Photoshop now available for iPad 2

Adobe’s photo editing program, Photoshop Touch, is now available for iPad 2. The app was only scheduled to be released today, but reports say it was briefly available in the Australian and New Zealand app stores over the weekend, before being removed ahead of the worldwide release.

Photoshop Touch, which was previously only available for Android tablets, is a touch-optimised version of the photo editing program with support for many of the basic tools that users accustomed to the desktop version would expect. Adjustments (like colour balance, black and white, saturation, brightness/contrast and replace colour), effects (such as Gaussian blur, drop shadow, glow and directional blur) and tools (like clone stamp, brushes, the lasso tool, blur and marquee tools) are all included.

The app isn’t just a straight copy though — the menus and functions have shifted positions and been grouped under some different headings to suit the tablet’s screen size and the touch format. Photoshop Touch contains some features not included in other versions of the program — like the ability to import images from the Adobe Creative Cloud or the iPad’s camera and download photos from Facebook or Google Images directly from the app.

It also has a tool called “scribble select”, which is a hybrid of the desktop-version’s pen and magic wand tools, and is demonstrated in a tutorial on Adobe’s website. Scribble select allows users to quickly select an object by roughly tracing around it and choosing what they’d like to keep and remove, although the function (along with a few others) seems more suited to using a stylus for nuanced detail work than your fingers — even Adobe’s senior creative director, Russell Preston Brown, uses a stylus to demo the app.

Photoshop Touch, which retails for US US$9.99 (approximately R76), is the first in a new roll out of Adobe apps for the iPad 2. Adobe plans to release Adobe Collage (used to create inspirational mood boards), Adobe Debut (used to present creative work to clients) and Adobe Proto (used to prototype websites and mobile apps) for iPad later in the year.

Photo courtesy The Australian.