I’m delighted to report that Photoshop Express, Adobe’s free photo capture & editing tool that’s been downloaded over 15 million times (!), is now available in enhanced version 1.5 form via Apple’s App Store.
This release reworks the photo capture experience, adding support for batch capture of photos plus a highly useful review mode, and it includes full Retina display support. iOS 4.2 compatibility brings benefits like an improved ability to upload images in the background.
After going a bit quiet (publicly, at least) following the previous release, the Express team is now cooking with gas, and we have other cool enhancements queued up for the near future. In the near term, please let us know what you think of the new release, and what you’d like to see us do going forward. Thanks for your interest & support.
Hi John. I’m glad to see something on the iOS platform from adobe. The fact that it is free I can’t complain too much. But I will just complain a little bit.
I have idraw, phoster, artStudio. They are very good apps from small companies. idraw and artStudio is just about perfect.
If adobe create an app like phoster and moodboard but with more customization it would be a big hit IMO.
I do not understand why adobe does not make premium quality programs for the iOS. I would rather pay for a full featured creative suite for iOS app than get a limited free app.
Sorry for the typos and grammar errors did not mean to post. Hopefully you get what I’m saying.
Lightroom please! Don’t need PS Express or otherwise if a Lightroom “Express” was available.
Are you going to let Pixelmator eat your lunch or you’re staying as the Apple of the 90’s (expen$ive products)?
[Really? Pixelmator making in weeks what Photoshop makes in hours equals “eating [our] lunch”? Let’s keep our shirts on. See also: “But everyone i know voted for McGovern!”
In any case, hopefully by now you’ve heard me say over and over that I’m working on building mobile apps at Adobe, as are many others. It would be really helpful to hear some actionable specifics about what products you’d like to use. Right now at least pros are *not* saying, in any serious way, that they want to replace Macs/PCs & powerful desktop apps with tablet-based versions. As Gruber pointed out, it’s the heaviness of the desktop that permits the lightness of the tablet. Kill the desktop and you’re doomed to recreate it, at least in part. –J.]
…bringing the Mac and Pro to the table…
John, while we don’t want to duplicate our powerful desktop with a tablet, at least not yet, that doesn’t mean that we don’t want more than can be done now. We can look to the several powerful drawing apps for the tablet that have even famous artists using it. A good article, and interview, with David Hockney is an excellent example. And what about that survey you had a while ago, where a lot of us expressed interest for a tablet version of Lightroom, which I like to think of as “Lightpad”? If it could be done, I bet you’d sell a lot, even at a higher price than most apps out there now.
With new tablets, and we can be sure that Apple is included in that, using dual core chips, faster gpu’s, more RAM, etc., these new tablets will be more than powerful enough to do the job. The ability to see the future is what has made Apple so successful over the past ten years, and the lack of same is killing others.
If Adobe fails to see that tablets are the future, then that will be a sad thing. I remember a few years ago when notebooks were considered to be too small and weak to do any useful editing. A keyboard and mouse aren’t requirements.
I just hope that you’re working on something significant in secret, and aren’t revealing your plans because of competitive reasons, rather than not working on anything at that level at all, because you think it isn’t needed or wanted.
[It’s not a question of whether mobile hardware will mature greatly; it will. It’s a question of whether the user interface & user experience currently offered on such devices can be scaled to deal with much greater complexity without in turn losing its simple appeal. As soon as an app like Mail lets me open more than one message at a time, for example, it’ll need to deal with window management. And then I’ll want filtering, and… I’m not going to just give up all the power and control of my main system, nor do I want to stuff it into my simple system. I want them to be complementary. Anyway, there’s more than I have time to get into here and now. –J.]
Sketchpad is a pretty complex app. I use it regularly. There are ways around the windowing problem, obviously.
And both Aperture and Lightroom use different metaphors than what we were used to in the past. I’m sure you guys can come up with something.
Honestly, I don’t know why you don’t charge $0.99 for this. I’m willing to bet that Adobe would have gotten almost as many downloads, and you would have been able to fund even better iOS apps with those profits.
While we know that Android users aren’t willing to pay for apps, that’s not the case with iOS users. And I’m pretty sure that those of us who are already users of Adobe products are even more willing, even though there will always be a few who want things for free.
Here is what I think, that just took way to long for Retina Support. It’s hard to complain as it is after all free, but its just not a killer app in any way and it really should be. Its an average app that doesn’t do anything other that what hundreds of other photo apps do. It also seem to take quite a while to save to the camera roll. I expect more from the makers of Photoshop and Lightroom, a lot more. Why not make it do some of the more creative things from Photoshop, like the ability to create a layered file for more creative options, some apps do this very well already. Or a small painting toolbox. Make it more fun and creative, charge .99 cents for it even. It may have been downloaded millions of times, but it doesn’t mean people use it daily as their go to photo app on the iPhone.
Why does it requires location for non-location related features?
[Please see the subsequent post for an explanation. It’s due to an Apple security requirement. –J.]
When iOS and Steve Jobs seem to put so many obstacles in the way of developers why is Android so neglected by such as Adobe?
However, I would just like to add my voice to the others about something more powerful/useful to the pro to complement the big desktop apps, as well as the more creative apps.
Mike
MikeL, give it a rest with the ‘evil Apple’ meme. iOS is flourishing as a platform. Look no further than the great iOS apps John links to regularly, which are made possible by Apple’s care and feeding of the platform. You say ‘walled garden’ and ‘closed’. I say ‘curated’ and ‘stable’.
Easy Greg. I’ve been in this business far too long to use or even believe such emotive names. I have watched Apple grow from a couple of guys in a garage producing a better than average computer box, through all the variations of the Mac via the $20,000 Lisa (based on the excellent Smalltalk software by Xerox at PARC)…
I’m aware of the benefits of the closed system vs the open systems – stability is one huge benefit. I could go on for ages about Apple’s triumphs and mistakes but this isn’t the place…
Sorry if my slight slight of Apple hit a nerve. I was curious as to why the Android OS is so neglected. Is it because Android is an open system or is Google putting similar difficulties in the way of developers or… is it simply economics – iOS was the first and not only set a trend but started the market (again), so had the largest potential market. Maybe as Android overtakes iOS it will become as economical to produce for.
iOS apps are great, I would like to see similar great apps on Android too.
Enjoy using your chosen tool.
Mike