Adobe eyeing iPad release of full Photoshop suite in 2019
Adobe has confirmed that there are full-featured cross-platform apps coming for Photoshop, but less clear is an announcement date, and a release window.
"My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible," Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky told Bloomberg. "There's a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era."
Belsky refused comment on timing, or details of the release. Also not specified is if the release would be for the iPhone and iPad, or just the iPad.
If the report is accurate, Adobe will debut the new app at October's MAX creative conference in October, with the release at some point in 2019. Bloomberg claims that "engineering delays could still alter that timeline."
Adobe already has a cut-down version of Photoshop available on the iPad. Companion apps for the title were released in 2011, but had little actual functionality.
Adobe currently has 34 apps in the App Store. There is no Adobe equivalent to the full Photoshop experience in one title.
The existing Photoshop Fix is geared towards retouching and restoring images, using various brushes, and adjustment tools for focus, color, exposure, and saturation. Mix is built around cutting, combining, and layering, though some basic image adjustment tools are present.
Photoshop Express is Adobe's the most recently updated iOS app for photo manipulation, and is similar to Photoshop Elements on the Mac.
"My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible," Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky told Bloomberg. "There's a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era."
Belsky refused comment on timing, or details of the release. Also not specified is if the release would be for the iPhone and iPad, or just the iPad.
If the report is accurate, Adobe will debut the new app at October's MAX creative conference in October, with the release at some point in 2019. Bloomberg claims that "engineering delays could still alter that timeline."
Adobe already has a cut-down version of Photoshop available on the iPad. Companion apps for the title were released in 2011, but had little actual functionality.
Adobe currently has 34 apps in the App Store. There is no Adobe equivalent to the full Photoshop experience in one title.
The existing Photoshop Fix is geared towards retouching and restoring images, using various brushes, and adjustment tools for focus, color, exposure, and saturation. Mix is built around cutting, combining, and layering, though some basic image adjustment tools are present.
Photoshop Express is Adobe's the most recently updated iOS app for photo manipulation, and is similar to Photoshop Elements on the Mac.
Comments
this is a big thing. I use Lightroom and the other apps named in the Bloomberg article. Affinity, and others are really going to have to up their game. Their apps are good, and in some areas go beyond what Adobe offers currently on the iPad, but fall far short of the full professional feature set of photoshop. In addition, Affinity’y Photo is very poorly laid out. It’s clumsy in a number of ways. Enlight I’d very good too, and fixes some of Ohoto’s problems, but also falls short.
a lot of us are waiting for this with a high degree of anticipation.
A tablet is a tool. A handsaw is also a tool that has it's place, but I wouldn't build a house using it.
The best possible combination of ways to use an Illustator-like program would combine iPad and desktop, so direct input on-screen for illustrating and keyboard/mouse for editing and other technical functions.
i will probably ask Apple for my money back on the Affinity app.
actually, you can connect to Windows networks. There’s no problem with that.
since you don’t know all the professional apps available for the iPad, you should be careful in what you say. Just because a specific app isn’t available, doesn’t mean that others that do pretty much the same thing, aren’t, because, often, they are. 91% of tablets used in business and government are iPads. Many of those have replaced notebooks.
there is software that you could run on a heavy performance Desktop, that you couldn’t fit, much less run, on a notebook. Does that mean that the notebook isn’t a real computer, useful for daily computing tasks? Of course not.
but none of them can offer the depth of tools many pros want, and need, in one place. I’m retired, so three years ago I stopped beta testing CC for them. I started in 1990. A number of the features in Photoshop are there because I, and a number of others, spoke to Adobe, and they added it. While some, who probably shouldn’t be using Photoshop in the first place, complain that there are too many features, I have to say that they’re wrong. Once this is out, and Adobe solves the teething problems, these other companies are going to have a hard time in the real pro space. And there are a lot of reasons for that.
I know Apple sometimes gives certain developers early access to hardware for testing, so it could be that this years iPad Pro has enough grunt to not only run Photoshop, but run it really well. If Adobe knows about the expected performance then it might have been enough to finally convince them to bring Photoshop over.
Yet we'll still have idiots running around saying you can't do real work on an iPad.
“...I’d have to be able to seriously customize all of the app’s icons and placement on screen to be able to use it for production, but that’s not possible today...”
Would it really be that difficult for you to customize all of the app icons, or are you simply unwilling to adjust to the learning curve? Or have no interest whatsoever of using the app? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.
I recall one time in a travel hostel in Ireland, an American guy, mostly a Windows guy, said to me: “I like what Microsoft are doing with the Surface, it has real apps, unlike the iPad”. I argued with him that Surface only has so-called real apps at this point because they are afraid to break with that past, and that real change happens and real apps like PS (to drop a name) only happen on a touch-first based system when there is no alternative way to interact with the apps there. Other than that we get same apps over again, and a desktop system (with touch as an afterthought) and that we already have that with typical laptops.
PS CC for iPad could be a sort of watershed moment for the iPad platform. Other apps will follow like XCode, too, at some point. I will still continue to use a Mac. For certain PS users though, I see iPad Pro 11” & 13” models being potentially pretty powerful for them.
For some, their whole studio and business may become of an iPhone, a Apple Pencil, an iPad Pro, with maybe a shared charger, a pen and a Moliskine. I’m sure for some this is already their present, but this opens up to many more.
The big question is why would you? In short, there are many things iPads are better at than Windows PCs and even Macs; they require far less non-productive activity/maintenance/administration, they perform many actions more fluidly and productively, their modern info mgt (not network drives) makes inter-device & multiuser workflow possible & more effective.
Most transitions will involve hybridisation anyway (you’ll probably grab the next branch before letting go of the last) but the main challenge isn’t software, it’s mentality.
I realize that AstroPad already allows you to mirror your mac screen on your iPad. But this would allow you to use each interface that’s designed to be the best on the device and still use both for their strong suits.