Adobe Photoshop for iPad - Is it any good?

Let's talk about Photoshop for iPad. What up guys, welcome back to another episode. My name is Eddy Bear and today we're going to talk about the newly released Photoshop for iPad. Back in 2018 Adobe announced the development of Photoshop for iPad during Apple's WWDC's keynote and we've been waiting for the release of Photoshop ever since. So in today's episode we will find out whether Adobe actually was able to keep up with the hype surrounding their new app. In today's episode we will not only talk about the good, bad and the ugly surrounding Photoshop, I will also show you some neat tricks I picked up along the way so hopefully your Photoshop experience will be smoother than mine. Let's kick off today's review by firing up Photoshop on the iPad and see how you can import your work into the iPad. With the release of Photoshop for iPad a new way to save your work has been introduced so you now can save all your precious work in Creative Cloud and open it in cloud documents through all the Adobe apps. But you're not completely nailed to Creative Cloud, you also can import files that are stored in other cloud services or on your iPad. Regarding the file size you should keep in mind that the files that you will have on your iPad are pretty much the same size as you already know it from a Mac or a Windows PC, meaning if you are having a bigger work file you will also need a significant amount of bandwidth to get all those files onto your iPad. To guarantee a smooth touch input experience Adobe not just simply ported Photoshop onto iPad, they also implemented some smart ways how you can manage your input. You cannot only drag and drop select with your fingers, you can also undo or redo operations with a certain gesture. An overview of all the available gestures can be found in the settings section of Photoshop. Additionally you can also utilize a feature called touch shortcut which basically replaces your option and command key. This little tool can be found somewhere on your screen in the form of a circle and to engage its primary feature just tap and hold it. If you want to engage the feature of your selected tool you just have to swipe to its corner. While you tap and hold it you also can relocate it to any other spot on your display. Since we are already in the settings, one setting I highly recommend you to activate if you are owning an Apple Pencil is the stylus painting only setting. This way if you accidentally touch the canvas before your stylus is touching the iPad you will not mess up your work because only the Apple Pencil e.g. the stylus is able to modify your canvas. Now let's continue by me giving you a rundown which tools are actually available on Photoshop for iPad and if you pay close attention you will notice that not everything you're used to from your PC or Mac is actually available on the iPad. Most obviously we have the drag tool to drag around our content all over the place. There is also an option to transform your objects in different kind of perspectives and ratios. For selections we have the lasso, quick selection, rectangle and elliptical selection tools. With the brush you can select from a variety of brushes and you also can adjust angle, flow, roundness and smoothing. Obviously if you have a brush you also need an eraser tool. Also included is the paint bucket and a gradient tool. The one thing I'm most excited about is the spot healing and also the clone stamp. Basic functions like crop and rotate and trust me cropping or rotating a picture was never easier than with this little helper. And last but not least the text tool. On the right hand side you can find layers, layer settings, masks and effects and such. And the cool thing is they implemented also a minimalistic version of the layer overview so that you are not wasting so much display real estate. From here you also can jump right in and add adjustment layers like brightness, color balance, hue saturations, yada yada yada. So it's very easy to access all those features. And of course you are not only able to add different layers you can also organize them in distinctive groups or add additional adjustment layers. In order to show you how Photoshop performs under real life conditions I wanted to showcase some simple tasks that you now can complete on your iPad rather than on your PC or Mac. So decide for yourself how usable it is. For this purpose we are taking the photo of the Atomos Ninja V and I'm going to select the whole monitor with the help of the quick select tool. So let's see how thorough of a job it does. You can see in this example here that it sometimes has its issues to stick only to the monitor in the darker areas. But overall you can say that it will help you to make your life easier because there is not much that I need to correct after the fact. This is also a good example why touch shortcuts can help you to speed up your editing workflow by easily switching between selecting or deselecting with just a touch. So I think this tool is really usable at this point in time. Next up is another very important tool the spot healing brush. To see how well it performs we are going to cut out the Atomos Ninja V put it