Last October, Adobe announced that it would soon be bringing its extremely popular photo-editing software Photoshop to iPads. Roughly a year later, the company has followed through and has released Photoshop on iPads. Adobe Photoshop is used heavily by the best graphic design companies and the top UX design firms.
Users of Apple’s tablets can download Adobe Photoshop on their device for free, and the download comes with a 30-day free trial. After the free trial period is over, users are required to pay $9.99 per month via in-app purchases if they want to continue using the app. They also have the option of including the app as part of a full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
What can Photoshop on an iPad do?
The tablet version of the Adobe’s software works just like the desktop version and is compatible with any tablet that supports iPad iOS, including iPad Air, iPad Mini, the latest iPad, as well any iPad Pro model.
Even though it works the same way, Adobe has announced that the iPad version will not have all the features that the desktop version has. However, Photoshop for iPad Pro and the more recent models do support Apple Pencil and also allows users to edit PSD files.
According to Adobe, the iPad version will have a subset of the features found in the main application on desktops on the initial release. The plan is to add more features over time. There is also a possibility that certain features may never be added on the iPad version of the software since, over the many years of its development, Adobe Photoshop has acquired different techniques to get the same results.
Adobe has said that for the first release, it has focused on features that will make the most of touch and the input from Apple Pencil. These features include retouching and core compositing tools, as well as improvements such as brush and mask support. Other features like smart selection, will be installed later.
In other words, to give users the best experience possible on the iPad screen, the interface of the software has been designed to be as similar as possible to the desktop application. However, Adobe has also considered features that will benefit most from touch and Pencil rather than keyboard and mouse control.
Thanks to its same PSD file format that is used in the desktop version as well, both the versions can share documents with each other. This means that the versions are kept in sync through the online Library storage of Creative Cloud.
The new release will definitely make the software more accessible, and will likely be used extensively by enterprises such as a creative graphic design agency.
