Menus are tucked away up top or down below giving you the maximum amount of real estate in the middle to work with. People who are serious about software should make their own hardware. They have features such as integration with Adobe’s Behance, a social network for artists who like to show off their work; and Kuler, a way to share color palettes. Adobe Line, meanwhile, enables precise drafting-style drawing for those looking to keep things tidy. (One of my favorites goes for $35.) Android. Designed to work with Adobe apps such as Illustrator Draw and Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad, the latter isn't just any old ruler – it can act as a smart input device for an app's shape-drawing tools. It only has one input button on the side that's designed to work as a menu function in the Adobe apps, unlike its main rivals that have two. (Adobe provided me with pre-release versions of the hardware and software, and loaned me an iPad to use with them.). It sits on the left side of the screen–where I kept accidentally brushing it with my palm and messing up my work. This particular piece of software, along with Wacom's Bamboo Paper (both free), are the closest options to Adobe's Sketch, but the accompanying styli pack a much beefier tip, so you'll need to take that into account in addition to the monetary savings. I was able to keep things color-coordinated from the start, and could grab existing assets for more accurate previews. There are two cons that ultimately hamper the experience: durability and price. But for all the ways in which Line and Sketch are nice, they feel unfinished. Thankfully, there's a lipstick-style plastic tube for the Ink stylus, an accessory that allows for both recharging and safekeeping. Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, You know the ones: rounded, rubber-tip affairs that feel more like a marker than a pencil or fine-point pen. Adobe says it’s planning to open up Ink and Slide so that other companies which develop graphics software can enable the hardware in their apps. Maybe Technologizer Should Be a Newsletter, Amazon’s Fire Phone Event, as Tweeted By Me. Think of Ink and Slide as digital versions of a pen and a ruler. It handles copy/paste functions too, and that clipboard can be accessed across devices. First, Adobe Sketch will be the option for free-form drawing with Ink and Slide. Ultimately, of course, what you really want is for Ink and Slide to work in any iPad app which might benefit from them–including excellent non-Adobe offerings such as Paper, Procreate, and Sketchbook Pro. When charging, that light becomes a colored ring that indicates the charge status on the case itself. This, too, offers palm rejection, an eraser tip and fingertip blending. Please refresh the page and try again. Adobe's first foray into hardware includes a highly capable set of accessories for sketching on the go, but its great design and great companion apps come with a somewhat steep price. The Pro Pen, by the way, is meant to pair with Wacom's pricey, professional-grade pen displays, pen tablets and hybrid devices from the outfit, but here, the precise nib tip is replaced with a larger rubber end that I'm not too fond of. Sign up below to get the latest from Creative Bloq, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox! Keep that in mind. This handful of touch gestures allows you to pick up the pace when drawing, without the need to switch to an eraser to correct a misplaced mark or navigate the canvas with a separate side-rail control. Adobe Photoshop can now identify 'shopped images, Adobe's Fresco painting app is now available on iPhone, Photoshop's new AI features include neural filters and sky replacement. In both Line and Sketch, you can move Slide around to arrange an on-screen line, circle, square or triangle–you cycle between multiple choices by pushing a button on the device–and then size it to your liking and trace it with the stylus to get a shape which simultaneously looks perfect and if it were drawn by hand. Your ratings help us make the buyer’s guide better for everyone. As the name suggests, it packs the same tech and skinny tip as Ink in the first third-party stylus to access CC settings. First, Adobe Sketch will be the option for free-form drawing with Ink and Slide. Right now, Ink and Slide can only be used inside the two free iPad apps that Adobe is also launching today. Additionally, Ink packs Adonit's Pixelpoint tech that allows for a skinnier tip with "thousands" of levels of pressure sensitivity. It feels great in your hand, with your fingers sitting nicely along the angles. Sure, most drawing apps allow you to select a thin line from the options menu, but fine strokes with a stubby rubber stylus never felt comfortable to me, and it's the main reason I haven't really dove into tablet sketching. To make the most of the iPad's touchscreen, both apps also feature handy gestures for things like undo, a history scrubber and both pan and zoom. The same indicator can even be customized for a particular user so that in an office full of mobile sketch artists, you aren't picking up someone else's device. Adobe's Sketch and Line make it much easier to get tablet sketches into desktop apps like Photoshop and Illustrator quickly. All rights reserved. Tip To confirm that the SMART Ink plugin is installed, go to Adobe Acrobat Reader and select Help > About Third-Party Plug-Ins > About SMART Ink plugin . Once you turn Bluetooth on, you can pair Ink with the iPad from Adobe's own Sketch and Line apps (more on those in the software section). Heck, you can even go full-screen and