Following last week’s release of Photoshop CS5.5, Adobe’s Photoshop Touch apps for the iPad have now appeared on the App Store. Originally announced last month, the new Photoshop Touch SDK allows third-party developers to create mobile and tablet apps that integrate with Photoshop running on a Mac or Windows PC. To demonstrate this new functionality, Adobe has developed three of its own companion apps for the iPad.
Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop ($3) allows users to create custom colours and colour themes by mixing colours on the iPad touchscreen to create custom swatches and five-swatch themes. Custom colours and themes can be saved on the iPad and accessed within Photoshop CS5 using a Wi-Fi connection between the iPad and the desktop computer. Adobe Eazel for Photoshop ($5) acts as a drawing pad to allow iPad users to create paintings on the touchscreen that can be sent from the iPad into Photoshop CS5 for further processing. The app incorporates a new painting technology with a unique interaction between “wet” and “dry” paint that allows for more advanced painting techniques.
The third app, Adobe Nav for Photoshop ($2) turns the iPad into a control pad for Photoshop CS5 running on a desktop computer. Nav connects to Photoshop over Wi-Fi and allows users to access various Photoshop tools and select open documents using the iPad touchscreen as a control surface. Users can customize the Photoshop CS5 toolbar on the iPad to access their most-used functions and browse, reorder, view and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop documents. All three apps are now available from the App Store and require an iPad running iOS 4.3 or later and Adobe Photoshop CS5 version 12.0.4 or later on the desktop.