Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Photoshop for iPad Live Demo [video] (photographybay.com)
40 points by davidedicillo on March 31, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



My last experience with Photoshop was CS2, is that layer animation a feature in the desktop version?

Also tomlin mentions Dreamweaver, I think Adobe has the talent behind them to build a high quality IDE for web development. Consider the amount of small web shops out there doing work for clients, designing sites in Photoshop, then turning straight to a different, non Adobe editor to actually develop these sites.

If Adobe came out with an editor to match TextMate, and a development environment targeted at these web shops and hobbyist, they'd make it so a web dev never has to leave Adobe products to take a rails app or wordpress theme or whatever. Surely there's a market for this?

Or maybe I'm giving Adobe too much credit.


That layer animation is new in this iPad demo version of photoshop.

The UI looks rather incomplete, more like a technology demo, but kudos to Adobe for taking the core problem of photo manipulation and making it quite usable on iPad.


That demo is such epic FAIL because it would've looked a million times better if they just had a TV-out.

Gosh... the colors so are washed out that you can see any of the amazing colors, hell you can't even read the buttons at times! I cringed at the sight of the reflection of the camera on the screen. *shrug

Come on Adobe... you can do better than this!


Impressive. Now they just need to make a non-crappy, standards-based, express version of Dreamweaver (calling it something else might help) for iPad, add integration with Dropbox and/or WordPress and Adobe's got a game changer.

Mom / small business owner / hobbyist creates own website from couch? Check.


Mom can make her website form the couch using http://www.weebly.com/ and it'll probably look better than what she just did in Dreamweaver.


The product I just described doesn't exist, and Weebly is better already? I used the word Dreamweaver, but also mentioned that it would probably be a bad name for it for obvious reasons.

What Weebly wouldn't have is tight Photoshop to Dreamweaver (again, you can go ahead and imagine another Adobe product in place of Dreamweaver) integration, making what I described much more appealing on a device where you expect a fluid experience.


I'm not a designer, but my limited experience with Photoshop et al. is that you really need the precision of a mouse pointer for single-pixel-resolution manipulations.

Can someone with more experience chime in and explain whether Photoshop on a tablet is really useful?


The iPad can zoom in and out so quickly, it becomes a far better solution to have a constant 'brush size', but use zooming to effect the difference between fine and broad strokes on an image [1].

Several of the photo manipulation apps on the iPad already do this and it's far superior to selecting brush widths, to say nothing of obviating the precision problem [2].

In short, the screen size of the iPad is more a roadblock to its being a replacement for desktop photoshop. Though its portability, comfort and the ability to focus would be a huge advantage for anything in the sketch/draft/mockup stages of work.

And the lack of (true) pressure sensitivity makes the iPad a non-starter as a wacom-replacement. I suspect this could be solved by a bluetooth stylus. But the iPad alone is simply insufficient for many wacom tablet uses.

[1] e.g. the 'brush' always applies the selected effect to the area of the image under your finger. If you wanted more fine-grain accuracy, you zoom the entire image, so that the number of image pixels covered by your finger is reduced.

[2] Which, at a fixed resolution, absolutely was and is a problem.


Brushes (http://www.brushesapp.com/) is already very popular with quite a few artists and school teachers. I think everyone knows the New Yorker cover by now but here are some students’ paintings: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cedars-school/

This is not the same as photo manipulation but it shows that tablets have some excellent artistic uses. Painting with Brushes feels very fluid, even if you are a beginner. More professional tools are not quite so accessible (and not only because of their price).

What will we do with tablets? I have no idea. We are at the very beginning. I was just playing around with GarageBand and it is now at least clear to me that software on tablets is different and can be wonderful. Some things will not work as well, some will work so much better and the only way to find out is to try.


It would be important to know if an iPad can be as responsive as a wacom tablet.

I think an iPad version of photoshop could work as a simple photo retouching app as shown in this demo. But it will be really, really hard for Adobe to get the same level of functionality into an iPad app that they currently have on the desktop. Can you imagine using the type tool, or manipulating a document with hundreds of layers and groups on a 10" screen? Seems difficult.

That said, a fast tablet with video out to a bigger screen would be pretty amazing, actually: palettes and details on the tablet, image you're manipulating on the big screen.

The iPad has a long way to come in equaling the speed of desktop, but you can almost see it down the road.


video didn't play on my ipad

youtube version: http://m.youtube.com/index?#/watch?v=6O4vdxJz6tE


Oh the irony...


Will it be $699 like the desktop version of Photoshop?


really cool that adobe spends time on an ipad app when their mac version is extremely slow and bloated


Looks like a pile of shit in my opinion. Call it something else if you're not even going to try and include some semblance of the Photoshop toolbar.


I agree. Looks more like a flashy demo than anything remotely resembling a usable graphic art application. While interesting, I see no value in the 3D layers feature.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: