Power at your fingertips – if you can
see past ’em
When adobe brought out Photoshop Touch for
the iPad, we were amazed it managed to fit so much functionality into such a
portable device and on such a small, screen. Now that it’s adapted the app for
the iPhone and iPod touch, is the physical limitation of the screen size a
factor it can’t overcome?
Photoshop Touch crams an awful lot into a
32MB app: a full suite of adjustments, a range of filters and selection looks,
layer control, and the ability to work with images up to 12 megapixels in size.
It’s not just vastly more advanced than any comparable iPhone app; it’s a whole
evolutionary leap forward.
Portion
control: When tweaking a layer’s blend mode, you can see all the layers, but
only a small part of the image itself
There are four tool groups, each indicated
by a single icon on the left of the screen: Clone, Healing Brush, Blur and
Smudge; Paint, Effects Paint, Spray and Eraser; and two sets of selection
tools. The Tool panel disappears when not in use, only popping into view when
you tap the current tool icon.
Selection is essential when doing any photomontage
work and the app offers several methods. The Magic Wand will select contiguous
or discontinuous areas of similar color; the Extract tool enables you to paint
inside and outside the area you want to keep, automatically detecting edges (or
at least making a fair stab at it). The Refine Edge tool smooth’s selections
and helps perform intricate cutouts such as hair, and the Selection Brush
enables you to refine the image manually.
Watch what you’re doing The
curves adjustment uses a translucent overlay so you can see the image through
it
Of course, there are also the Lasso tool,
and the Elliptical and Rectangular Marquee, the latter of which has
user-definable rounded corners, a feature we’d like to see in the full desktop
version of Photoshop. For all the selection tools, a Mode button sets new
selections to replaced, add to or subtract from existing selections.
The trouble with working on such a tiny
screen is that your fingers get in the way. When selecting a tool from the
toolbar, which is located on the left of the screen, right-handed users will
always find the pop-up tool icons are obscured by their thumb (although the
same of the tool helpfully appears over the top).
Fingers getting in the way is a particular
problem when painting or using selection tools of course, so Photoshop Touch
help-fully includes a Show Pointer mode. When this is active, eth cursor is
positioned about ac centimeter North North West of where you touch the screen.
It’s always on view, and in order to activate it, you need to press a secondary
button in the bottom-left corner with your other hand. It’s useful technique,
but it can be self-defeating when, for instance, you want to make a selection
in the bottom-left corner: you literally can’t get there with the offset cursor,
and if you get close, the secondary button gets in the way.
A separate Selection menu enables you to
work with selections not just Cut, Copy and Clear, but Inverse, Feather, Copy
Merged and Extract. As with all the menus, reference is by icon as well as text.
The menu bar is a constant across the top of the screen, as is the
context-aware tool and layer panel at the bottom.
Layer control is good, with the ability to
hide and show layers, to move them up and down by dragging, to create new
layers from selections, from the camera or from your photo library, and then to
vary the opacity and blend mode of the layer. Most Photoshop modes are
supported, including Darken/Lighten, Multiply/Screen, Overlay and Linear Dodge,
although for some reason not Hard Light. Again, the tiny screen becomes an
issue: when you can see the Layer panel on the right, and the mode adjustment
at the bottom, you can glimpse only a small fraction of the image in the
remaining space. A nifty (and rather bizarre) feature is the ability to
double-tap a layer’s thumbnail to show all the layers in an exploded, rotatable
3D view, which is ingenious, although it’s hard to see the practical value in
it.
Masked ball The Fade control
applies a graduated mask to a layer, which is the nearest there is to layer
mask
There are 12 separate adjustments,
including old favorites Curves, Levels, Brightness and Contrast, as well as
Noise reduction and Replace Color. The use of the minimal space is ingenious:
in the Replace Color dialog, initial source selection is from a pop-up color
picker, but you can also drag on the image itself and the color beneath the
crosshairs will be sampled. Sampling is made easier by an enlarged loupe view
shown just above your tap position. Adjustments with multiple sliders, such as
Shadows and Highlights, display just a single slider at a time, with buttons
beneath to switch it between Draks, Shadows, Lights and Highlights. Where this
single-slider approach isn’t possible as with Curves, the curve is shown
translucently over the image, with anchor points displayed as circles at each
location where you tap and drag to adjust the settings.
