
Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17567886/ipad-photoshop-release-date-apple-photo-editing-adobe
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liamk
Porting photoshop to iOS/ARM could also in part be motivated by a known or
perceived Apple transition from Intel to their own ARM chips.

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orev
This sounds most likely to me. Port to IOS on ARM coupled with the rumors of
IOS APIs being added to MacOS. Sounds like a first step to ARM migration
overall.

~~~
scarface74
It’s not a rumor. Apple announced they were doing just that at WWDC and they
showed two or three apps ported from iOS to the next release of MacOS.

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Pulcinella
There was no official mention of MacOS running on ARM.

~~~
scarface74
_....coupled with the rumors of IOS APIs being added to MacOS_

This part isn’t a rumor. It’s been confirmed by Apple.

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emsy
I'm an iOS user. But frankly, iOS sucks for this kind of work. I tried. Copy
pasting is slow, file handling is unnecesserily clunky (just give me a file
browser Apple). And exporting always needs some kind of workaround because I
can't just pop in USB drives (which my wife's Surface Pro gladly accepts).

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hug
You say you tried, but it sounds to me like you didn't try hard enough.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I do the vast majority of my photography work
on a 9.7" iPad pro, with a Pencil. I'm constantly editing 24mp RAW files in
Affinity Photo, which is about as close to full-fat Photoshop running on the
iPad as you can possibly get, and let me tell you: It's fantastic.

I turn on my camera, I shoot some images. I open up Cascable, which connects
to my camera's wifi, and I pull down some images. I flip through them and find
one I like, the one I want to edit, so I click on that one and click "share",
and then select Affinity Photo.

Affinity Photo opens. It's 95% of the power of desktop photoshop, albeit
organised in subtly different ways. I do the things I would normally do: White
balance, HSL, blemish touchup and even frequency separation. I click export,
and save to camera roll.

It's in the camera roll, and I select it, and I share it over email to some
friends, and to discord, and to instagram.

I don't get where the problem is.

~~~
emsy
I tried all sorts of work, from text editing to drawing and music creation.
They all kind of work but they are needlessly complicated. On the PC/Mac I can
edit a sample in Audacity and just drop it into my DAW, in most cases probably
via Drag'n Drop. On iOS I'd have no guarantee if that's even possible for the
two apps I'm using.

Copying an edited photo (or drawing in my case) to a flash drive involves an
external computer. It's not that it's _impossible_ it*s needlessly complicated
and clunky. I don't ant to try hard enough, I want the device to make my work
easier.

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Tomte
Affinity Photo on the iPad made quite a splash and was Apple's software of the
year in some category. I guess it showed Adobe that there is real money to be
made.

And Affinity Designer for iPad has just been released.

~~~
heavymark
I imagine it's less about money to be made but rather about fearing money to
lose. Affinity offering a more and more well rounded solution with their
Photoshop, Illustrator and now upcoming Indesign competitor, most of which are
already on iPad today. With a Lightroom competitor in the works, I imagine
Adobe is worried people will leave them completely for Affinity because of
some customer's hatred of the subscription model, and lack of iCloud and other
Apple specific tech. If affinity designer didn't release their app yesterday
and announce publisher I'm sure Adobe wouldn't have leaked this news today.
Excited for all the competition.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I will leave Lightroom and and InDesign the moment Affinity releases their
equivalents. No, I don't care about hundreds of existing LR presets, I'll do
everything to free myself from Adobe's arrogant lock-in.

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mark_l_watson
I am not a customer for this but I see the value. An iPad Pro is easier for me
to always have available, I feel it is less intrusive on my life than always
having an open laptop handy.

My must have iPad apps to be somewhat independent of a laptop are: OmniGraffle
for producing diagrams, Prompt for SSH shells, Microsoft Office 365 apps for
dealing with material from other people, TextTastic and Working Copy for
github, etc.

My use of a laptop with external monitor is really limited to doing software
development.

For creative types, tablets with apps like Photoshop should help cut the cord
to being tied to a full blown computer.

Microsoft Whiteboard was announced today, and I like the idea. I think Apple
needs to step up and provide similar group collaborative tools. Apple does a
great job of smooth workflow between iPhone/iPad/MacBook but they have
opportunities for improvement in collaborative tooling.

