Adobe Photoshop ٤+

As a product manager and designer myself I do sympathize with this kind of reaction to a major release. But it wasn’t unavoidable. It was waaaay easier to spend the last year thinking that an iPad version of photoshop that had feature parity with the desktop version was coming. Many of the outlets reporting on the announcement left out the caveat about v1, and even the official Adobe announcement article only had a single bullet point mentioning it. Most people who read about it walked away with the impression of “full” and “real” photoshop, not “a limited feature v1 that will grow overtime”.

From an announcement hype standpoint that’s fine. From the standpoint of expectation setting, that was precisely what led to the blowback currently manifesting itself as one star reviews.

The optics and narrative mistakes of the whole thing aside, what y’all have shipped in this v1 is really solid. It’s obviously limited in functionality, but everything that did make the cut is smooth, easy to pick up with knowledge of desktop photoshop, and just feels really good to use. If future functionality is added with the same care, I’ll very much look forward to trying it out.

I have always loved photoshop for everything from personal to professional use. So I was very excited to finally get a full version of photoshop for my 12.9 iPad Pro. What I found though was that this is not a “full” version of photoshop at all. This does have many of the features I know and love, but lacks a SIGNIFICANT amount of the functionality I have enjoyed on my PC experience. I am a current paid membership user of the desktop version, so I was hoping for more of a one to one translation.
My biggest grievance isn’t the lack of features though. My largest issue is the downscaling of the “cloud” files. When I upload a photo project I am working on for a client, and the PC is showing a file size of 4700x5600, I am expecting that same pixel count on the ipad. What I got was a loss of about 15% across the board on any file I uploaded to the cloud. This means that projects I want to take with me on the go are not the same resolution as they are on my personal computer. This also means that any retouching I want to do will be absolutely a moot point as I wont be able to have control of the finer details that I do on PC.
I still love everything that photoshop is capable of doing, but this version feels more like a Photoshop “lite” than it does Photoshop. I am excited for the possibility moving forward but for now unfortunately I will have to stick to my computer.

So, I just got an iPad and got procreate excitedly as I've heard good things. I was immediately disappointed by the lack of stabilizing tools in Procreate. Even though they technically have them, they aren't great, so I figured I'd roll back to photoshop since I know the program anyways. I was happy to find a stabilizer! And subsequently sad to find I can only use the default brushes. And the defaults in the app aren't even like the ones on the PC. What's the point if this program works better for me but none of the brushes work for what I need to do? I tried adobe sketch as well, and I'm happier with the brush options and that you're technically able to import more, but then they don't have stabilizing options! I feel like Goldilocks trying to find the program that fits just right. If this app actually allowed me to use my own brushes, it would be perfect for me. I'm a loyal adobe user but the whole point of me getting an iPad was so I didn't always have to use my computer and could draw on the go-- it's completely pointless if I can't even have good lineart brushes. PLEASE either expand the amount of brushes available or preferably allow us to import our brushes and settings.