Adobe Eazel for Photoshop review

Adobe Eazel for Photoshop is one of the first ‘Touch’ apps Adobe released. It’s a simple but useful app that allows you to create art on a tablet such as an iPad and then transfer seemlessly over to Photoshop on your desktop.

Eazel adopts an interesting multitouch interface. Using all five fingers, you control brush size, colour, Opacity, undo/redo, and some basic settings such as Transfer to Photoshop and Save a Copy.

You bring up these controls by placing five digits simultaneously on your iPad screen – and then, using the appropriate finger, you slide up and down to control Opacity and brush size, or pick your colour of choice using its colour picker.

The interface is easy to use and soon becomes quite a natural process – just remember to turn off multitouch gesturing in iOS 5.

Adobe Eazel’s painting engine is also interesting. Its wet/dry approach enables you to quickly blend paint together, or alternatively wait a while and paint over the top. There’s no way to dry the canvas like in say, a desktop tool like Painter, but it can produce interesting results.

This is very much an experimental painting app – and this engine suits that approach. But that said, everything can feel a little rough, a little blurred. And the lack of any kind of real painting tools (apart from a single brush) rather lets it down.

Also, it feels like it pushes the original iPad to its limits – at times it can lag.

However, there’s no real lag on an iPad 2. What is nice though is the way that you can quickly send your works in progress to your copy of Photoshop CS5 and above.

Just tap the PS icon and, after setting up remote connections in Photoshop, your iPad creation will appear on your desktop.

Eazel is not the tool you want for complex digital artwork. ArtRage, PS Touch or SketchBook Pro are much better for this.

However, its interesting, uncluttered interface and direct connectivity with Photoshop make it a wonderful tool if you want to integrate quick and easy watery brush strokes into your artwork.

In a world where highly sophisticated painting apps are on sale for next to nothing, Eazel seems somewhat limited.

However, these limitations are also part of its charm and it comes into its own when perceived as a Photoshop tool rather a painting app in its own right.

We like…
The original multitouch interface makes this a fun tool to use

We’d like…
A lot more painting tools – there’s only one brush on offer here

Verdict
When viewed as a Photoshop tool rather than a fully-fledged painting app, Adobe Eazel has its own quirky charm

Score: 4/5

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2012 at 11:38 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.