Is Photoshop For iPad Worth It?
Intro
Hello! Thanks for visiting my site. Something I’ve been compelled to write about recently are tech stuff for animators. I’m not going to be a tech reviewer, nor do I have a desire to make this a major thing for my site, but for the sake of variety, and keeping a pulse on the landscape, I thought it’d be interesting to talk tech and programs once in a while. Today I’m going to go over Adobe’s Photoshop for iPad. Now, I’ve used photoshop ever since I was a teenager, and it’s been a very close part of my workflow since that point. From making YouTube thumbnails, to layouts, to editing and so on, photoshop has been a part of my life for a long time.
When I heard Adobe wanted to bring the full fat version of photoshop to iPad, I thought that would be cool- like many other artists. It was the step Adobe needed to make to stay relevant in a rapidly expanding and competitive digital environment. Along with that, there’s just so much potential in the idea. I’ve written a lot over the last year about being freed from the desk, and for many artists, having the full photoshop will allow them to do the same. With all of that said, what do I think of photoshop for iPad now? To be completely honest, I’m disappointed. I’ll be looking at it from a drafting perspective, not photo editing, so be mindful that I am not covering all of the things that can be utilized in the program.
The DL
I’ll be separating this into a list of things I like and don’t like about the program.
Things I Like
Nice beginner brush library.
Gradient tool works perfectly.
The touch circle is cool, but wish it were programmable.
More seamless cloud integration than other programs could have.
Not much to re-learn. Lot of the same language from desktop photoshop.
Unpinning tool bars and having them float where ever is cool.
Things I Don’t Like
The biggest disappointment is the tool selection. Currently, it doesn’t have as many of the tools the desktop version has.
Weird interface for layer controls and interacting with layers.
Layer options hidden under a separate section which means more clicking.
Can’t do a lot of basic functions like rotating the canvas.
Feels slow, and laggy.
Cropping is cumbersome.
Outro
These are more or less the thoughts I was left with after using the program. My biggest overall issue, aside from the weird design quirks is that it’s just not fun to use the program. It felt as if Adobe put their B-team on this, when they’re faced with A-list competition in the form of Procreate. In other words they brought a stick to a gunfight, and they’re 1000 feet from their enemy with no cover whatsoever. As I was using the program, I found myself wanting to just draw in Procreate. In fact I did several times. Using the program felt like I had to fight with it to get what I want, and why would I willingly subject myself to that when there’s a better alternative?
Now, Adobe have said that this rendition of the program will play a larger part in their future, so the hope is that it’ll get better with time, but in my head I’m already thinking these guys are far, far behind their competition. I wasn’t expecting to have all of the functions that the desktop version has, but I also wasn’t expecting to have so little of the functions either. If I were to get asked whether you should spend money for mobile Photoshop, I would say to pass. The program is not worth it at this point to spend the money on. If you already have the whole suite, than sure, what’s the price of a gig or two of memory? However, if you’re in the market for a program, to do art with,there are a lot of better alternatives than this. What’s even better too is that a lot of these programs can save in PSD format, and if you have a cloud service, there’s your means to work cross platform!
Anyway, hope you found this insightful. I’ll be keeping a lookout on the updates for Photoshop as they come out, and will try to update my thoughts on this later on in the year. That’s all for now, thanks for reading!
At the time of this writing, I was reviewing photoshop for iPad version 1, but they’ve just released an update with new features so some of the information in this blog might be outdated