Adobe's already graced the iPad with Photoshop Touch, a simplified version of its venerable desktop photo editing application, Photoshop. Now the company's offered a sneak peek of an iPad app that promises many of the most powerful capabilities of Lightroom, Adobe's professional photo image editor.

Adobe product manager Tom Hogarty, who is in charge of Lightroom and Bridge, showed off the app on The Grid, a web-based video program. Hogarty said the iPad app will let photographers accomplish many of the advanced image editing tasks of Lightroom on their iPads, including processing raw images. Photographers prefer raw images, because they include all the information a camera's imaging chip has gathered, rather than processing the images into a JPEG file inside the camera.

In the video, Hogarty edited raw image files from a Canon 5D Mark 3 digital SLR on an iPad 2. The unnamed application is in its early test phase so far, yet it was already able to adjust some photo parameters. In the video you could see many favorite raw-processing tools such as clarity, vibrance, and the ability to adjust highlights and shadows. However, only a couple of the tools were actually demonstrated.

While he didn't give any indication of when this application would be ready to ship, Hogarty deftly explained its benefits. Said Hogerty, "I just want to be able to sit there with my mobile device and enjoy my time with photography, wherever I am, with whatever device I have — and not be tethered to a laptop anymore." And as one of the video's hosts suggested, photographers who use Lightroom would be able to edit raw image files on iPads with considerable precision, while accessing familiar tools they've already spent years learning how to use.

A unique feature of the app will be that its images reside in the cloud, so users won't be required to store or transfer large numbers of megapixel-heavy images on an iPad with limited space. They can work on a smaller version of the file, and once they've finished editing, the changes they've made can be sent to the cloud in the form of small text files.

Those files, containing the image editing instructions, can be applied to those same images on any other computer equipped with Adobe's $50/month Creative Cloud service. Hogarty said, "The transfer is the big issue. You can kludge together some things with Dropbox or other services that move data around, but it's not going to be as efficient."

SEE ALSO: Adobe Brings Photoshop Touch to the iPad

The nascent app is off to a good start, but it's not ready for prime time just yet. However, the app will be a breakthrough if it reaches its maturity with the ability to sort photos, edit raw images and easily send those edits to the cloud, and then apply those edits to the original images.

Here's a video of the interview with Adobe's Tom Hogarty — at 18:29 he demonstrates Adobe's prototype image editing iPad app:

Video and screen shot courtesy The Grid, Kelby Media Group