by frame animation in procreate, Adobe Fresco takes us to an entirely new level, allowing you to have different timelines for every layer within your document. And also its motion path features that can be combined with Frame by Frame. You may be sitting at your computer screen screaming at me. What about Procreate Dreams? Procreate Dreams is an amazing animation application. I've been pla

ying around with it, I've been enjoying it and having fun. I have a lot more to learn with it, but it is a full on animation application. And although that's amazing for a lot of different people for the kind of stuff that I do, like creating looping animations that I've done for social media advertising campaigns for different clients like McDonald's, Adidas, uh, under Armour, those kind of looping simple animation sort of things are a lot easier in Adobe Fresco because it automates a lot of th

ose features and you can do it one layer at a time and it just break things down in a, a really simple way. And in addition to that, the drawing experience is just better for me in Adobe Fresco than it is in Procreate dreams because the drawing in Procreate Dreams is a little bit limited compared to full on procreate or or Fresco for that matter. And on a side note, if you're someone who's like starting out and wants to just experiment a little bit with motion or animation, but you're overwhelme

d by something like Procreate Dreams, fresco makes it really approachable since there's a different timeline for every layer, you could just start with something really simple and small and then build up your confidence and then go from there. For example, with this little animation, I was able to break it down into layers where I started with the pedals going around and I made that sequence. And then once I had that sequence, I could go onto another layer and then just make the leg and foot fol

low along with that sequence and then I could just keep moving until it was all completed together. You can just go through one thing at a time and just play around and experiment a little bit more without having to like fully plan things out. For example, if you were trying to do simple frame by frame animation and procreate, there's only this one timeline and it's tied directly to your layers. Let's say you animated a sequence and then you're like, oh, I wish I had some clouds floating by in t

he background. You would have to go in and then add those into each of those layers and it could get very complicated. Let's say you wanted those clouds to travel at a different speed than you know what was happening in in a foreground. This, uh, opens up a whole other can of worms where you'd have to like duplicate that full sequence and then start putting the clouds in there. In Adobe Fresco, you could have those clouds on a separate layer and just change the speed or the length of that path a

nd it will automatically work and just a, a second dramatically faster. And with the motion path features, you can just take anything you've drawn and set it on a path and have it move and have just tons of control over that path in the way it moves. You can add multiples, you could combine frame by frame animation and then set that onto a path. The motion tools are just far, far beyond what you can do in regular procreate and to some extent they're far more advanced than what you can do in Proc

reate Dreams easily. And again, that's not to say that Procreate Dreams isn't amazing. That feature in Procreate Dreams where you can sort of like act out the motion is amazing. Fresco does have something sort of similar where you can control the speed of the motion path with how fast you draw, but I'll give it to Procreate Dreams on that feature. It's a good one, but the simplicity of emotion and Adobe Fresco can't be expressed any easier than with this path in place thing. I forget what it's a

ctually called, but you just can click on path and then control all these things and have your object do all different kinds of things without having to do any manual animation at all. And on top of all that, you can animate within a clipping mask. Think about the possibilities there. What about some more stuff? Both Fresco and procreate have the ability to snap lines and snap shapes to get clean smooth lines, but Fresco takes that a step further by adding in a whole bunch of different drawing a

ids like a ruler that you can move all over your canvas and rotate it. This is super helpful. And they also have shapes in the drawing aids, things where you can use this to really kind of control your curves or you know, draw in perfect shapes wherever you want them. What about the multicolor swatch? You can turn anything into a swatch in Adobe fresco and you can even make custom brushes with these swatches and save those and use them in wherever. You can make this like crazy looking 3D line so

fast using a multicolor swatch. Or you could just take some weird little drawing like this little taco guy, turn it into a stamp and just put them everywhere and fill a whole page. You can make all kinds of custom brushes like this and then stave them all and have just a bunch of multicolor swatch things. It's a really handy tool. What about live brushes? I haven't even talked about live brushes. If you're a painter, live brushes are incredible. The live brushes actually work like real life wat

ercolor and oil brushes where they stay wet, you can reactivate them, you can paint with actual water to like blend things together. It is a magical, magical thing that I don't ever use 'cause I'm not a painter, but I like, uh, showing people them because it's so, it's so wild to me. You could mix water and oil. You can't do that in real life. That's magic. I mean, maybe you can, I don't know, but you can do it easily here without making a mess. You don't have to use that. Those chemicals to cle

an your oil brushes. Fresco is saving your life. All right, now we're in the rapid fire section of just things because they didn't fit into other categories. Adobe Fresco allows you to easily add an color adjustment to your whole document without having to do it on individual layers. And then you could also make those as a clipping mask if you wanted it to be on an individual layer. So lots of flexibility there, depending on your iPad spec. procreate will limit the amount of layers that you can

have in your documents. Uh, fresco does not do that. You can have layers until your iPad catches on fire. Procre is only available on the iPad, but Fresco is available on the iPad, but it's also available on Windows devices. Pretty cool. Can you even use Fresco on your iPhone? Not all the features, but I find it handy if I'm somewhere and I need to access a file or like send someone something that I was working on, I can just open it up on my phone, export the file and send it off to the client.

Very convenient. What about pricing? Pricing is a big one because I feel like I'm constantly having to, uh, answer this question or correct people. When they say Fresco's so expensive, it costs 9, 9, 9 a month. Fresco does not cost 9, 9, 9 a month for most people. The free version of Fresco. And yes, you can get Fresco for free for most people, the free version of Fresco is all you'll ever need. But if you want the premium version, which gives you more creative cloud space and the ability to im

port whatever brushes that you want to do, it costs 9.99 per year, not month. All you gotta do is go into the App store, look for Fresco, and you'll see I can't entertain the idea of that being expensive for the value you get with Adobe Fresco. Nine nine nine per year. Literally nothing costs 9, 9 9 a year. You can't even get one meal for 9, 9 9, let alone something that you can earn money with. I'm not saying you have to use, you have to earn money with it, but if you're just a hobbyist, you ca

n get the free version. Procreate is 9 99 once one time, and that's it. Two other random cool features. You can import a color palette from a photo automatically, or it doesn't have to be a photo, it could be, uh, another illustration or something like that. Or maybe you drew something and you wanna reuse the color palette. You just import that photo and it'll automatically generate a color palette from that photo. In addition to that, you can also auto generate a perspective grid from an image

that's pretty neat. I decided to make this video because one of my earliest videos is actually a Procreate versus Fresco video. It's somehow is one of my most popular videos on the channel, which not that crazy about 'cause it's an old video and the ability to draw. It's not very good. A lot of things have changed since I made that video. A lot of people still correct me on a regular basis about features that it's actually usually all procreate features that actually exist now. Uh, that I didn't

include the video. Most of that video is a little outdated, but there are still some good information in there. So if you want to check it out, I will link it here. You can see how far I've come as a video maker or maybe maybe not, but uh, the bar is very low on that video. If you're one of the people who is a procreate user and is somehow still watching this, well, what do you think? Are you interested in trying Fresco? I'm I'm curious if not, what is it about procreate that you love so much?

If this video did get you excited about trying Fresco, I'm here to help. I have a big playlist full of Adobe Fresco tips and tutorials. I'll pop that up on the screen too. Dive in there and you'll be ready to go. All right, good talk.