Home / Apple / Reviews
Reviews

Photoshop Touch for iPad review

Clean up pictures and mock up projects with Photoshop Touch on your iPad
By Helen Bradley
Macworld APR 3, 2012 12:00 am PDT
At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

  • Innovative touch interface
  • familiar toolset
  • great for roughing out

Cons

  • No layer masks
  • bitmapped type
  • size of images is limited

Our Verdict

Photoshop Touch offers novices a fairly easy learning curve, while Photoshop users will get used to the interface after an hour or so of tinkering. The app won’t replace Photoshop, but it’s fine for tasks like cleaning up images or mocking up projects, and it must rank among the better iPad apps for image editing.

The Photoshop-for-tablets app is now available for the iPad, following its Android release late last year. It offers a raft of photo-editing features and the chance to play around with concepts for photo-based illustrations or graphics projects.

Photoshop Touch includes many familiar Photoshop features with a touch-controlled twist. If you apply a Curves adjustment, for example, you use your finger to drag the curve line to get the tonal range you want. As regards layers, you can alter opacity, merge a layer with the one below, flatten the image, or try the match colour feature, which recolours the current layer using what’s on the layer below. Layers can be dragged up and down in the layer stack, and tapped to toggle visibility. The most common blending modes are available, too.

Other features include a few filters and basic tools such as a paintbrush, a clone stamp and a spot healing brush. One new tool is Scribble Selection, which extracts a subject from the background. Select the Keep or Remove option and paint over the area of the image that is to be the selection, and the tool does the rest. 

While there is a lot to like about Photoshop Touch, there are some disappointments, such as the lack of layer masks or adjustment layers, and the fact that any type you add to an image is rasterised. In addition, the image size is limited to 1,600 x 1,600 pixels, and the app only works in landscape orientation.

Photoshop reaches the iPad

https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/reviews/3348665/Available-on-App-Store-190.jpg” alt=”” width=”190″ height=”66″ />