Report: Adobe to launch full version of Photoshop for iPad this October

 

 

Part of the vision of the "Creative Cloud" was to offer their vast array of products across different platforms without sacrificing any user experience, data or functionality. That was six years ago, and we've only recently started to see that vision come to life in meaningful ways with the announcement of Rush last month. But according to Bloomberg, Rush was only the beginning as sources they claim have "knowledge of the plan" but wish to remain anonymous, have spoken out about the future of Photoshop: Adobe will launch a full version of Photoshop for the iPad this fall at their annual creative conference, MAX. 

Though as you can imagine the timing was not confirmed by Adobe, they actually did confirm they were working on a cross-platform iteration of Photoshop. Scott Belsky, the chief product officer of Creative Cloud, told Bloomberg that, referring to cross platform apps like Photoshop, his “aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” and that “there’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”

Up until the announcement of Rush, Adobe's most cross-platform, mobile-friendly application was Lightroom, but even that experience isn't ideal for all users. Other applications like Sketch and Draw do cross over to desktop platforms, but the functionality of the individual apps is extremely limited. In an interview with Bryan O'Neal Hughes earlier this year, Imaging Resource brought up the limited functionality of applications, and even Hughes agreed that apps like Sketch and Draw, which have very specific uses from a design standpoint, but are very similar from a usability standpoint, should probably be one app. And from that perspective, why not have the entire Illustrator experience available on iPad? 

 

Photoshop Touch has long since been retired, and when it did exist only offered extremely limited functionality. This new app will reportedly bring all features to the tablet.

The desire of the users for the kind of consistency among applications is shared by Belsky, who Hughes said pushed hard for apps to be the same no matter what hardware was running them. "He said we need to be consistent across apps," Hughes said of Belsky. "Value access to work wherever you are, connection with mobile apps and integration with desktop. They need to be high fidelity, they need to be supported in all the languages that we support on desktop." Bryan added, "We need to be platform agnostic."

With the announcement of Rush and now this report from Bloomberg, it seems that the goals of 2012 are finally starting to see the light. Much of what Adobe wanted to do back then was seriously limited by hardware technology. Today, with cell phones and tablets boasting considerably more horsepower than they did six years ago and with the combination of Adobe's ability to do complex computations in the cloud, we may actually see the real vision of Adobe CC in 2018 in working product.

[Via Bloomberg]