Sketchpad: Photoshop for Your iPhone? PhotoForge Comes Pretty Close.

For what it costs at the app store ($3) I must say, the features in this new iPhone app are well worth the money! Although it isn’t necessarily practical for the average user to have Photoshop-like image editing features all within the pocket-sized confines of an iPhone, this could definitely come in handy if you make consistent use of it’s built-in camera and want to edit images you take with it on the fly before sending to friends or uploading to Flickr.

PhotoForge comes with many of the basic imaging tools that Photoshop is revered for. There are different brushes and erasers to choose from, a crop tool, an eyedropper to select various color values, the ever-ubiquitous clone stamp tool, and the ability to zoom and and out of images. For editing you get many of Photoshop’s adjustment methods, including curves, levels, sharpening, hue/saturation, and brightness/contrast. It comes with the ability to save your images in RGB or CMYK, and the adjustments let you control each channel independently inside whichever colorspace you are working with. Finally, PhotoForge comes with 20 built-in filters and allows you to output your image to a variety of different sizes.

Not a bad effort on behalf of Ghostbirdsoft! Even though practical use as of now is mainly limited to pictures you take with your iPhone or images sent to you from friends on the device, who knows how many ways this app will make itself resourceful down the road. And seriously, for $3, you really can’t go wrong.