Photoshop for iPad
Does it live up to the hype?
Free (IAPs) From Adobe, adobe.com Made for iPad Needs iPadOS
The wait is over — Photoshop for iPad is finally here, at least in name. Even by Adobe’s own admission, this app has been released with limited capabilities, with the intention of adding more features later.
The opening screen is similar to the desktop app, but with some notable omissions: no CMYK option, no link to Adobe Stock, no Artboards, no saved presets, and no Advanced options. Photos can be imported from Camera Roll or directly from the Camera, while PSD projects can be continued directly from the Mac thanks to cloud-based saving. Cloud Documents is a great solution for cross– platform sharing.
On opening a document, you’re presented with a pared–back interface, with tools hidden behind a veil of icons and menus. Some icons are immediately obvious, while others require some experimenting. Luckily, there is a Help section in the topright corner which contains tips, tutorials, and shortcuts.
The Layers tab has two configurations: a panel of small squares that take up less space, and a more extensive window. Both offer basic options like Opacity, Blend Modes, Masks and Groups, but not necessarily
where you’d expect to find them. Sometimes it’s frustratingly difficult to achieve basic operations like grouping layers.
It has most of the vital adjustments needed for photo correction: Brightness/ Contrast, Levels, Color Balance, Black and white, Exposure and Hue/Saturation. But accessing them requires you to hold down the New Layer icon, select “adjustment layer” and choose, which feels slow and cumbersome. There are currently only two filters — Gaussian Blur and Invert.
The toolbar is located on the left, with a modest array of tools. The image enhancement options are fairly comprehensive – Clone Stamp, Brushes and Healing Brush in particular are well suited to Apple Pencil, while Transform lets you resize and distort layers easily. But it’s lacking other tools, such as Pen Tool, Shapes, Burn, Dodge, Blur and History Brush. Without a Pen Tool or a Refine Edge there’s a distinct lack of precision.
You can insert basic text with the Type tool, but it suffers from the Character and Paragraph windows being combined into one diluted tab.
If you own an iPad–friendly keyboard then standard Photoshop shortcuts are possible, as well as touchscreen gestures like a double–finger tap to Undo. The most novel of these is the Touch shortcut, which is shown as a translucent circle on the canvas, letting you switch between different tools without having to go back to the toolbar.
At Adobe Max 2018, Adobe described this app as “not a watered down version of Photoshop, this is real Photoshop”. Unfortunately, it’s more like a pick–and–mix of popular features, focusing on retouching and compositing. As a basic portable photo editor it certainly ranks highly, but there are plenty of cheaper apps that do a similar job.
If you’re already a CC subscriber then it’s well worth the free download, if only to experiment with as an extension of the full desktop app. If not, it’s a costly $9.99 per month to use.
THE BOTTOM LINE. In its current state it’s not a replacement for the real thing and suffers from that inevitable comparison, like a child who can’t live up to their parents’ glory. This is the stirring of a slumbering giant on the portable stage rather than the titan we’d like it to have been.