Photoshop maker Adobe Systems, Inc., released a long-expected iPad companion aptly named “Photoshop Touch.” The Android version demonstrated at Maxx earlier this year and released shortly afterwards.
The first in a series of six touch-optimized apps (the other five are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler and Proto), it supports Photoshop layers—arguably the basic and most-oft used Photoshop feature. With simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into layered images, make popular edits, and apply professional effects. It also provides advanced selection tools and adjustments.
According to Adobe’s website, the tablet-exclusive Scribble Selection Tool lets you extract objects in an image by simply scribbling on what to keep and then what to remove. With Refine Edge technology from Adobe Photoshop, even hard-to-select areas with soft edges, such as hair, are easily captured when making selections. Photoshop Touch also plays nice with Creative Cloud—a brand new paid cloud storage service from Adobe for seamless sync of your Photoshop files between desktop and iPad.
Social sharing is also supported through Facebook or email. You can also import images from Facebook, Google Image Search, and your iPad’s camera roll. Photoshop Touch works only on iPad 2 and requires iOS 5. The app is a $9.99 download from the App Store. Photoshop Touch became available on Android devices last November.
Software-maker Adobe posted an interesting video on its Photoshop channel through YouTube. The clip showcases content-aware move, which is one of the new features in the upcoming Photoshop CS6 update. Similar to content-aware fill in Photoshop CS5 that replaces the missing pixels behind removed image elements, the new feature lets you define a region and move it around with the background replacing automatically. What’s best is that one only needs to draw a rough boundary around the wanted object and the software will figure out the rest to —in most cases— define a pixel-perfect selection. Moreover, ite lets you stretch and extend objects intelligently without suffering any of the nasty artifacts. More sneak peek videos are after the break. Oh, and 9to5Toys offers some sales promotions on Adobe products.
Adobe Systems Incorporated, the maker of the popular photo-editing application Photoshop, announced today that a free beta version of Photoshop Lightroom 4 is now available for download. The software highlights several new features and enhancements over the previous version, most notably support for video and geotags. The latter allows you to pinpoint the exact geographical location of your photographs on a Google map. Geotags are automatically imported from photograph Meta data, but they can be applied manually as well.
Other features include minor drawing tool tweaks, the ability to recover blown-out highlights and shadow detail, support for built-in Blurb book publishing, soft proofing and more. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta can be downloaded free of charge at labs.adobe.com (it expires on March 31, 2012). The company will announce availability and price points of the final version in due time. The full list of new features and a video demonstration are right after the break (release notes here).
Amazon offers Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 for Windows and Mac, model no. 65064073, for $149.99. With free shipping, that’s tied with our October mention of a downloaded version and the lowest total price we could find by $130. This photo editing software is designed for use with RAW files.
For those who don’t need all of the bells and whistles (and overhead) of Adobe’s Photoshop for photo editing, another product has taken off in the Mac platform. Pixelmator is a $30 Mac App, now in the App Store which gives you 80+% of what Photoshop offers.
The good news is that Pixelmator 2.0 drops tomorrow with additional tools which may be able to take care of the needs of light Illustrator uses as well with the inclusion of Vector Drawing tools:
Enjoy perfectly precise, full-featured drawing tools that allow you to easily create and edit any vector shapes, whether simple or advanced…and some more sophisticated Photoshop tools like content aware fill and a more advanced type tool.
