Adobe Photoshop Express is a great, free and highly usable iOS app for quickly fixing up your digital photos, but those who have longed for deeper photo editing functionality on iPad have reason to rejoice, though it fades in comparison to the desktop version of Photoshop.
Adobe Photoshop Touch for iOS image courtesy of Adobe
The company at the Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona announced its first six touchscreen-optimized apps–and surely, the first of the new version is almost identical as the Android version, providing the ability to combine photos into layered images and use finger gestures to control familiar Photoshop tools and effects.
In fact, Adobe Photoshop Touch also leverages the iPad 2’s camera to let users fill an area on a layer, and with the Android version, connectivity to the Internet plays a big role, with Google searching and Facebook image sharing directly from within the app. In fact, users can search for images using the integrated Google Image Search, share images to Facebook. Additionally, you can view, share, and sync images across multiple computing devices using the Adobe Creative Cloud hub. Adobe Photoshop Touch also supports AirPrint wireless printing.
“People will be surprised to discover what they can create on the iPad using Photoshop Touch,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media Business Unit, Adobe. “Photoshop Touch blends the magic of Photoshop and its core features with the convenience of a tablet, bringing image-editing power to the fingertips of millions of people.”
Adobe Photoshop Touch is a combination of Adobe Touch Apps, a group of six touchscreen-based apps that is influenced by Adobe’s own Creative Suite (CS) software. Adobe, in coming months, anticipates to roll out more iPad apps later this year including Adobe Collage (for moodboards), Adobe Debut (for presenting an reviewing creative work), Adobe Ideas (for sketching), Adobe Kuler (for exploring color schemes), and Adobe Proto (for Web site and app prototyping).
Apart from numerous other features, it is also compatible with Apple’s iPad 2 devices running iOS 5, and provides “core Photoshop features” in an app that is custom-designed for tablets. Besides, users can incorporate multiple photos (the maximum photo resolution is 1,600-by-1,600) into layered images, blend with sophisticated image effects, even touch up images, and paint to fill in portions of your image project.
Moreover, the iOS apps, which can be downloaded instantly for $9.99 from the iTunes App Store; requires an iPad 2 running iOS 5. Adobe says the iPadification of the rest of the Touch apps is under way.
In addition to built-in tutorials and a relatively intuitive interface, Photoshop Touch delivers a truly full-fledged image editing application (within the hardware limitations of a tablet, of course) and bundles some of the nice tablet-specific enhancements (such as the Scribble Selection Tool for masking out background images).
However, to experience a truly great overview of the product, check out the Adobe Photoshop Touch videos on the Adobe TV site, especially the great tutorials by Russell Brown, Senior Creative Director at Adobe, such as the Scribble Tool tutorial.