It was announced this week that Adobe is developing the full version of their photo-editing software Photoshop for the iPad and other mobile devices. The news was confirmed by Adobe’s chief product officer, Scott Belsky.
The strategy behind the effort is to make Adobe products more compatible across devices to boost Creative Cloud subscription sales. The company is allegedly planning to announce and demo the full version at its annual MAX conference in October, which will subsequently become available in 2019. In a recent interview, Belsky said: “My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible. There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring out products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”
The strategic move arises after the Microsoft Surface advertised their creative capabilities that rivaled the iPad’s. See their 2018 commercial below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r3436NmtJk
I’m curious to see how many new subscriptions Adobe will get with the launch. What do you think of the full rollout? Do you solely rely on your iPad or tablet to do your work? We were big fans of the iPad Pro in our review, so it could be quite an interesting release.
Lead image by Lost Co via Unsplash, used under Creative Commons.
Kudos if they get it right, but admittedly I’m skeptical. They still haven’t made Lightroom stable on the iPad or iPhone.
Why on earth would anyone want to do photo editing on a phone or small tablet. It's difficult enough on a 27 inch screen, with a 24 inch screen sitting beside it. For snapshots sure, but not with a full fledged version of Photoshop. Snapseed works quite well for those edits. Adobe: spend more time making Photoshop better and less time trying sell more subscriptions.
You, Sir, are oh so spoiled :)
It's even less for me - just one 17'' laptop + Wacom tab. Works just fine.
Easy—you zoom into your image as you make edits, and you use a precise tool like a stylus. Doing a lot of editing, on the other hand, will probably be best suited to desktops for the time being.
The next generation of kids are growing up with tablets and not needing computers. This is another creative tool they will have access to.
They can't even get Lightroom to run faster on a desktop, so forgive me if I doubt they'll get this right.
Lightroom CC is really good on iPad is excellent and much faster than Classic in many regards. I imagine PS will also require a rewrite to be ARM optimized and redesigned for touch—just like Lightroom CC.
I agree with you Colin. With the gradual shift from Apple to have IOS and Mac OSX become more cross compatible, PS will need to be optimised. This is actually a good thing for all of the people who just demand "fixes." As the software is ported across, a lot of libraries will have to be updated or rewritten for newer generation code. This will allow Adobe the chance to update and patch some of the problems whilst also innovating with a new product.
For all those who travel regularly with a camera and need the functionality of Photoshop, but don't bring a computer, this could prove to be very handy.
Users are just going to have to get past the idea that subscriptions are a bad thing. 90 percent of the software that I use as a post production artist is subscription based. It is just how the new software business model has evolved whether we like it or not.
why adobe dont fix all the shit that is broken before they do new shit i dont get at all...
Adobe will be billing 99 cents a minute for the service...
...nice to see small fry Affiny Photo for iPad putting the screws on Adobe...