Adobe just released their first three Photoshop Touch apps for iPad. These apps allow you to connect Photoshop on your computer to your iPad and use that connection to interact in different ways. Eazel is an app that allows you to paint on your iPad and send the resulting piece straight to Photoshop wirelessly. From there, you can touch up that piece and make it into a masterpiece.

If you were going to imagine an app for iPad that could help you use Photoshop more effectively, what would it be? For me, it would be along the lines of what Adobe came up with in Nav for Photoshop. It’s one of the first bunch of Photoshop Touch apps for iPad, and it turns your screen into a button interface for quick access to your most used tools in Photoshop. Simple and effective.

Color Lava is one of Adobe’s first Photoshop Touch apps for iPad. It’s an extremely interactive color picker that lets you mix colors from scratch or smudge the colors around in a source image to create a palette. From there, colors can be passed off to Photoshop to be used instantly. Pretty cool, right? The main point of this app is to use these colors in Photoshop.

Adobe has released CS 5.5, which brings Adobe’s Photoshop Touch apps and SDK. What this means for Photoshop users is that you’ll have new and exciting ways of using Photoshop via tablet devices, starting with iPad. The first apps announced are Eazel (finger painting), Color Lava (color mixing) and Nav (Photoshop shortcuts).

Back in early April, Adobe announced Creative Suite 5.5, along with a new update schedule and subscription. Today, it all comes together with the release of the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product family. Chief amongst the updates are advances in HTML5 and Flash authoring, innovation in the areas of video production and editing, and new capabilities in digital publishing, including delivery of Apple iOS and other mobile devices and tablets.

Breaking from their standard cycle of major Creative Suite updates every 18 months or so, Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced the new Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product line, “…enabling designers and developers to target popular and emerging smartphone and tablet platforms, as the revolution in mobile communications fundamentally changes the way content is distributed and consumed.”

If you want to build your own Photoshop filter effects or have access to thousands of high quality filters, you may want to look at Filter Forge 2. You can easily create your own filter by dragging and dropping controls in the editor and downloading the nearly 8,000 filters that have been created by other users. If you have Photoshop CS2 or higher, there is a plug-in so you can apply the effects to the current layer you are working on from within Photoshop.

One of the worst things about scrapbooking is the endless amounts of paper, stickers, glue and other supplies you have to continue to buy, not to mention you can’t really make mistakes without having to “scrap” entire pages. And then there’s the amount of space it takes to store all of the supplies and scrapbooks. Surely, in the 21st century there is a better way. Thankfully, there is. It’s called iScrapbook 3.

With enough tweakable options to keep pro photographers happy and a simple and a preset-based interface for newcomers, Topaz Labs’ Photoshop Plug-In Bundle is easily a one-stop shop for all your image editing needs. It can handle anything from simple sharpening, detail enhancement, or creating quick and easy layer masks to more complex tasks such as giving an image a funky psychedelic feel or creating a charcoal sketch out of your favorite photo. The ability to integrate the plug-ins with Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto means you can even continue using your favorite app to manage and correct your photos.

Topaz Labs’ Clean Photoshop plug-in is designed specifically to take the edges off your photographs. Hard edges and irritating details are easily minimized to provide greater emphasis on a portrait subject or to deemphasize irritating details in larger compositions where the focal point may be overpowered, such as floral arrangements or macro shots. The Topaz Clean plug-in, like all members of this excellent bundle, gives quick results through a variety of presets and finer control for photo perfectionists.