Photoshop Reimagined for iPad: The Journey

We are thrilled to have shipped the first version of Photoshop on the iPad at Adobe MAX earlier this month. On behalf of the Photoshop team at Adobe, I want to thank all the customers who’ve downloaded the app and already started to create so many amazing images. In this short time, we’ve seen truly inventive ways many of you are experimenting with the app to integrate Photoshop on the iPad into your work.

Where we are today** **

We’ve built Photoshop on the iPad with a new user experience completely redesigned for the tablet and the era of touch and mobility. At 1.0, we started with Photoshop’s top workflows, compositing, masking and retouching because these are core to almost any Photoshop-based project.****

We also built Photoshop on the iPad so you can open and edit your PSDs any time, anywhere and see and edit your layered documents. The app supports very large PSDs and thousands of layers, just like Photoshop on the desktop. In addition, your PSDs are automatically saved to all the devices where you have Photoshop through our new cloud documents functionality. Our goal is to give you a seamless experience, so you can create anywhere you have Photoshop, on the desktop or on the iPad.

What’s next

With the introduction of Photoshop on the iPad, we started to scratch the surface of what’s possible and began our journey to build the best mobile application for all of you. Your experience, your feedback and your point of view has always been a critical part of our process, and we take that very seriously as we chart a path forward with the iPad.

That’s why today, we’re excited to share how we think about the future, and give you a glimpse into what’s to come and how your input is reflected in our planning process.

We’ve heard a lot of questions about fonts on the iPad. Here’s something we’ve already shipped that you might not even be aware of:

Access all Adobe Fonts on iOS

You can already create with Adobe Fonts in Photoshop on the iPad. Using the free Adobe Creative Cloud app you can browse and install 1,300 fonts, and all 17,000 fonts that are included with your Creative Cloud plan. Any font you install on your iPad via the Adobe Creative Cloud app is also available for use in Photoshop. Download the app here.

Learn more.

Coming to Photoshop on the iPad in 2019:

Select Subject

Select Subject uses the Adobe Sensei AI machine learning technology to enable you to automatically select the subject of an image to speed up complex selections. We gave you a sneak peek of this feature on the iPad as part of the Adobe MAX keynote presentation a few weeks ago. There is no other iPad app on the market with this type of powerful yet easy to use selection capability.

Cloud documents

Cloud documents will become faster than ever before. The new cloud documents system saves your documents between Photoshop on the iPad and desktop to make working across devices seamless. The Photoshop cloud document format is optimized to save only the incremental changes made to the PSD, making it the fastest way to work across all your devices with Photoshop. For example, if you change just one pixel, only that pixel syncs to the cloud. In December we will begin the rollout of system optimizations that deliver even swifter upload and download of cloud documents than what’s in the app today.

Coming in the first half of 2020:

Selections in Photoshop on the iPad will become incredible with the addition of rich and deep selection capabilities only available in Photoshop.

Refine Edge

The Refine Edge brush is one of the most important selection tools in Photoshop. It is used to make complex, soft edge selections on challenging subjects like hair and fur, or to perfect selections of objects that intermix both soft and hard edges, and many other tricky selection operations. We are thrilled to bring it to the iPad in the coming year.

Curves and Adjustment Layer Options

We will further deepen the app’s retouching capabilities by adding Curves for tonal adjustments and continue to build out adjustment layers to enhance non-destructive workflows. For example, within Levels we’ll add things like adjust by color range and more.

Brush sensitivity and Rotate Canvas

We know you have been enjoying the amazing brush sensitivity in the new Adobe Fresco app (which I also encourage you to download here if you have not). And of course you want to rotate the canvas to perfectly position it for any angle. We will continuously bring unique touch and mobile optimizations like these to Photoshop on the iPad.

Lightroom Integration

Images are the foundation to virtually any composite and we are very excited to work with the Lightroom team to begin to deliver integration of Lightroom and Photoshop workflows on the iPad. With these new capabilities, you will be able to process raw images in Lightroom premium on your iPad and take them further in Photoshop using workflows designed specifically for this device.

How you can give input

We are so happy to get Photoshop on the iPad into your hands! Please join our community forum to give feedback on what you would like to see in the future: feedback.photoshop.com. We look forward to your thoughts.