Quick – grab your iPhone and take a picture of something nearby — the remote control on your coffee table, a pair of Warby Parkers, anything, really. Now take that photo and turn it into a fully editable vector graphic that can be used by a host of drawing and artistic programs across your iPhone, iPad and Mac, all via the magic of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
That’s precisely what Adobe Shape CC does, one of a host of new apps available on your iOS device to make capturing the real world much easier than ever before.
Here’s a quick video rundown of how it works.
https://youtu.be/d0LTzbksUiU
As you can see, principal Adobe designer Geoff Dowd takes a picture of his boss’ glasses as well as one of the Adobe Max logo and turns them into useable vector shapes. Vectors let you resize and reuse the artwork in a variety of ways across tons of different artistic projects.
Now, when you have a project that calls for a slick-looking shape, you don’t have to spend hours re-creating a common object; just snap a picture of it and import into any one of your Adobe products with a click or tap. It’s that simple.
Adobe also released a few other free-to-download mobile apps that will let you pull these vector images into, including Adobe Illustrator Draw and Adobe Illustrator Line, apps that let you use your stylus or finger to draw curves and/or straight line artwork, then export to Creative Cloud for use in all your Adobe products. There’s also Adobe Brush, which lets you capture any photo and turn it into a digital art brush for use in Photoshop, Illustrator or Adobe Sketch.
It’s a good time to be an Adobe user, for sure, with a host of new, amazing apps that use the power of your digital devices and the ubiquitous cloud to deliver unprecedented control over your digital artwork using the world around you. Check out these free apps in the App Store today.
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
5 responses to “Real life becomes a vector with Adobe’s Shape CC”
amazing! love this.
I’ve been using this app for a couple days now and it’s pretty great. I just haven’t figured out how to get it on illustrator
Have you managed to get it to upload the images to Creative Cloud yet? Mine do not appear there yet.
It can’t be very good if it does not work as advertised. Adobe does not deserve your money. Try Affinity Designer. It’s only fifty bucks on the app store.
Not sure about illustrator, but in photoshop: windows/libraries (then it takes a few seconds to load). Then its useable. (or you can sync via the creative cloud app).