Software : Hands on: Adobe Photoshop CS5 iPad apps review

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Hands on: Adobe Photoshop CS5 iPad apps review Posted: 05 May 2011 06:38 AM PDT Photoshop is frequently used not just for photo retouching, but as a tool to create artwork from scratch. Doing so with a mouse, or even with a graphics tablet, removes the artist from the process by having to use a separate tool to draw with: how much better it would be if we could just paint straight onto a multi-touch screen, such as the Apple iPad. That, in essence, is Adobe's reason for creating the possibility of controlling and linking to Photoshop through a tablet device. To demonstrate the possibilities in this convergence of two technologies, Adobe is releasing three iPad apps that give a taste of what may come, showing off some of the potential of the new, extensible architecture of Photoshop CS5.5. These are not perfect, finished apps, but serve to show off the possibilities. Adobe Eazel A novel painting app, Eazel is notable more for its limitations than for its feature set - there are many apps out there that are far better suited to painting. Painting with Eazel feels like painting with watercolours on an already wet surface: colours merge into one another, with the paint initially shimmering like liquid that then "dries" after a few seconds. We can control the size of the brush tip, the opacity, and the colour, with five most-used colours stored in a virtual palette. What's interesting here is that there's no on-screen clutter whatsoever: we invoke the options by tapping the top left corner of the iPad screen. If we instead tap with all five fingers, a different control will appear beneath each finger (the three mentioned above, plus a Settings dialog and an Undo/Redo/Clear Canvas control). Releasing all but one finger will leave just that dialog on view, and we can then drag that finger to change colour, brush size, or opacity. When we're done, we can send the painting to Photoshop CS5 wirelessly: simply tapping a button causes it to appear at a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. This is notably larger than the native resolution of the iPad, which means that when painting we can zoom in to paint in detail. After a while, the limitations become apparent. There's no layering control, and only a one-step undo, which means making mistakes can be costly. Eazel also only produces brush strokes of uniform thickness, which always lends paintings a somewhat unnatural appearance. More worrying, though, is the fact that when images are transmitted into Photoshop, the colours undergo a significant shift: subtle hue changes are often lost in transition. As painting apps go, Eazel's ability to transfer images directly to Photoshop really isn't enough to make up for its significant shortcomings. Adobe Color Lava All designers need to create groups of matching colours, whether they're creating a brochure, a website or an abstract painting. Color Lava aids this process through an iPad app that allows users to blend colours together by smudging them into each other. In essence, this is very similar to the colour mixer palette that used to exist in Photoshop before it was pulled due to patent infringements. Users start with six basic colours, and selecting any one of them allows us to paint it onto the canvas area. We can then smear and drag the colours, and as we drag the colour directly beneath our finger is shown in one of the five colour swatches down the right hand side of the screen. At any time, we can switch to a different colour swatch to store a separate colour in it. We can create an almost unlimited number of these five-set swatch groups, naming each one as we see fit; the canvas we used to generate these swatches is stored along with it. And here's the best part: tapping any of the colours transmits the colour directly to Photoshop, where it becomes the foreground colour. As well as starting with a blank canvas, we can opt to load a photo from the iPad's album and sample colours from it - and we can also smear and smudge the colours together in the image. This smudging ability is well thought-out and responsive, and it's a pity the same tool didn't make it into Eazel, where it could have been put to good use. The concept is a good one, but it falls down in that we only have an HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) model to choose the initial colours. For those used to RGB or even Web colours, this is an irritation; for print designers, the lack of a CMYK model is more than frustrating. Adobe Nav This curious app allows users to select the tool they want to use in Photoshop, to swap the foreground and background colours, cycle through screen modes, and even switch between open windows. We can choose which of the tools we want to appear in the app, and can drag them around to rearrange them; but although we can select them, we can't actually use them on the iPad - we have to go into Photoshop to make them function. We can also create a new document directly on the iPad, but we can't change its size from the default 1024 x 768 pixel resolution. Given that Photoshop is awash with keyboard shortcuts, it seems unlikely that many users would choose to keep their iPad switched on just for a more cumbersome and underpowered way of switching tools and windows. Of the three, this is the least functional app by a long way. Conclusion What Adobe has produced in these three apps is more a proof of concept than finished products. It's interesting to see how the iPad can interact with Photoshop, but all three apps are underpowered and feel incomplete. As is so often the case, it will be up to third party developers to push the new system to its limits once they get their hands on the software development kit (SDK); in the meantime, we get to play with a set of ideas that Adobe has floated as a way of dipping its toe in the convergent waters.

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