It’s been a long time coming but early indications are that Adobe has delivered a solid iteration of Photoshop Touch for those with phones running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or using an iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 or fifth-generation iPod Touch. Priced at $4.99, it’s now available for purchase on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
As expected, the app sticks closely to the approach provided by the earlier tablet version. Familiar Photoshop features notably include the abiity to edit images of up to 12 megapixels on three layers. The creative filters of the tablet version have also been kept, with the addition of just one new one, Ripple. Scribble Selection for finger-based selections is back, while Camera Fill for real-time creative blending of a camera feed with layers is a pretty nifty app.
If the provision of layers, selection tools and filters, as well as tonal and color adjustments, adds up to a subset of the Photoshop experience that will appeal to a consumer-level user, it’s still unlikely that pros will employ it to create finished work. Adobe clearly sees it as an element of its Creative Cloud service, thanks to the app’s ability to automatically sync images to CC (2 gigabytes of storage are included for those using the free version of CC). JPEG, PNG, TIF and PSD are all supported by Android Touch, with PSDX being its native format (RAW is not currently supported). So moving work via CC between the phone, tablet and desktop versions of Photoshop will become a common scenario for pros. Oh, and a bonus for those using Galaxy Note phones is that Photoshop Touch supports their pressure-sensitive stylus. Sweet.
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