Adobe Photoshop: Photo Editor

First, this app is missing a lot of useful tools that I use all the time on the desktop version. There are several cheaper apps that include many more tools for a lot less money. ArtStudio Pro and Procreate are just 2 examples that charge a one time fee (no subscription required) and are way more useful for drawing and manipulating photos on your iPad. Seriously, Adobe, you couldn’t even manage to include dodge and burn tools in PHOTOshop? But I have a subscription, so I figured I might as well give it a chance. Until I realized the app REQUIRES you to save everything to the Adobe Cloud. You can also save it to your iPad. But you cannot turn off the autosave to the cloud. I DO NOT WANT TO SAVE TO YOUR SERVER! I’m a physician at a medical school and periodically use photoshop to prepare patient photos for presentations. It would be a privacy violation if it were to end up on your servers. I need to be able to turn off the autosave function. The only possible reasons for making this a requirement, are nefarious. It is either to force you to use up your cloud space and then be forced to purchase more storage or it is a data mining scam. There is no good reason you can’t make this optional. Allow the customer to decide where they want to save their work. You will eventually cause someone to commit a HIPAA violation if you don’t change this feature.

I have always loved photoshop for everything from personal to professional use. So I was very excited to finally get a full version of photoshop for my 12.9 iPad Pro. What I found though was that this is not a “full” version of photoshop at all. This does have many of the features I know and love, but lacks a SIGNIFICANT amount of the functionality I have enjoyed on my PC experience. I am a current paid membership user of the desktop version, so I was hoping for more of a one to one translation. My biggest grievance isn’t the lack of features though. My largest issue is the downscaling of the “cloud” files. When I upload a photo project I am working on for a client, and the PC is showing a file size of 4700x5600, I am expecting that same pixel count on the ipad. What I got was a loss of about 15% across the board on any file I uploaded to the cloud. This means that projects I want to take with me on the go are not the same resolution as they are on my personal computer. This also means that any retouching I want to do will be absolutely a moot point as I wont be able to have control of the finer details that I do on PC. I still love everything that photoshop is capable of doing, but this version feels more like a Photoshop “lite” than it does Photoshop. I am excited for the possibility moving forward but for now unfortunately I will have to stick to my computer.

As a product manager and designer myself I do sympathize with this kind of reaction to a major release. But it wasn’t unavoidable. It was waaaay easier to spend the last year thinking that an iPad version of photoshop that had feature parity with the desktop version was coming. Many of the outlets reporting on the announcement left out the caveat about v1, and even the official Adobe announcement article only had a single bullet point mentioning it. Most people who read about it walked away with the impression of “full” and “real” photoshop, not “a limited feature v1 that will grow overtime”. From an announcement hype standpoint that’s fine. From the standpoint of expectation setting, that was precisely what led to the blowback currently manifesting itself as one star reviews. The optics and narrative mistakes of the whole thing aside, what y’all have shipped in this v1 is really solid. It’s obviously limited in functionality, but everything that did make the cut is smooth, easy to pick up with knowledge of desktop photoshop, and just feels really good to use. If future functionality is added with the same care, I’ll very much look forward to trying it out.