by Professional image editing jumped onto tablets in early 2012 with Adobe Photoshop Touch, but smartphones remained curiously absent from the company’s finger-friendly party. That’s all changed with this year’s debut of a phone-specific version, but are digital artists ready to create on a palette that fits in the palm of their hand?
Adobe Photoshop Touch for Phone (not “for iPhone,” curiously) believes it is indeed possible, assuming you’re willing to buy it again (it’s not a universal app) and have a smartphone powerful enough to run it on. The $4.99 app requires a minimum of iPhone 4S (or fifth-generation iPod touch) to run, and overall the app was quite snappy and responsive on our iPhone 5.
Like the iPad version of Photoshop Touch, the phone-only app does an effective job of implementing core features from the desktop, utilizing both the top and bottom of the screen for access pop-up layers, selection tools, adjustments and filters. You’ll want to maintain realistic expectations, however: Elaborate features like masking, plugins or a huge font selection are still missing.
Touch for Phone works in portrait or landscape, but the iPhone 5’s taller display isn’t a major advantage unless you zoom in or happen to be working on a panoramic image. While the screen doesn’t feel overly cramped, there’s only so much one can accomplish on a smaller palette, especially for those of us with beefier digits.
Perfect for spontaneous moments of inspiration, images can be shot right inside the app or imported from existing photo libraries. Artists can start from a blank canvas up to 12 megapixels in size, an improvement over the first iPad release. Edited images are saved within the app and can be optionally synced to Creative Cloud, saved to Camera Roll or shared as JPEG, PNG, PSDX (a Touch-specific format) or PSD for further editing on a Mac or PC.
While Adobe has streamlined the mobile-to-desktop sync with Creative Cloud Connection, the process is still a bit too one-sided for us. We had no problem opening a PSDX image from our iPhone 5 using Photoshop CS6 for Mac, but saving edits as a standard PSD flattens image layers when ported back over to Touch. (Layered PSDXes from another Touch app open just fine, however.)
Ultimately, Photoshop Touch makes more sense as an iPad app. Even at half the price of the tablet version, the iPhone feature set is overkill for most users, making it all the more bewildering why Adobe missed the opportunity to make the existing app a universal build. The phone version is more appropriate as a bonus for existing iPad users, rather than this dubious bit of double dipping from Adobe.
The bottom line. If you’re a frequent user of Adobe Photoshop Touch for tablets, the phone-only edition is worth another five bucks – it’s perfect for getting wherever inspiration strikes or making a quick fix while on the go. For everyone else, the smaller display limits what you can do with it, especially when you have to pay extra in the first place.
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