Sketch Pad: Photoshop For Your iPhone? Yes, This is the Real Thing!
Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 11:53AM So a few weeks ago I did a write-up on a nice little photo editing program for the iPhone/iPod touch called Photo Forge, available at the app store for $5. Overall it was a pretty slick imaging editing program, incorporating curves, levels, and around 20 filters to use on the pictures you take with your iPhone.
Adobe themselves have now gotten into the competition, releasing their own version of Photoshop for the iPhone, completely for free!
Photoshop Mobile offers a few basic functions for your iPhone images. The basic crop, flip, and rotation tools allow you to manipulate the size of your images. There are a few basic exposure adjustment features, clearly aimed towards photographers: exposure, hue/saturation, tint, and black & white. There are also two built-in filters: sketch and soft focus, which surprisingly are really not very useful (a sharpening tool would’ve been much more welcome as opposed to soft focus which performs the opposite!) Finally, there are also a few presets that can help stylize your image. One level of undo at the bottom also lets you step back if you don’t like any of the adjustments you made.
Honestly although this is a free program, I am surprised that Adobe has not offered to the market a more fully-featured version for a nominal fee (such as $10). Levels and curves are unfortunately absent here, and am surprised that there are only two filters available here (as opposed to Photoforge that boasts 10 times as many). Now this being a free program that is fine, but it would’ve been cool to incorporate these things, along with a sharpening tool and maybe the ability to paint or use the clone stamp tool using your fingers, to the mixture in a version you must pay for. I do like how you can use your fingers to swipe across the image to make your edits however.
On the flip side of this argument, the only practical instance on an iPhone that you would need to edit images is with pics you have taken with the iPhone’s camera, so a lot of the higher-end tools are probably not even necessary for most people anyways.
If interested in using Photoshop Mobile, definitely check out Photoshop.com and sign up for a free account, it’s an online community that allows you to upload pics you have taken on your iPhone right through Photoshop Mobile to show your friends and family.
With the iPhone camera becoming slightly better with every iteration, and the device itself becoming more ubiquitous amongst many people, this is a great step for Adobe to release this during what really is the infancy of mobile devices and social media. This could mean a great deal of free promotion for Adobe, so we’ll see!
Reader Comments (1)
This ish is insane. I hope they drop this on the G1.