Photoshop is in trouble. Attacked on all sides by the best photo editing apps with powerful image editing features – Canva and Instagram chief among them – the pressure has been on to deliver a Photoshop mobile app deserving of the name.
Lest we forget, Photoshop celebrated its 35th birthday earlier this year, making it one of a very small number of brands to have simultaneously become an enduring household name even as the tectonic plates of content production have shifted dramatically beneath it.
And so, finally, the new Photoshop for iPhone is here. A free app – albeit one improved by the presence of a paid-for Creative Cloud account), Adobe makes some big claims. It delivers Photoshop’s core imaging and design tools as well as some surprisingly powerful pro features, layer masking and blending among them, as well as the generative AI features that are making a splash on the desktop version.
So, as someone who opens Photoshop on a near-daily basis for commercial photography, here’s how the new Photoshop for iPhone tickles my fancy after hours of tinkering and prodding…
Photoshop for iPhone: The likes
1. It’s easy to learn
I’ll never admit it, but I don’t know everything about Photoshop. And in an app that can’t offer the usual tooltips when you hover over an unfamiliar icon, Photoshop for iPhone has am slight learning curve, even if you understand the core terminology and principles.
Thank goodness, then, for the dozen or so video tutorials you can access when you first open the app. These take the form of talking-head videos describing various actions, such as working with layers, masks and selections, as well as videos provided by creators as they describe their process to building various collages and concepts.
Of these, the latter are particularly useful as they come with the source files, allowing you to see how a final image comes to be – useful if you don’t a file of your own to hand.
2. All the core features are there
Blimey. A quick feel around Photoshop for iPhone’s clean-looking interface reveals a really full set of tools. There are no fire-and-forget filters here – if you want to apply a split-tone look to an image, you’re going to have to get up to your elbows in hue and saturation sliders.
That’s a book of two chapters, of course – on the one hand it takes longer, and more practice, to get the effect you want. On the other, all those years I’ve spent laboriously learning how to do things in Photoshop translate like-to-like.
3. It can handle some surprisingly big files and tasks
Although Adobe is careful not to claim that Photoshop for iPhone has brought over every tool in the Photoshop chest, the app makes it clear – this is for ambitious types.
So, obviously, I fired a 1GB file over AirDrop to try and bring the whole thing to its knees. Just to make sure it didn’t work, and thus give me something to complain about, the file was a high-res, TIFF-format image in the ProPhoto colorspace. To my immense surprise, the file promptly loaded and looked… fine.
As we’ll come to in a bit, not everything makes the journey betwixt Photoshop desktop and Photoshop for iPhone, but if you’ve got big images, captured on modern cameras, you’ll be able to bring work-in-progress onto your iPhone to work on them.
And, not only is it compatible with layers – finally – it’s also compatible with layer groups, which means you can work up some surprisingly complex image constructions using the same device you use to watch TikToks on the toilet.
4. It’s got Adobe Camera Raw
This is another big one – import a raw file into the iPhone for Photoshop app and you’ll be greeted with a different-looking-but-still-all-there version of Adobe Camera Raw, allowing you to prepare a file for further editing via a surprisingly full set of options.
Highlights, shadows, whites and blacks all get their own sliders, as does color balance, complete with its own white balance picker. Texture, clarity, dehaze and vignette control are all there, as is a one-tap lens corrections button.
Once you’re finished, you can finish importing your image either as a standard layer or, get this, as a smart object, letting you step back into ACR if you want to fine tune things further.
5. Generative fill has made it, which is… good?
Getting images share-ready just got faster, thanks to Adobe’s much-vaunted Generative AI features that also make an appearance in the new Photoshop app.
Lean on Photoshop for iPhone’s automated features and you’re in for an impressive experience – the app was uncannily good at automatically detecting and selecting foregrounds, backgrounds, people and skies. And with the annoying legwork of making selections turned into a one-tap process, removing and replacing objects from your work is equally quick.
I found generative AI – replacing skies and such, removing the odd person – to work as well on iPhone as it does on the desktop – which is to say, impressive, with occasionally hilarious outtakes.
Photoshop for iPhone: the dislikes
It strikes me as strange that an app which prides itself on being the fullest-fledged version of Photoshop that Adobe could manage is missing a few tools which, least for this snapper, are part of my daily arsenal.
For example, I think it’s impressive that Photoshop for iPhone can open a multi-layered, 1GB TIFF file with a load of adjustment layers, but less impressive that when some of those adjustment layers are levels adjustments, there’s no way of editing them. It seems strange – curves has made it, so why not levels?
And although Photoshop for iPhone does a generally decent job of automatically selecting objects, things are a bit trickier if you want to make your selections freehand, as there’s no paths tool. Not only no paths tool, but if an image has paths already in it, there’s no way of accessing them within the app.
You could make the very sensible argument that creating a spot-on bezier curve is hard enough with a mouse or trackpad, of course, and that trying to perfect a bendy path with a fingertip would be a surefire track to PTSD, but it would be nice as an inclusion.
While I’m here, Photoshop’s handy collection of filters are also missing, so if you were looking for a chance to learn, for example, frequency separation, you’ll need to stick with your desktop.
2. It’s free, but only just
Real talk: getting an app with the power that Photoshop for iPhone has and then grousing that it costs money is like getting breakfast cooked for you by a Michelin starred chef and then complaining about the language – this is an incredibly powerful app that produces near-desktop results from a device that fits in your pocket.
If you’re a high-end content creator, or want to tip-tap away at an image before transferring it seamlessly to your desktop, Photoshop for iPhone just set a new standard.
Still, if you want the full version – which includes omissions from the free version including generative fill (the free version gives you 10 free generative credits, the paid-for one 100), object select, the magic wand tool and a few others, you’ll need to stump up $69.99 / £69.99 a year.
Don’t sniff – that’s cheaper than Canva, and while Canva is undoubtedly the better tool for whizzing up social media templates, for photographers there’s no contest. And bear in mind – if you already have a Creative Cloud subscription, this is included for free.
3. It’s not on Android yet
I’ll be honest, I don’t actually care about this one as I’m on iPhone, but if you’re in the 70% of the smartphone market that uses Android, you might.
While it’s (probably) more efficient to develop an app for Apple’s closed system of app stores and hardware, there will be plenty of content creators out there screaming for a decent image editor, and Adobe hasn’t done them a favor here.
Still, Adobe has promised that an Android version is coming “later this year”, so Android fans shouldn’t have to wait too much longer for it.