hide nearly all of the tools if you really need to get at the edges. Thanks to its partnership with Adobe, Adonit has a Creative Cloud-connected stylus of its own, the Jot Touch with Pixelpoint. It also works only with iPads and is fine-tuned for the company's Paper (no, not that Paper) app that was recently retooled for iOS 7. The gizmo is a little aluminum-topped bar, around 4 inches long, on two dinky legs. Spending $200 on them right now is a major investment in a vision in progress. Even though Line and Sketch have very similar toolboxes which let you choose an art utensil and a color, Line places its version at the bottom of the screen, and Sketch puts it at the top. Actually, if we're getting technical, the Ink stylus will work with other OSes now, but just as a regular ol' capacitive stylus. © 2020 Verizon Media. Line lets you customize the size and opacity of its drawing tools; Sketch does not, which limits the variety of effects you can get out of it. Ink is an ambitious new product in an existing category. There's no indication that these bits of software are already in the works, so once the decision is made, it could take some time before you get to use these tools on an Android or Windows slate. Adobe says that it created two separate apps to avoid feature bloat; it’s a noble-sounding goal, but most of the few unique features which Sketch has could be folded into Line without overloading it. Whether they will choose to do so remains to be seen–especially since Adobe’s Ink competes with multiple other high-end styli which require their own special software support, such as Pogo Connect, FiftyThree’s Pencil, and Adonit’s Jot Touch. © You. It also gives the two a premium look, especially compared to other stylii, most of which are fashioned entirely out of plastic. BA1 1UA. Creative Bloq is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Ink and Slide are available as a package for $200 from Adobe.com. You don’t need to spend anything like that to get a solid iPad stylus. Adobe's Ink & Slide offers both a state-of-the-art stylus, and a 21st century take on the good-old straight edge. Another useful example would be interior designers using the app to plan a space by applying the built-in Herman Miller furniture packs. Limited app compatibility The build quality of the Ink (the stylus) and Slide is solid enough and it feels great to use . If you've encountered similar software in the past, you can expect a comparable UI arrangement here. The bottom line on Ink and Slide: They’re impressive, polished pieces of hardware already, but they’ll be far more compelling if Adobe beefs up Ink and Slide and third-party app developers support the devices. Wacom's Intuos Creative Stylus is another iOS-only tablet pen that touts palm rejection and 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity (the Ink recognizes "thousands"). The end snaps magnetically into the cap where there's a micro-USB port for charging. It's here that you can also choose from three palm-rejection settings, toggle Slide detection and configure the LED color. Today, the final versions go on sale as Adobe Ink and Slide. Which brings up a question: Why does Sketch exist at all? Actually, the pen fits beautifully in the hand. As big as Adobe is in the software space, the company only announced last spring that it planned to dive into hardware, starting with a cloud-connected stylus and a drafting ruler. The larger contact area makes the Creative Stylus feel like just that, a stylus, instead of a more realistic pen-to-paper experience when sketching inside the Bamboo Paper app. Ink takes about an hour to fully juice up and is rated for around eight hours, allowing you to get through a full workday before plugging in again. Adobe, however, gave Ink a tip which uses Pixelpoint, a technology created by a startup called Adonit, which also uses it in some of its own styli. This means the add-ons match white variants of the iPad Air, iPad mini and fourth-gen iPad well. The drawing toolkit here includes graphite pencil, pen, markers and an eraser. While you can certainly use Ink and Slide without a Creative Cloud account, signing into one brings stored color palettes, Cloud Clipboard, access to saved files and the ability to share via Behance from your tablet. But Adobe isn’t being completely irrational: Other pressure-sensitive styli sell for up to $120 on their own, no equivalent to Slide included. Alongside these two devices, Adobe is introducing three new iPad apps that are "Ink and Slide aware": Photoshop Mix, Sketch and Line. At first blush, Ink’s striking looks–its barrel is a twisted triangle–seem like they might favor form over function. What's more, because they stay connected, I was able to pick up both devices in the morning and immediately resume where I had left off the night before. The only question is whether the company has priced itself out of attracting the curious. Unfortunately, the metal surfaces here scuff about as easily as Apple's devices, too. The whole process is quick and I never encountered any snags when trying to get the stylus and tablet ready for work. There's also a grid view for creating sketches with accurate perspective -- something perhaps a package designer would fancy. What matters even more than the shape of an iPad stylus’s barrel is the shape of its tip. In the end, though, Adobe has built a somewhat tempting window into Creative Cloud for those eager to start projects on an iPad. When Adobe offered the first look at Slide, the short ruler had a collection of buttons on its top for each bank of shapes for straight-line drawing.