Up Your Photoshop Game with Adobe Capture

Make your own design assets wherever you are.

Did you know that you can make Photoshop brushes, get font suggestions, and grab color themes all with your phone or tablet? These are just a few of the things you can do with Adobe Capture, a mobile app that lets you transform the world around you into assets for all your favorite desktop workflows. Because, let’s face it — sometimes you don’t want to sit in front of your computer or you just don’t have it with you when you’re traveling. Adobe Capture’s magic lies in its ability to take images and turn them into totally new and unique assets.

If you haven’t tried Adobe Capture, check out this brief intro to get you started. You’ll find that once you start playing with the app, it’s hard to put down. You might be wondering where all these awesome things go after you save them. Where do all those shapes, patterns, type samples, materials, and colors go? Thanks to the power of Creative Cloud, every asset you make gets sent to a CC Library automatically. Think of CC Libraries as a place for you to organize, view, and share your creative assets.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to make a simple design in Photoshop using color, brushes, and type from Adobe Capture, and how to access what you make in CC Libraries.

Getting started with color themes

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a completely harmonized color theme for projects; colors aren’t created in a bubble and are intimately tied to each other. When you’re deciding what colors to use, one solid way to ensure you’re picking the right ones is to use Adobe Capture. You can create color themes two ways: either use an image you already have saved and grab a color theme from there, or, if you happen to see something out in the world that has an interesting color scheme, just take out your phone and snap a photo of it to automatically start the color theme-making process. The difference between a color theme and color palette is minute, but important to note. Color themes are sets of five colors that are specifically tuned for optimum color harmony. Color palettes are a more general set of swatches that can be unlimited in number, since those are not automatically harmonized to work together.

Select the Colors module within the app, gather your colors from your image, adjust as needed, and save to library.

Getting started with brushes

To make a repeat brush from a drawing or object, select the Brushes module within Adobe Capture and take a photo of your brush asset. Use the slider to adjust transparency around your asset, edit your brush as needed, and save to your library.

Getting started with type

Find interesting type out in the wild and want to find a similar font for your project? Use the Type module to find fonts from Typekit CC and generate character styles for your project. Simply frame the type under (within the blue box), and Adobe Capture will search for similar fonts. Select your desired font, adjust as needed, and save the character style to your library.

Using CC Libraries, Adobe Capture collects all of your generated assets and saves them for use in many of your favorite CC desktop apps. These assets are available anywhere, anytime. To find a full list of compatible apps for Adobe Capture assets, see Adobe Capture’s FAQ page.

To use your collected assets in Photoshop, open the Libraries window by going to Window > Libraries on the top menu. Select your desired library from the dropdown and start using your assets to finish your project.

For more information about CC Libraries, check out the CC Libraries overview page.

Want to share your assets from Adobe Capture with a colleague? Within the Adobe Capture app, tap on the three dots in the upper-right corner and tap on “Collaborate.” From there, invite others via email to view or edit the library.

In just a few easy steps, you can be well on your way to making unique projects in Photoshop by using the handy Adobe Capture mobile app. Check out more ways to use Adobe Capture, as well as the desktop extension we recently released, and stay tuned for more mobile-to-desktop tutorials. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below! We’d love to hear from you.