Project Gemini announced - Adobe reveals its Procreate competitor raster and vector drawing app for the iPad

Oct 25, 2018

Photo by MacStories

Along with details about the forthcoming Photoshop for iPad, Adobe has announced another brand new iPad app coming soon, called Project Gemini. Revealed by Kyle T. Webster and Eric Snowden, the iPad app will pair pen and touch hardware with professional tools and a streamlined, easy-to-use interface:

“Today we announced Project Gemini—a focused new app focused specifically on drawing and painting. Building on Photoshop’s powerful brush engine, this new app combines powerful Photoshop brushes, precise and scalable vector brushes, and an entirely new category of groundbreaking Live oil and watercolor brushes – you’ve never seen anything like them. In addition, layers, selections, and masks enable the most modern non-destructive drawing and editing workflows. Most importantly, though, we’ve built Project Gemini with the illustration community.”

Project Gemini has been created with Adobe's users and community in mind. Having heard that they've been asking for professional-level features on mobile, Adobe went back to the drawing board and completely rethought how its tools can be used on mobile devices.The interface has been ‘streamlined’ to make it simpler and focus its tools around drawing and painting – and using touch and your Pencil to control every part of it.

The result is a set of intuitive features that hope to recapture the simple, natural feeling of working with analogue drawing tools. New painting and illustration capabilities, such as new types of paint and painting interactions, open previously impossible digital art opportunities. This includes the ability to mix digital watercolor washes just like the real thing, as well as exclusive brushes and a multiscreen mode. Impressively, Gemini remembers all the colors you use in a piece, giving users a history menu, which collects thumbnails of every shade used, no matter how subtle in variation. It also records each color’s opacity.

Photo by DigitalArts

To make sure that the newly designed brushes have a close resemblance to their “real” counterparts, these tools have been rigorously tested by a selection of skilled artists. On top of that, Project Gemini will also be able to sync with Photoshop on the desktop. This means that drawings you make in the field can be inked or further developed seamlessly when you're back in the studio, without the additional task of transferring files.

Gemini is very much Adobe’s attempt to take on the professional artists most popular drawing and painting iPad apps of choice Procreate – but it also has its sights on Affinity Designer, as it includes vector drawing tools as well as raster ones. Needless to further emphasize the impact Project Gemini will have on our drawing practices in the field. Right now, Procreate provides the most solid experience when creating our initial drawings at the monuments, however it’s not entirely flawless and a little competition could certainly benefit us, the end user.

Project Gemini is currently only available as a pre-release on iOS, with a full release due to take place in 2019. If you'd like to join the Gemini beta when it begins, Adobe has a short survey available for interested testers.

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