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Adobe Photoshop Touch review

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Verdict

More than just a decent tablet app, Photoshop Touch completely redefines what we expect to be able to do on a tablet

Review Date: 17 Nov 2011

Reviewed By: Jonathan Bray

Price when reviewed: £6 (£7 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
6 stars out of 6

Value for Money
6 stars out of 6

Ease of Use
5 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Received wisdom says tablets are playthings – not for carrying out professional tasks or doing serious jobs on, but fine for occasional email, video playback, listening to tunes and gaming. But there are a number of software developers taking the task of producing serious creative software head on, notably Apple and Korg.

Now Adobe is joining the slowly growing crowd, and has brought the daddy of photo editing applications to the tablet platform. Dubbed Photoshop Touch, it’s initially only available on the Android Market for tablets, costs a reasonable £6.99, and is launched alongside five other Adobe apps. An iOS version isn’t available yet, but is coming.

Obviously this is never going to be able to rival the power of full-blown Photoshop; that would be silly – especially at this price. But you might be surprised at how much is packed in here, and the quality of the results that can be achieved.

Management and workspace

The first thing you’re faced with on launch is the photo management space. This is where you can see your finished and ongoing projects – saved in PSDX format – and all the images you’ve imported.
Photos must be brought in individually, which can be laborious, but it’s good that you’re not only restricted to images in local storage.

Photos can be imported from a variety of other sources: direct from the camera, from Google images marked as royalty free, your Facebook albums and Adobe’s Creative Cloud online image storage and sharing space.

The latter gives you a very generous 20GB capacity (included in the price of the app), and allows you to browse not only shared image files, but also projects, complete with layers. It also provides an easy way of loading full-resolution images onto your tablet from your PC.

Once you’re into the editing window proper, files can also be brought in directly from these sources as new photo layers, making working with your images very straightforward indeed. The workspace itself is also an outwardly simple affair, with common and global image tools – such as selection, effects and move/resize – in a narrow panel along the top of the screen, a layer panel down the right-hand side and the tools panel along the left. All these panels can be minimised with the flick of a finger.

Controls

With a lack of screen real estate, and the need to keep buttons and so on finger-sized, there’s a danger of things becoming either cluttered or over-simplified, but Adobe has managed to get the balance just right. The tools area to the left transforms into a properties panel when your desired tool is selected, offering such parameters as brush size for adjustment.

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Comments

User comments

Gutted

Finally, I thought, some apps for Android tablets that make them worth having. Until I saw the system requirements:
Android 3.1+
8.9+ inch display
1280 x 800 resolution
Which eliminates the vast majority of units on sale at the moment - limiting these apps to owners of Galaxy Tab 10s, Eeepads and the like, and not Androidified TouchPad owners such as myself.

I appreciate the design challenges of creating tools such as this for a 7 inch screen but with the launch of the Kindle Fire (in the US at least) it seems commercial suicide to create new tablet apps that don't work on it. Good old Adobe.

By KevPartner on 17 Nov 2011

@KevPartner

The problem is, the TouchPad and the Kindle Fire don't currently run a tablet OS.

If the Adobe app needs the extra functionality found in Honeycomb and ICS, it isn't surprising that "tablets" running the "smartphone" OS aren't supported...

I think this has more to do with Google letting the market fragment and not placing controls on it, to ensure that tablets are running the tablet OS...

The screen size is another question altogether. I can see 1280x800 being a useful size for working on images, but necessary? I don't know, maybe the screen is too crowded at 768x1024? But surely that should be up to the user, so I give you that.

8.9"+ display? Again, I'm guessing that being anywhere near accurate enough under that size. Again, that should be a user decision, but I guess it has something to do with user experience and not wanting people complaining about how c*** the app is on their htc Flyer etc.

So, in summary, I see that as the Android 3.1+ requirement as reasonable, considering 2.n is "only" for smartphones and doesn't support tablet extensions.

Your other 2 points, I think, have more to do with ensuring a good user experience and are more marketing decisions, rather than technical restrictions.

By big_D on 17 Nov 2011

Be reasonable folks

loaded this up on my ASUS Transofrmer and really like the interface. As for the limitations lets be reasonable. I normally handle the editing on my 4 core desktop with 16GBb of memory. So let's not be too surprised that we aren't getting full RAW support on my dinky little tablet!

By DJ2003 on 17 Nov 2011

Great looking tool

When I first heard about this app I was very sceptical and I can't say that I am a true convert after reading the review but given the lack of decent alternatives, this will be a tool that I can use to create half-decent mockups on low-res files right in front of my clients eyes. Let's be honest. If I want to do the job properly, I'm not going to use a tablet with it's severely limited performance. That is not what it was designed for and definitely why this app has limitations. Additionally, if it could sing and dance like the full version then it would have a much larger price tag. So far as quad-cores becoming the norm... well, that may well happen, but by then the average image size will increase further and no doubt the app will become bloated leading us back to dual-core performance. For now my Galaxy Tab 10.1 will suffice and so will this app. Great effort Adobe.

By craigcac on 3 Jan 2012

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