Something for the iPad crowd
Yesterday Adobe released three apps for the iPad which allow the device to interact with Photoshop CS5 on your PC/Mac. The apps are called Nav, Color Lava and Eazel and they look pretty cool. I haven’t tried all of them out yet but once I do I will update this post. In the meantime there’s a bit more info about them here.
Eazel is more or less a painting app, similar to Sketchbook Express which has been available for a while. I’m not sure how useful that one will be for photographers. In any event, the cool thing about this one is that once you’re connected to Photoshop you can send the images straight over the network for further editing etc.
Color Lava is slightly more interesting. It’s like having real paints to mix up with your hands which you can then transfer over the network for use in Photoshop.
The last and possibly most useful one is Nav (pictured above). Nav basically gives you a bunch of shortcuts to the most used tools in Photoshop, easily accessible on the iPad. I have tried this one and it is cool to be able to switch tools, zoom quickly etc using the iPad, especially if you don’t have a tablet to hand. There is a little bit of crossover with the magic trackpad if you are using a MacBook Pro, but if you’re on a PC there is nothing like it.
Also recently released was Photosmith. Photosmith is a companion app for Lightroom, although this one has not been developed by Adobe. It allows you to sort through your images once uploaded to the iPad, tagging and starring them as you would in the Library module of Lightroom itself. Those ratings can then be transferred into Lightroom at the same time the photos are imported. This can be a fairly handy tool if you like to do stuff out in the field. I’d rather just wait and do it all at once on my MacBook..
Anyway, I think this sort of stuff is really where the iPad excels. That multitouch screen has yet to be surpassed by any other tablet device. What I’d like to see is for it to be utilised as a proper tablet, although that might be limited by the input device – chubby fingers are never going to be as precise as a proper pen tool. In any event these apps are a good step forward and I hope to see more stuff like this soon.