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kgraves
Well that's disappointing :(, I would have expected the full Photoshop
experience to be ported to the web instead, not in Apple's locked garden.
Sigh.

~~~
raverbashing
Browsers don't have the power or the speed to run the most demanding loads
that Photoshop require (especially without using more memory than needed)

At some point you really need to manipulate image data (from/to disk) in weird
ways that's just not possible in a browser

Try opening a .jpg file that's bigger than available memory in PS and see how
that goes (harder now as memory is not so constrained) as opposed to other
softwares

~~~
ktpsns
This is not even true in the classical JavaScript world. A 10 year old tiling
image viewer (think of any map viewer) proves the opposite.

Given we have WebAssembly and friends nowadays, you can think of the browser
as a X86 VM host if you whish, with similar limitations (= no relevant
limitations for running PS).

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nostalgeek
You can't really load giga bytes of data in a web page without that page
dying. The issue isn't really what Javascript can or cannot do (though speed
is obviously a concern). Even if you manage to stream the data somehow you
still need to persist it locally, and I'm pretty sure no browser allows that
kind of quota. Photoshop feature complete is not going to run in the browser
soon.

If what you said was true we would already have late Xbox 360 and PS3 like
games running in the browser...with acceptable performances on high end
hardware, which is clearly not the case.

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barrkel
Why do you need to persist it locally?

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nostalgeek
You need to load the app at first place. Launch Photoshop CC and check how
much memory it takes. Then open a 200 MB psd.

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fareesh
I wonder what the battery life will be like for a full Photoshop session with
a decent number of layers and filters being rendered in real-time while
editing a reasonably large photograph.

~~~
miohtama
You can already run heavy games on iOS devices that tax the system even worse
(audio, network). So based on this it should be couple of hours minimum.

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lebrad
Mouse/trackpad cursor support, keyboard shortcuts, and robust filesystem
access are required to intelligently use Photoshop. Does Adobe expect that iOS
will eventually get there?

~~~
systoll
iPads support keyboards. Wacom's entire business is predicated on
mouse/trackpad being inferior to styluses for many uses of this and similar
software.

And... while there are some pretty easy UI wins Apple could make there [eg:
the special handling of 'photos' in many apps makes treating them as 'just
files' awkward] the iOS 11 system seems reasonable for most common workflows.
Do you have any specific complaints?

I'm sure adobe would like the ecosystem to get better for them over time, but
there's nothing blocking their software from being useful on the iPads of
today.

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memsom
Didn’t they try this before? I had a copy of the Photoshop Touch(?) app
previously. It was on iOS and Android. I think it was 32bit though, so no
chance it still works on iOS.

~~~
hrktb
It was very very limited and clunky. Perhaps they later added more Adobe Cloud
integration, but that alone wouldn’t help much.

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flanban
I think this feels like a step forward, but I bet it's going to be a while
before this is usable for heavy PS work. The main issues for me are that I use
photoshop with as many keyboard shortcuts as possible and if I need a bt
keyboard then to me it's already more cumbersome than a small laptop. Plus,
photoshop clobbers RAM. There's no way you could use it at speed on a wee
tablet.

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tedchs
Well, I expect this is the beginning of the end for macOS. iOS and macOS have
been converging for a long time. First Photoshop runs on iOS, then Apple makes
larger and larger "i" devices until there's one with a 27" screen that sits on
your desk, then there's no reason for macOS. At that point everything happens
inside one of Apple's sanctioned App Store apps.

~~~
1over137
That's a definite and worrisome possibility, yes. But the App Store is 10
years old now, and they haven't required it on macOS so far, so there's hope!

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zingplex
I'm interested to see how the UI paradigms will transfer to a touch oriented
device.

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esturk
I wonder if people will drop Photoshop from their list of deficiencies when
the topic Tablet vs. PC comes up. Often, some people bring up the lack of
productivity tools like PS, X_Cad, writing and building code etc.

~~~
eropple
My Photoshop workflow depends on its ability to act as a plugin host for third
party workflow tools and to integrate with the rest of a professional
toolchain. So, for me, Photoshop functionally remains a PC/Mac application.
(This applies to most applications ported to iOS or even the Web with such
fanfare -- I _still_ use Office plugins here and there...)

~~~
rainbowmverse
It's the same with music software.

