Photoshop Touch for the iPad
When the iPad was born, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that Photoshop on an iPad might be interesting, but now I’m not so sure.
I use a whole range of instant gratification apps almost like a tool kit to process an image. These apps include - Snapseed, Phoster, Type drawing, Background Eraser, Tiltshift, Percolater, Pixlromatic amongst others. Maybe I’m sub-consciously rebuilding Photoshop from a bunch of disparate apps? If I keep adding to the tools, the sum total cost could be close to Photoshop Elements @£60 ish! Great for iTunes revenue, but not great for my bank balance.
So let’s download the beast…
At £6 it’s not cheap or really expensive (depending on what it offers). It is light in Mbs weighing in at 50Mb - I’d say good job Adobe! on the small footprint.
You can directly import images from the “Local Photos” option. This is what iPad users would call the Camera Roll. Of course it ran first on Android so the terms of reference mean I don’t feel so at home.
There’s also access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, the built in camera, Google and your Facebook account. Interestingly, one image I immediately wanted was in my iCloud stream and that wasn’t obviously accessible neither is Dropbox.
On the upside, the Google import is direct from Google images with a search option as opposed to linking with your Google account. It does offer a search by colour! and also by usage rights which is great again for educators.
With my “Apple head” on I thought “forget the handy tutorial”, I can figure this out! Guess what? I could load an image, I could add layers and text but I couldn’t intuitively really manipulate anything with ease.
Back to the in built tutorial and hey there’s a whole series of 13 activities. These are very well put together offering a whole range of image editing options. I’ve opted for the clean up background tutorial. Wow! It’s simple and easy to follow with the on screen prompts. I’m not a big lover of a manual with apps. For me things have to be obvious, but I am making an exception here as these tasks are not simple gratification taps, like many iPad Photo apps.
There is some skill involved in this. Skill and the iPad don’t have to mutually exclusive!
Not sure why we need bikini clad babes - but Adobe obviously think it’s a great idea.
More critically for iPad creatives, it does save Transparent PNGs. These will look gorgeous in Keynote, Pages, Explain Everything and Avid Studio as an “overlay” - oops Avid Studio is kind of quirky/cool on the iPad, but that’s another story!
PT does also offer an interesting ”Enable Presentation Mode” in the preferences that creates a red visual laser pointer - this again is great for “Sage on Stage” sessions. My fellow ADE’s are gonna love that “bad boy feature”.
So first impressions were not great, but then RTFM and it all made sense. It was a bit of a snub to Apple by releasing the Photoshop Touch app on Android before iOS. I’d love to know the download stats for the two platforms. I bet after 1 day IOS is already higher than Android.
As regards workflow it seems iPad bound. In that there is no import and export of .PSD files. Is that an issue? - I’m not sure that it is for most people that are also happy to work within the limits of 1600x1600 pixels!
Overall I think this is a great app for longer and more meaningful digital imaging learning journeys or should that be digital roadtrips? ;-) It feels very android in terms of interface and a little clunky but it does for and it has got a reasonable set of tools.
I am liking it. It could be improved. I’m thinking secondary/high schools and planning. The 1600x1600 limitation means that some outcomes won’t look good on that new LED you’ve just purchased for the school foyer.
