How to Use Adobe Mobile Apps to Improve Your Adobe CC Creations

The Adobe mobile apps found on both iOS and Android help users create amazing projects on their computers. Photos taken with the phone’s camera and the Adobe Capture CC app are turned into a texture usable in any Adobe Creative Cloud app on a computer. The app also finds the colors in a scene, a room or an image. Those colors can be used to design a nice layout in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. Other apps like Adobe Comp CC can start a layout project using a photo taken on an iPhone. Users can add text and then export it to Photoshop to make a beautiful magazine cover or a flier for their businesses.

The Best of the Adobe Mobile Apps

To get started, head over to Adobe’s website to find the Adobe Mobile apps. You can also search your device’s app store. We won’t cover all of them, but will focus instead on the following mobile apps:

• Adobe Capture CC – captures images, colors and textures for use in layout and image applications
• Adobe Comp CC – create layout designs using photos on your phone and then share with desktop
• Adobe Illustrator Draw – create vector based free-form drawings on iPad Pro with Pencil or other mobile devices and the use them in Illustrator CC or other applications
• Adobe Photoshop Fix – work on a photo taken on your phone and finish it on a desktop
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – capture images using a camera, then import them into the phone or tablet to create collections that sync to online and desktop versions of Lightroom
• Adobe Photoshop Mix – combine images or work creatively with single images and then finish on a computer
• Adobe Photoshop Sketch – draw on the phone and finish on the computer
• Adobe Premiere Clip – put together a rough cut of a video using video capture on your phone or imported from a camera and then finish it in Adobe Premiere CC
• Adobe Preview CC – create a website or layout design with a client on a phone or tablet and then finish it on a desktop using Photoshop CC

That’s just a sampling of the three pages of Adobe mobile apps on the page linked above the list. The above video shows some of the features added to Lightroom mobile in the last year.

Start on the Phone with Adobe Mobile Apps

It seems counterintuitive to think that we should start a project on a phone or tablet that we plan to finish on a Mac or PC, but many of the Adobe Mobile Apps intend for the user to do just that. Let’s look at a few examples.

Imagine that a designer visits a beautiful park with lovely natural colors including bright freshly cut grass, beautifully cultivated rose bushes, and incredible trees. The artist can pull out their iPhone and take a photo of the scenes and then use something like Adobe Capture mobile app to take advantage of the color scheme of the scene or the textures of some flower petals, the grass mowing pattern or amazing bark on an old craggy tree. The video below shows how Adobe Capture works.

Capture does four things:

• Brush tips – take a photo of a flower in the park and transform it into a brush to use in Photoshop or Illustrator or in the Adobe Sketch mobile apps.
• Color schemes – use the Color tool to grab color and create a color scheme for an InDesign desktop for a magazine cover.
• Looks for videos – grab the colors from a scene and then use Looks to add them to videos to give it a unique look based on the colors from our photo.
• Patterns – grab an image of an object and then create a pattern from that object to use as the background of a layout in Photoshop or a website in Dreamweaver (see image below).
• Vector shapes – use the shape feature to take a photo of an object and turn it into a vector shape and Capture transforms it into a Vector shape that we can use in a project in Adobe Illustrator.

After creating the above in Capture, the app saves them to the Adobe Creative Cloud that syncs to desktop apps and other mobile apps. This makes them useful anywhere that you can use color schemes, brushes, shapes, vector images and patterns.

While the above focuses primarily on artists and layout professionals, photographers and videographers can also use mobile apps to jumpstart their desktop or notebook Adobe projects.

Fire up Adobe Lightroom Mobile and import your photos. You can either take the images already on your iPhone or import them to an iPhone or iPad with the SD card to Lightening adapter that Apple sells for $29. Lightroom also includes a nice built-in camera app that photographers can use to take photos.

The Lightroom app can organize the photos with Collections. Edit them with great touch-based editing features. The photos and edits will then sync to the Adobe Creative Cloud for use in the web-based version of Lightroom or the computer version of Lightroom.

Adobe Premiere Clip doesn’t give videographers a full-featured video editing tool. However, they can grab video from their phones and begin a project by trimming and clipping scenes. Finally, syncing them to the computer to do the finished product on the Windows or Mac version of Adobe Premiere.

This gives you the basic idea of starting your projects on the mobile app. Adobe Creative Cloud users don’t just have to think about using a keyboard, Wacom stylus and mouse for input. Make use of the touchscreen phones and tablets that we own already. You can use their cameras, the Apple Pencil or Samsung Galaxy Note 7 pen to work on a drawing or handwritten project. Sign documents on your phone and send them to Adobe Acrobat or just send them back to the person needing your signature.

To learn more about Adobe Creative Cloud, see Adobe’s website.