Review: Photoshop Touch for iPhone

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It has taken a while for Adobe to get its Photoshop Touch app on the iPhone but now it is here. The Photoshop iPhone app brings core features of Photoshop desktop software to mobile devices and offers similar intuitive, touch-based gestures and features. It costs $4.99 and is designed to work specifically for the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and the iPad mini.

“Mobile phones are increasingly becoming the primary tool for people to take and edit photos,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe.

“Adobe is dedicated to serving our customers’ evolving creative workflow and we heard, loud and clear, that Photoshop fans wanted some core Adobe imaging magic on their smartphones.”

Adobe Photoshop Touch for phone offers powerful new capabilities for smartphone users:

·         Enhance images using popular Photoshop features such as layers, selection tools, filters, tonal and color adjustments

·         Apply effects and add graphical text for endless creative possibilities

·         Edit images as large as 12 megapixels with layers

·         Combine images together quickly using the Scribble Selection feature, and easily refine your selection with the Refine Edge tool

·         Automatically sync images to Adobe Creative Cloud with free 2GB of storage

"Photoshop Touch is a great way to work on an image on my mobile phone. The 400 percent touch zoom and organized interface in Photoshop Touch for phone made enhancing my images fun and easy,” said Brian Yap, creative director, Boxing Clever. “Working with curve adjustments and filters that use slider controls is especially intuitive."

There are a multitude of image editing tools on iOS, but very few will offer the key features that have made Photoshop so successful on the desktop, namely layers and filters as well as the ability to synch with Creative Cloud. As a long time Photoshop user, I welcomed the addition of these features on my iPhone 4S.

Purely designed for touch manipulation, Photoshop Touch for iPhone gives users a quick walkthrough of features and many principles should be easy for any user to figure out.

Within minutes, I was able to take a photo of an Old Fashioned cocktail, quickly add some layers to remove the distracting background and quickly paint around the image of the glass and straw. 

It was also easy to add some text and I was delighted at the choice of fonts available.

There's pros and cons to being to manipulate pixels with such ease on such a small screen.

The pros are that it is easy to put your creative ideas on screen and create good enough mock-ups and simple images.

Photoshop Touch is primarily a touch-up tool for photos that have been taken on your device but it is also a handy design and content creation tool for preliminary studies of designs.

The downside is that you need to rely on your fingers which, when employed on the Retina Display, aren't the most precise tools for the job.

Expect to do a lot of pinching-to zoom, specially if you're using the iPhone 4S which has a smaller 3.5-inch screen

For users who want a simple app that can crop, resize and do simple edits, Photoshop Touch for iPhone might be a little too much but those who are keen on transforming their smartphone photos into more detailed and stunning original artwork should definitely consider what Photoshop has to offer. 

The most remarkable thing Adobe has done is manage to distill the essence of their marquee application into something that runs buttery smooth on a smartphone and without the kilometric drop-down menus. A lot of thought has gone into which features best suit a mobile user and how best to make these accessible. In this respect, Photoshop Touch for the iPhone is tough to beat.

Adobe Photoshop Touch for phone is immediately available in the Apple App Store and Google Play for US$4.99. For iOS devices, the app requires iOS 5, iPhone 4S and iPod touch 5^thgeneration; Android phones must run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or later.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5