BARCELONA: Adobe Photoshop Express is a great, free and highly usable iOS app for quickly fixing up your digital photos, but it pales in comparison to the desktop version of Photoshop. Last year Adobe introduced a solution: Photoshop Touch, but chose to bring it to the Android Tablet market first. Now, as promised, Adobe is finally bringing that powerful image editing capability to Apple‘s iPad 2. The company will announce the new app today in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress.
Editor’s note: This story was intended to be confidential until 9 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night, but 9 to 5 Mac broke that embargo, so that’s why we’re publishing this story early.
For $9.99, iPad 2 owners (sorry, there’s currently no iPad 1 support) get the ability to work in layers, use “sophisticated” selection tools and “scribble” over images to remove unwanted portions. Users will also be able to touch up photos, paint over them and create new layouts. The new app is part of Adobe’s upcoming suite of iPad “Touch” Apps. “Inspired by Adobe’s Creative Suite,” the apps include:
Adobe Collage; Adobe Debut presentation software; Adobe Ideas, which will be similar to the Illustrator vector-based desktop drawing software; Adobe Kuler color theme manager; and website- prototyping and wireframe tool Adobe Proto. Adobe said these remaining apps will launch for iOS later this year and will all work with Adobe’s Creative Cloud services.
Other features in Adobe Touch for iPad include the ability to share to Facebook directly from the app, search, using Google, from within the app, apply sophisticated image effects, and even use your tablet’s built-in camera to fill in portions of your image project.
“Photoshop Touch combines the magic of Photoshop and its core features with the convenience of a tablet, bringing image-editing power to the fingertips of millions of people,” said David Wadhwani, Adobe’s Digital Media Business Unit senior vice president and general manager.
Adobe’s Photoshop Touch requires iOS 5 and will be available in the App Store on Monday, February 27. Although9 to 5 Mac reported it was available now in New Zealand and Australia, the app has since been removed from the App Store, set to become available worldwide on Monday. The 9 to 5 Mac site also reported some of its readers saying the iPad 2 version “works better than the Android version.”
Will you pay nearly $10 for this tablet-based image editing app, or are instant effects-generators and editors like Instagram and Adobe Express sufficient for your image-editing needs? Let us know in the comments.