Adobe Announces Photoshop Touch Applications for iPads

Photo Apps Review

San Jose, CA—Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the availability of the Adobe Photoshop Touch apps—Adobe Color Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav—for Apple iPad in the Apple App Store. The three apps from were developed using the Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) to demonstrate the potential for new interaction between Photoshop and tablet devices.

Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop, Adobe Eazel for Photoshop and Adobe Nav for Photoshop are designed to unite the fun and interactive experience of touch devices with the power of Photoshop by enabling users to create custom color swatches, paint directly on-screen and drive Photoshop tools from tablet devices. The apps take advantage of the iPad’s touch screen for an immersive, tactile, on-the-go experience.

Photoshop is a part of the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product family, enabling designers and developers to create for smartphone and tablet platforms. Current Photoshop CS5 owners can download a free update to enable new interaction between Photoshop and tablet devices.

“Tablet devices are destined to become part of creative workflows and these companion Photoshop applications are just the first indications of the creativity we can expect from Adobe and our developer community,” John Loiacono, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media Solutions, Adobe. “With our Touch SDK, we are going to see some astonishing new ways to keep Photoshop at the heart of the creative process no matter what the device—desktop computer, Android tablet, BlackBerry PlayBook or iOS device.”

The Photoshop Touch SDK makes development possible on numerous devices, including iOS, Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. Utilizing the SDK, developers will have wide access to Photoshop functionality with the freedom to create new apps or add capabilities to existing ones.

The new Photoshop Touch app extends the creative processes in several ways:

•  Adobe Color Lava allows creatives to use their fingertips to mix colors on the iPad, creating custom color swatches and themes to transfer back into Photoshop.

•  Adobe Eazel takes advantage of painting technology by letting digital artists create rich realistic paintings with their fingertips, and introduces a new kind of interaction between “wet” and “dry” paints. These paintings can then be sent directly to Photoshop CS5 for compositing or for taking the artwork further.

•  Adobe Nav is designed to increase workflow efficiency by letting users select and control Photoshop tools using the iPad as the input surface, customize the toolbar, browse and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop files, or create new files. adobe.com