It's wonderful that Reaper has a native Linux version! I might just go with
Linux when I have the means to build a dedicated mixing and mastering
computer, though I'll miss the ease and quality of SerumFX. Unfortunately, few
VST developers have taken advantage of the new Linux support in the VST SDK.
And then there's Ableton Live. All of it runs on Windows and Mac. None of it
is likely to see an iOS port.

I need my _whole_ workflow to come along. None of it is trivially replaced.

~~~
eropple
I didn't even _think_ of music stuff. I use Logic Pro at the moment as my
primary mixer for the video stuff I do (mostly because the remoting
capabilities are nicer--Logic Remote is a lot nicer than Lemur or other OSC
stuff) and...well, now I'm a little queasy.

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dharma1
Interesting - wonder if Android too?

I wish Sketch or Figma had iPad/pro support too.

~~~
scarface74
The Android high end tablet market is basically non existent.

~~~
dharma1
yeah.. but you can actually use a mouse!

~~~
scarface74
For precision pointing there is the pencil - yes it is sub optimal.

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bagrow
The complete Photoshop is a pro-level app that makes a lot of sense on an
iPad. Illustrator would also be great. Easy enough to write out a new PDF, but
so hard to edit an existing PDF.

~~~
eropple
I think Illustrator would work much better than Photoshop. I don't know too
many people who don't have third party plugins in their professional
(nontrivial, couldn't-just-use-Pixelmator) workflows, or don't need pretty
fast storage for stuff like batch jobs. Illustrator tends to be used more as-
is, in my experience.

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gallerdude
Hopefully, this means we’ve reached some critical mass of Mac apps moving
over.

Because the iPad is the future of computing, much the same way the GUI
superseded text interfaces.

~~~
seba_dos1
After some initial craze in the first years, I rarely even see an iPad (or any
other tablet) in the wild anymore. Smartphones getting bigger seem to have
already replaced them.

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orbifold
It is a really valuable tool for knowledge workers. If you study medicine for
example a lot of courses provide you with tons of slides with low information
density. The last thing you want to do is carry them around as printed out
stacks of paper. You need to be able to annotate them and draw little diagrams
on them. For that an IPad Pro is perfect.

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StreamBright
s/full Photoshop/full Photoshop functionality/

I guess it would be hard to move the application as it is

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magic_beans
I can’t even fathom using photoshop without keyboard shortcuts... iPad keypads
are not useful.

~~~
matthewmacleod
The iPad will happily connect to a standard Bluetooth keyboard, and I'm almost
certain it'll include keyboard shortcuts in this fashion (at least if they're
planning on _any_ professional user using it!)

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cecja
That's 100% marketing talk. There will be no native running "full" Photoshop.
Maybe it will be cloud hosted like on chromebooks but porting the behemoth
that photoshop is is not gonna happen.

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matthewmacleod
I'm not sure why that'd be the case.

I don't doubt that Photoshop on a desktop machine will usually perform better.
But the latest iPad Pro models have six-core 2.3GHz processors and 4GB of RAM.
It was only a few years ago that were were doing pro photography work with
machines of that specification.

The challenges are definitely going to be building a productive and useful UI
using the iPad's input constraints. This is something that might be more
effective on a device like the Surface. But I'm sure there are ways to build a
good user experience on an iPad, so we'll need to wait and see what happens.

~~~
cecja
This is not a pro tool. It is called PRO like Windows 10 PRO there is no way
an ipad can handle pro resolution (10k+). The input methods available right
now are not fit to do pro work.

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seba_dos1
Exactly. From gf's experience, doing her many-layers/high-resolution work even
in older Photoshop versions on RAM lower than 16GB is a nightmare. At 16GB it
barely starts to be usable.

We're working on a 2D game. Some years ago, when PCs had lower amounts of RAM,
games didn't even had to include full HD assets. These days you may even
target 4K. While you're at such resolution already, you may even go a bit
further and keep it at printable quality for easy marketing. This eats lots of
resources, no iPad will be up to such task. It will work fine for occasional,
amateur editing, with low resolutions and low amounts of layers, but
definitely not in our professional case.

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matthewmacleod
That's a really specific case. But the idea that a heavily multicore device
with gigabytes of RAM is suitable only for "occasional, amateur editing" is
just laughable.

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seba_dos1
Well, part of my argument was that this isn't really a very specific case:
these days if you do any screen-targetting work that consists of many layers,
you will have a very hard time doing it on 4GB RAM.

