Gadgetory

Adobe's finally announced a real Photoshop app for the iPad that's coming sometime in 2019 we got to try out an early beta version of that and what we saw was pretty promising it's not an exact copy of the desktop app but it's big a selling point is that it uses real PSD files Adobe's actually created these new cloud PSD files that although you work seamlessly across all your devices and automatically syncs any edits you make to the cloud so if you're retouching a photo on the desktop and you need to adjust some stuff on the go you can open up that same PSD file on your iPad and continue working on it so here's what happens when you first open up Photoshop you have all your cloud documents here and I'm just gonna open up this file made by our illustrator Alex Castro on the left here you have all the tools that you may be used to seeing in Photoshop there's brush gradient eraser everything you're used to seeing and here on the right you have your layers panel which is collapsible giving you more space to work and what's really cool about Photoshop is that you can have as many layers as you want compared to some other apps that might limit how many areas you can have or make you buy more there's really no limit here so keep in mind this isn't the finished product so a lot of the features like text or crop have interface elements here but just don't work right now and there's other features like timeline which aren't included here at all so we're assuming it won't be in the first version when it launches which is kind of unfortunate for animators who are the ones who could really benefit from a mobile device for such a labor-intensive process so we're gonna try to use the functions that are available and see how far we can get with that based on the tools they've prioritised on having in this first build Adobe's focus for Photoshop on iPad is mainly for compositing so I'm gonna take a photo of carly Rae Jepson and make it look like she's building a sword I'm gonna go ahead and import some photos and this version of Photoshop can let you import photos from iCloud Drive Google Drive and Dropbox I'm going to go to my camera roll and open up this photo of Carly and then I'm gonna add the picture of the sword and I can resize the sword and rotate it and bring that closer to her except she's holding it and I'm going to just hear it and this might take a while no need to be too precise we got the idea to undo you can tap with two fingers I'm almost there this is gonna look so good and now I'm gonna adjust the opacity of the sort so you can look through and see the part of the hand where she's actually holding it and then I'm gonna erase that there you have it carly rae jepsen holding a sword I'm mostly an illustrator so while Photoshop stand missing from the app store I found an alternative apps like procreate and clips to do that work for me same goes for the photographers designers and motion graphics artists on the Verge's art department who each found their own preferred apps to work on but we've asked them to take a look at the new Photoshop to give their thoughts and what if they can see themselves using the half what's going on it's Al's Castro from the verge of a no shooter and designer hi my name is Michelle and I do photo retouching hi I'm will I'm the design director for The Verge I was able to test out the new Photoshop program on the iPad it was actually really fun because I got to leave my tusks and work on photos which normally I don't get to do I have to stand at my desk or sit at my desk and work but this time I actually got to pick up this iPad go to the couch sit down and I've got to edit which is really fun and really exciting so you're kind of tracing something or you're drawing you can just rotate it so if I'm outlining something I want to get really close it's just nice to be able to like turn and coloring I think we've all grown up coloring on paper so doing something like this is kind of just instinctual as somebody coming from a desktop environment using professionally every single day coming to a touch-based UI for Photoshop is really confusing on the computer I have a lot of the keystrokes so the keisters that I've memorized in here I can't I don't have a keystroke I didn't have a keyboard to use and so I had to click around to try to figure out how do I invert a mess and for a retoucher who gets lots of images a day time is of the essence so it does have this modifier button that allows you to toggle between say paintbrush and eraser so let's say your paintbrush and your coloring in Andrews hair and you went too far over you can just press it says you grace now I can just erase one thing I did notice my hand got a little bit sort using this pen the Wacom pen that I use a little bit more cushioned molds to my hand a little bit better but I felt my fingers on my palm getting a little bit sore with how I had to grip this pen I can see us being very useful in the future once Adobe adds and a lot of their features that nobody else can get type K integration Creative Cloud integration and the mere fact that you can open up Photoshop files natively on the iPad is huge so I currently use Adobe sketch and adobe draw and one of the benefits of that is that I can save these files as PSD and they upload right to Creative Cloud which is kind of what their Google Docs for Adobe once it's uploaded I can just go to my desktop open that folder and jump right in the PSD automatically what's going to be nice is I'm going to be able to work the other way that I can save something on the desktop save it to the Creative Cloud and then I can open it up in the app itself something you can't do right now as for pricing it's gonna be included as part of the Creative Cloud bundle so if you already pay a subscription for Photoshop and you've already invested in an iPad pro great if not there might be one-time fee for the app maybe another monthly fee we don't know yet and what does this mean for other Creative Cloud apps does this mean that illustrator and after-effects could be coming to the iPad someday Adobe says it's definitely something it's considering in the future so that's our first look at Photoshop for the iPad coming in 2019 something we're not going to replace your entire desktop but it's gonna be a really great extension of your workflow speaking of workflow you can go check out our newest episode of workflow in which you can learn how to make an animated gif in Photoshop but you actually can't do on the iPad because it's not there yet