Adobe Photoshop Touch 1.3 (for iPad)

Adobe Photoshop Touch does an impressive job of bringing features from the leading desktop imaging application to the iPad. And as its name suggests, not only do you image tools that have made Photoshop famous, but the app makes ground-breaking use of the iPad's multitouch interface. With the latest update, the $9.99 app now supports the new iPad's Retina display, as well as larger image sizes?up to 12 megapixels. It also adds a couple new effects, such as"pixel nudging" for better precision, smoother animation, and support for iCloud Photo Stream.

Adobe has no shortage of mobile apps: First we saw Photoshop.com Mobile, a free, basic photo editor and enhancer that later became Photoshop Express. Next came Carousel, later renamed to Revel, and then came some tablet apps designed to work with Photoshop on the desktop. ?In all, the company at this point offers 18 different mobile apps, and was even cited back in 2009 by Gartner as a visionary for its mobile consumer app strategy. But as the mobile version of the company's flagship app, Photoshop Touch has a special place in this constellation of mobile apps.

Given the depth, power, and complexity of the desktop version of Photoshop, you may be surprised by the number advanced features that make it into Photoshop Touch?including Clone Stamp, Layers, Magic Wand, and even Curves. Perhaps even more surprising is how easy these features are to use on a tablet, thanks to Adobe's smart use of the touch interface. I tested the app on a new Apple iPad (it requires an iPad 2 or later and iOS 5 or later), but it's also available for tablets running Android 3.1 and later.

Getting Started
Right off the bat, Photoshop Touch comes to your aid by offering full, clear, helpful tutorials on the start screen. There are 15 in all, covering topics such as "Add a dramatic flare," "Paint with effects," "Add people to images," and "Drop Shadow Text." The one I tried first called "Clean up a background," has you remove a distracting person in the background so that it doesn't distract from your subjects. The technique uses some familiar Photoshop tools, though in a newfangled mobile interface.

Adobe somehow manages to smush a wealth of these tools and controls into the limited space of a tablet screen, while still maintaining a neat, uncluttered appearance. The interface sports some familiar options along a left-edge toolbar?Marquee selection box, Lasso selection, Magic Wand, brushes, Clone stamp, eraser, and Blur tool. An arrow at the bottom lets you hide the toolbar, touching an icon flies out related tools, and tapping on an icon moves it to the top and fills the toolbar with options for the selected tool.

Along the top, another icon menu offers image opening, cut & paste, selection options (feather and inverse, for example), rotation, and resizing. Adjustments, effects, full-screen, and even more standard tools are up here too. Along the right, just as in big Photoshop, are your image layers. You can hide and show these with the tap of a button, and set opacity and blend mode.

You can open new images from your tablet's local photo storage, from Creative Cloud, Google image search, or Facebook. Or you can just shoot a picture with your iPad's built-in iSight camera. One thing I'd asked for in version one and subsequently got is the ability to start without any photo, and just draw and add text to a blank canvas; the Plus sign at the bottom of the welcome page does this. You can also, add an empty layer and hide all others. You can move layers down in the stack with a simple swipe. New for version 1.3 is the ability to use high-res photos up to 12 megapixels and from iCloud Photo Stream.6

Even if you don't start with a tutorial, helpful overlays get you started by indicating what the major tools around the edges can do. Undo and redo arrows are always at your disposal, should you mess up or decide you like an edit after all. And as you'd expect, you can pinch and unpinch to zoom out and in on your image. Since there's no hand tool, moving is done with two fingers, which can be tricky to do without unintentionally zooming. New for version 1.3 is the ability to view an image at 100 with a three-finger tap, a definite convenience, and the fact that doing so again takes you back to the screen-fit size is nearly as useful.

Removing Background Distractions
I was able to remove distracting stuff in the background of a photo of a friend by first protecting his head by selecting it with the Lasso tool and then using the Clone Stamp tool to overwrite the distractions with similar background matter nearby. The process took a little doing, as the face of my friend occasionally crept into my stamping material. I also tried selecting with the magic wand, but for my test image, this involved a lot of selection adding. Selection with the lasso was also trickier than in desktop Photoshop, since there isn't a Magnetic option.

Much better and easier was then new Scribble selection tool. This let me draw on parts of the images to keep in green "fingerpaint" and parts to remove in red. But the Clone Stamp tool is still not as powerful as the Content Aware patch you get in desktop Photoshop, making removing background clutter harder.

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