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Adobe Thinking About Options for Viewing Photoshop Files on iPad

Friday May 28, 2010 8:29 am PDT by Eric Slivka

In a blog post, Adobe's John Nack is soliciting feedback from Photoshop users about whether they would like to have the ability to view native Photoshop (.psd) files on the iPad. Through the solicitation, Nack hopes to hear about such details as how users might be using those files, whether they require full manipulation of layers or if a flatten representation would suffice, and whether users would be willing to pay for the service.

This is obviously a capability that Adobe could build. The question of course is whether we should build it (as opposed, say, to building something else).

Nack, formerly a project manager on Adobe's Photoshop team, has recently transitioned to a leadership role in a new team devoted to ground-up development of applications for tablet devices such as the iPad. As a result, Nack has been thinking about and receiving feedback on what users would like to see on the iPad platform. While the iPad obviously offers some significant constraints when it comes to performance in comparison to larger computers, users have been pushing for such possibilities as a version of Lightroom or even a "Photoshop Lite" application for the iPad.
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mox358
22 months ago
A Photoshop lite on iPad would be awesome! There are a few apps already that try to do this but I don't think any currently come close.

I would be willing to pay for this too... can't expect a great tool to be free.
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Gleemen
22 months ago
Oh Adobe just swallow your pride and make a Photoshop app. :apple:
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Grimace
22 months ago
I'm having trouble seeing how Photoshop, with its complex UI, would be implemented on an iPad. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems nearly so to do well.
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baryon
22 months ago
I'm sure simple brushes, layers, and layer masks would have no trouble running on the iPad. They could implement many features Photoshop has.

Photoshop was great even 6 years ago, when having a 1 GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM was completely normal. My 9 year old Dell still can run Photoshop CS3 without problems and the iPad is probably more powerful than that, so it could run many features of Photoshop. The only thing that has to be done is making it touch-friendly and stripping features that wouldn't make sense.

I can easily imagine a version of Photoshop for the iPad that has some cool brushes, selections, layers, masks, liquify and a more automatic background extraction tool. None of these conflict with the touch platform, there just has to be a way to enhance precision, or use an optional capacitive pen.

Obviously it would require a lot of development from Adobe's part and they may not want to do such a full-featured Photoshop, but I would definitely imagine something much more robust then that ridiculous Photoshop Mobile that only lets you apply 3 automatic filters, crop, and that's it.
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rednic
22 months ago
Why don't you put all your resources into a tool that converts flash files to HTML5 , your customers would be happy , things would run on the iphone , and the world would be a better place ....
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emulator
22 months ago

Why don't you put all your resources into a tool that converts flash files to HTML5 , your customers would be happy , things would run on the iphone , and the world would be a better place ....

You are the perfect example how clueless apple fans (in general) are about flash, html5 and producing for the web.
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KindredMAC
22 months ago
I've been begging for an Aperture/Lightroom version for the iPad that would allow tethered shooting so that you could view everything as you shoot and store them in their native RAW formats.
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kirky29
22 months ago
Having the ability to open AND edit Photoshop files, including Layers etc would be a big thumbs-up for me.
I'm for this..
Obviously, I wouldn't expect it to be as complicated as the desktop version, but A LOT more extensive than say, the current Photoshop App on the iPhone/iPad. I'd like to add layers, curves and text and some more filters.

(:
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tkatz
22 months ago

You are the perfect example how clueless apple fans (in general) are about flash, html5 and producing for the web.


A better reply would have been to point out how a large company such as Adobe has different departments/groups that deal with different things. The Flash group might have nothing to do with the Tablet group, and as such the tablet group would have no real direct connection to anything Flash related.

While lately it seems Adobe does nothing but Flash, people should remember that there are a lot of other (fine) products that Adobe puts out, and they don't just have a single group or team working on all of them.
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ryanide
22 months ago
Why don't they think about a simplified version of Photoshop for the iPad, since obviously it is possible considering the other apps that already do quite a bit. Step it up a notch and be a leader in imaging on the go... Hello?
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