Inspired by the version for tablet devices, the Photoshop Touch phone app incorporates some of the core features of Photoshop desktop photo editing software, such as layers, selection tools, filters and tonal and colour adjustments.

Users can also apply effects and add graphical text with the new Photoshop Touch phone app, and edit images as large as 12 megapixels with layers.

Other features include a Scribble Selection tool, which lets users combine images and a version of the Refine Edge tool.

The Photoshop Touch phone app will also automatically sync images to Adobe Creative Cloud with 2GB of free storage space.
Adobe’s Photoshop Touch for phone is available now in the Apple App Store and Google Play, priced £2.99.

For iOS devices, the app requires iOS 5, iPhone 4S and iPod touch 5th generation; Android phones must run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or later.

Below is a short video from Adobe showing the Photoshop Touch app in action.

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Adobe Photoshop Touch Review
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Adobe has announced the launch of Adobe Photoshop Touch 1.4, the latest version of its popular photo editing software for tablet devices.

• read our Adobe Photoshop Touch review

Adobe Photoshop Touch 1.4. brings optimisation for smaller tablet displays including the iPad Mini and Google Nexus 7, in addition to new features and bug fixes for all users.

Among the new features in Photoshop Touch 1.4 are:

• Added support for three pressure-sensitive styli for iPad: the Pogo Connect, Jot Touch and the Jaja stylus
• New ways to share completed projects to Facebook and Twitter directly from the app
• Added effects including Lens Flare and Stamp Pattern
• New performance and workflow enhancement including smoother brush strokes and new colour selection workflow

Pricing and Availability
Adobe Photoshop Touch 1.4 is available as a free download for existing Photoshop Touch users in the iTunes App Store and Google Play; new users may purchase the app for £6.99.

There are plenty of decent image-editing tools for the iPad that enable you to carry out basic adjustments and enhancements or apply special effects.

However, Photoshop Touch is altogether more ambitious. In Adobe’s own words, it provides the core features of Photoshop in an app designed for tablets. It’s already available in an Android version, but now you can get a version for the iPad, too.

At £6.99, it’s a fraction of the price of the ‘real’ Photoshop. But then it also has to make do with a fraction of the computing power of a desktop computer, a fraction of the storage space and a much smaller screen. Can it really match the desktop version in features and performance?

Hardly, but it does come a lot closer than you might expect. You can create multi-layered images using familiar selection tools and processes, apply Levels, Curves and other standard Photoshop adjustments, and apply a range of special effects.

There is one profound limitation though. Photoshop Touch has a resolution limit of 1,600×1,600 pixels, which means that your images will be fine for on-screen or web use, but not much more.

Photoshop Touch tools

Layers are easy to create and manage, and you can combine them using Photoshop-style Blend Modes and Opacity. You don’t get Layer Masks as such, but you can blend layers with ‘Fades’, which are like customisable gradient masks. The Scribble Selection tool works pretty well, too.

You select the areas to keep, the areas to remove, and finally you use the Refine Edge tool to paint around the outline, and then the software separates the background from the foreground.

With the ‘camera fill’ feature, you can use the iPad’s built-in camera to take a photograph and use it as a layer within your current project.
Levels, Curves, Saturation, Shadows/Highlights and other adjustments can be applied from one menu, while effects such as Gaussian Blur, Sharpening, Sepia and Posterise are applied via another. Some can also be applied locally using a Brush tool.

The interface looks strange and unfamiliar at first, but once you start to see how the Photoshop tools, menus and palettes have been translated into touchscreen alternatives, it all becomes much simpler.

There are some excellent hands-on tutorials to guide you through the basics, and once you’ve tried a few you’ll have no trouble striking out on your own. And that’s when you start to notice that the touchscreen control has advantages.

It feels more natural for painting, for example, and following object outlines, because it doesn’t have the ‘jittery’ action of a mouse. It works well with sliders, too, and Photoshop Touch gets round the lack of a keyboard by displaying a pop-up numeric keypad for entering values.

But there are drawbacks. Smaller brush cursors are hard to see, simply because the tip of your finger covers them up as you drag. And some of the more processor-intensive art effects are too slow for real-time adjustments with the sliders.

The overall experience is very positive, though. Photoshop Touch doesn’t cost much, yet it replicates regular Photoshop tools and adjustments remarkably effectively.

Even the sharing options are good. You can edit photos from your Facebook albums, and share your images via Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which also offers a roundabout route for getting layered Photoshop Touch files into Photoshop. There’s also a neat Google Image Search tool for finding photos released under the Creative Commons licence, which should make them free to use.

Our Verdict

But there’s no escaping that 1,600×1,600 resolution limit. Just what are you going to do with the images you create? They’re fine for sharing online, but what else?

The resolution’s too low for printing anything larger than a postcard. If you live your life on your tablet and interact with the world via Facebook, Photoshop Touch is rather good. But serious artists will want to work with full-resolution images, and Photoshop Touch doesn’t do that.

This is a really good app, and Adobe has done a great job of adapting Photoshop for the touchscreen interface. But until the resolution limit is addressed, it’s hard to see where you can go with it.

In Short
Adobe has effectively transformed its big, lumbering Photoshop into a super-slick iPad app, but the resolution limit is a major handicap.

We like…
Its power and simplicity, and how natural the touchscreen control feels

We’d like…
Support for full-resolution images. Without that, it’s limited

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Adobe Photoshop Touch is now available for the iPad 2 and offers core Photoshop features, as well as new functions for creating and sharing images in an app that was custom-built for tablets, Adobe says.

Photoshop Touch lets users combine multiple photos into layered images, make essential edits and apply professional effects to create beautiful artwork, touch up photos, paint, lay out ideas and much more. The Scribble Selection Tool allows users to extract objects in an image by scribbling on what to keep and what to remove.

Photoshop Touch’s Refine Edge function also lets users edit typically hard-to-select areas with soft edges, and when you’re done editing the Adobe app lets you share your creations through integration with Facebook and Google Image Search.

For a short demonstration of how to use Photoshop Touch, Adobe has released the video below:

Adobe Photoshop Touch – price set for £6.99 – is available through the iTunes App Store.

You can buy Photoshop Touch here.