Getting an app with many advanced features of its flagship Photoshop£799 at Amazon UK application onto a tablet seemed hard enough, but Adobe has gone a step further, taking the world's leading image editor to phones, with Photoshop Touch for iPhone ($4.99). It only makes sense to offer these capabilities on the iPhone, since that's become the primary point-and-shoot camera for many users, including me—despite the fact that I own a shiny new (but much bulkier) Canon EOS 6D.

If you're going to shoot and share the photo from the phone, why not have the ability to edit it effectively, too? Photoshop Touch brings a lot of—though obviously not all—familiar Photoshop tools and concepts, including layers, filters, and the beloved Magic Wand. But the iPhone version is not as powerful or usable as that for the iPad, which is only to be expected, given the smaller work area. It's also missing some expected tools like red-eye correction and photo leveling.

Interface

You get started by tapping the bottom center photo icon, which lets you choose form your camera roll, from Adobe's Creative Cloud online service, from shooting a new picture with your camera, or with a blank document. I missed the ability to open a Facebook photo, and I also missed all the helpful tutorials of the iPad app, but the first time through the interface, tool tip overlays explain what each button is for. The camera option doesn't offer any shooting tools like Camera+'s separate focus and exposure points and self-timer. Once you've got an image in to edit, you'll see four icons across the top. The first is for basic actions like selection and pasting, the second is for image adjustments, and the next two offer filters and advanced effects.

Similar Products

Our Current Picks for The 11 Best iPhone Photo-Editing Apps

The bottom left icon is the tool selector: this popped up well-known Photoshop features like Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, and Magic Wand, along with selection and painting tools. If you need (just a little) more space, you can hide the top toolbar.

The coolest of this last group is the Scribble selection tool, which lets you finger-paint on a rough trace of the object in the photo you want to select and automagically your person or whatever other item you want is selected with a usually accurate outline. You use a green scribble to mark what you want to keep and red for what you don’t. The Refine Selection tool let me do just that after the rough scribble selection. One basic thing missing was a hand tool—it took me a while to figure out that the same two-finger input was used for this. And I'm not alone, several users have complained about the app's lack of a hand tool in the product forum

Basic Photo Edits

Photoshop Touch includes all the basic photo adjusters you'd expect from the imaging software leader: brightness and contrast, color saturation and temperature, and noise reduction. You also get more specific tonal adjustments for shadows, darks, and highlights. I like that these adjustments start in the middle and lets you slide down and up to darken or brighten the effect. You even get the more advance curves and levels tool, which lets you adjust using a histogram, and even by separate color channels. I was surprised not to find sharpening in the adustement tool set, but thankfully it was available in the FX tool set.

I could rotate my photo by 90 degrees or flip it, but I couldn't level or straighten images from this tool, which other photo apps offer. This seemed odd for an app that actually lets you "warp" your photo using several control points. You can use the Transform tool to rotate to a specific number of degrees, but that also rotates the image sides. Another tool I was surprised to see missing was red-eye reduction. You could of course go in and select pupils and replace colors, but red-eye is a basic correction that's in nearly every photo editor at every level.