Photoshop on iPad: Latest update offers Curves, Apple Pencil improvements

When Adobe first announced Photoshop on iPad, the prospect of having access to one of the most popular photo editing apps on a mobile device was certainly a tantalising one. The iPad app is built on the same base code as the Photoshop desktop client, and Adobe says that cross-compatibility between iPads and desktops would be seamless.

And a big part of the plan is to integrated desktop-like feature onto the tablet version, with Adobe promising to add more capabilities and features over time. Now, the company’s latest update brings one of the more eagerly-awaited features to the iPad version: Curves.

This means that, much like desktop Photoshop, you’ll be able to make adjustments to the colour and tone of your image by adjusting a diagonal line in a histrogram within the side-panel. By tweaking the line, you can adjust highlights, mid-tones, and shadows in a “non-destructive way”.

This has been one of the core features of the main Photoshop client over the years, and a feature that has been a long time coming on the iPad. However, Adobe says that numerical inputs are still not available on the iPad version for now, although a future update with that functionality—and eyedropped tools—will be coming “soon”.

Another interesting aspect of Photoshop for iPad is the integration of the Apple Pencil and touch input as a whole. In response to complaints that users have had to press harder to actually register strokes, the update will bring a pressure sensitivity adjustment feature to the app.

This, according to the company, allows you to be even more precise when it comes to the various brushing, cloning, and editing being done on the app. At the “light” end of the scale (as pictured), users won’t need to press with as much force to achieve certain pressure values, while the opposite applies for the “heavy” end.

The app was released towards the tail-end of 2019, with Adobe receiving criticism from certain quarters over several missing features—including Curves. From the start however, the company has insisted that more features will be rolled out, and the addition of Curves is further proof of that.

“The first version of Photoshop on iPad is focused on compositing, basic retouching, and masking, common tasks and workflows that we know will be useful for most Photoshop users. Over time, we’ll add more capabilities and workflows as we learn more about how customers use Photoshop on a mobile device.”

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