(Credit: Adobe)
Adobe is betting on a new generation of creatives’ propensity for doing everything on their phones, so what could make more sense than a Photoshop Mobile app?
The design software company has tried it before (with Photoshop Touch and Photoshop Express among others) and already offers a capable iPad app. And though the complexity of the industry-standard photo-editing app may seem to preclude its usability on the small screen, Adobe designed Photoshop Mobile from the ground up for small touch screens and mobile device capabilities.
The new Photoshop app is available today on iOS and is coming to Android later this year. It will be available in limited form for free or with a new mobile and web subscription for $7.99 per month (or $69.99 per year) to get all the advanced features. Existing Photoshop subscribers also get access to the new app.
What's in the New Photoshop Mobile App?
The app includes many standard and even some of the more-advanced Photoshop features, such as layers, masks, and blending modes. You’ll also get auto-selection with a newly designed Tap Select feature that uses AI to identify and highlight objects in your photo, along with a healthy selection of free stock content from Adobe Stock.
Photoshop’s recent generative AI tools aren’t left out, either, with Generative Fill and Generate images, which use Adobe’s Firefly AI technology and create commercially safe results—i.e., content that doesn’t violate existing intellectual property rights. Some of the generative tools—including Generate Similar, Reference Image, and Remove—require the subscription.
(Credit: Adobe)The app also includes old-standby Photoshop tools like Adjustment layers, Curves, Spot Healing Brush, and the Text tool (complete with halftones and texture-filling).
Saving edited photos to Adobe Cloud means you can pick up editing an image you worked on in Photoshop Mobile on your desktop PC, iPad, or the web. Add to that integration with other Adobe apps such as Express, Fresco, and Lightroom for a continuum of editing possibilities.
Unlike Apple Photos and Google Photos, which recently added impressive generative AI tools for things like removing objects from images and re-creating the background, Photoshop for mobile is squarely intended for image-creating professionals, though enthusiastic consumers can certainly enjoy the reasonably priced new offering. Plenty of other powerful mobile photo apps, such as PicsArt and Polarr have been competing in this space for several years. Adobe’s own Lightroom mobile app impressively translates the desktop program’s capabilities to the mobile format.
Updated Photoshop for Web, Too!
Photoshop’s web application has a sleek, user-friendly design and comprehensive feature set. This web version ties in with the mobile app, as projects started in one are instantly available in the other, thanks to cloud syncing. This launch includes updates to the Web version of Photoshop, and the $7.99 plan includes cloud storage.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)The web version of Photoshop now has AI tools like Generate Image, Generate Similar, Reference Image, Remove Tool AI (requiring a subscription), as well as auto-selection and Magic Wand. It has access to 20,000 fonts and supports advanced blending mode and color corrections. Photoshop users will welcome the fact that many keyboard actions work just as they do in the installed desktop application; for example, holding the Shift key down switches to the Hand tool no matter what you’re doing in the app. You even get the fairly new Contextual Toolbar.
We've reached out to Adobe representatives for information on how much online cloud storage Mobile plan subscribers get and how many generative credits they get for the Firefly AI features. We'll update this article when we hear back.
You can get Photoshop Mobile on the iOS App Store today, and later this year on Google Play.