onto another layer and then fill in the void with the help of the spot healing brush. I'm actually quite surprised how fast Photoshop is running on the iPad especially considering that this is an older iPad but still the movement and the adjustment is happening really fast so no lagging here. After we now created a massive void in the middle of the picture it's now time to paint over it with the help of the spot healing brush. For this I'm disabling the unnecessary layer and continue by selecting the base layer. As I'm starting to paint over the void you can see that there is some slight lag in my painting action but also consider that this is a massive picture and it will take a considerable amount of time to get the rendering done. So as you can see it here this is in real time I did not speed it up and this is how long it takes to fill this kind of massive void but the result is actually quite good for a first run. We can now clean it up with the help of the clone stamp and add some additional texture but after that you will pretty much end up with a result that could look like in real life. By the way this is a good example why I recommend you to enable the stylus only painting setting because it will happen all the time that you start to paint with the palm when you're touching the display and not reaching for the display with the stylus first. And unfortunately it's also very easy to accidentally trigger a brush movement when you're trying to zoom in or out of the picture so make sure paint with stylus only is enabled. After you successfully fill the void you now can re-enable the layer with the Atomos and this picture would be done. It's incredible that you're now able to complete such easy tasks now with just the help of an iPad. Another highly used feature is masking. Masking is often used to insert parts from one image into another. Unfortunately in Photoshop for iPad it's not too obvious how you get parts from one PSD file into another so let me show you the fastest way I did find so far to get this done. For this start by opening up the image you want to mask out. Select the layer settings, unlock the base layer and then copy the layer. Now head back to your dashboard and open up the image where you'll want to merge both photos into. Open up the layer actions and paste your layer from before. Now add a layer mask to be able to paint away the unnecessary parts of the image. Since I only want to re-add the box on the right I'm starting by filling the whole mask with black so everything disappears and then I select the brush to slowly paint back the box into the image. So far this is the easiest way I did find to merge two images together and again I think it's amazing to have such a tool now finally available on iPad. And don't let us stop here we even can refine our result a bit further with the help of Gaussian blur. For this we go to filters and now we can set the amount of Gaussian blur that will be applied to our layer mask so the edges of our mask will be smoother. So much for the usability of Photoshop for iPad. Unfortunately it's not all unicorns and rainbows regarding Photoshop because we're still missing a bunch of features and there are still a lot of things that don't work as they are supposed to. For example if you're somebody who highly relies on brushes in Photoshop there is no way to import any custom brushes you are nailed to the stock brushes that come with Photoshop. Also if you were paying attention while I was showing you the available tools you may have noticed that we are missing a magic wand selection tool so far. Another massive bummer is the lack of smart filters and effects if you're running an older iPad Pro from 2017. So in order for these features to work you need to have the newest iPad Pro. Another thing I should mention Photoshop at this point in time still has a bunch of bugs. For example while I was using the brush I encountered a bunch of artifacts on my canvas while I was painting. Also the quick select tool sometimes just jumps to a whole selection of the whole canvas so this kind of bugged me out, no pun intended, but every now and then I was able to fix these issues by forcefully closing down Photoshop and reopening my project. In the end what can we say about Photoshop at the moment? Hence the lack of certain features and abilities and considering the amount of bugs I encountered Adobe already received a massive backlash from the community and knowing Adobe they are pretty good at listening to their community. So they already issued a statement they are working on massive bug fixes and also new features will come up along the road. Unfortunately we don't have a roadmap on that yet and as we've seen it with Adobe Rush they are pretty quick when it comes to the release of new features that are highly requested by the community. So what is your opinion about Adobe Photoshop for iPad? Have you also been anticipating Photoshop as I did? Let me know down in the comments below which tools you are most excited about now and also maybe the ones that you think are still missing. With that said I hope you enjoyed today's review. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and I see you in the next one. Peace!