In the past few weeks, Apple has had some attractive new releases. A major feature to be found on many of them is the force trackpad, which has essentially taken their glass trackpad up a notch or two by adding pressure sensitivity. App developers were quick to jump on this and have created some editing apps that take advantage of the new tech and have shown how the force trackpad can be a rudimentary Wacom-like surface. This itself is unlikely to get the sure-footing of the Wacom business model trembling, but what Adobe is doing with mobile editing for Apple’s iPad, may.
In a new video narrated by Adobe’s Head Of Outreach, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Adobe pulls back the curtain just enough to give us a look at what’s happening in their mad science lab, and what we see is a glimpse into the future of mobile image editing. The app itself isn’t named, but from the demonstration it’s not hard to deduce that it’s likely the next generation of Photoshop Mobile for iPad.
The demonstration actually uses 50MP images from the new Canon 5Ds, and the fluidity with which it is panned, zoomed, and modified, show this app to be extremely capable. The dome shows healing and cloning features, as well as painting and liquify features all working smoothly, and all apparently, non-destructively.
[REWIND: Why You Need A Tablet & How It’ll Transform Your Lightroom Workflow]
While there is no actual named date for the release of the app or features, it brings to mind the many rumors of the Apple iPad Pro, which features a larger screen size and more power said to come out this year. It may very well be that this coincides with that release, though that’s just speculation. That actually leads into more speculation about the future of dedicated pen tablets, because it would seem that once this app is released, it will just further develop along with the hardware which may leave Wacom tablets with a very small niche market. Time will tell.
Have you ever tried to use a capacitive pen on an iPad? How much further do you think mobile tablet hardware and software have to come to leave Wacom behind?
Source: Adobe
5 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
as a Adobe CC subscriber I am excited about this new advancement. Great stuff as usual from Adobe.
Apple still gets all the love…. rats! Samsung has been shipping actual Wacom digitizers in their tablets for going on four years now, including my 1.5-year-old Galaxy Note 12.2… that’s a 12.2″, 2560×1600 screen. Now, sure, I’m not suggesting that anyone’s going to be switching over to tablets of any kind vs. real screens for the best photo editing. Just that Apple’s still getting “firsties” from Adobe, despite being far less suitable to the job than, say, many Android devices.
You still can’t color calibrate an iPad as far as I know – that kinda prevents this from being used professionally.
Also, editing on a 10″ (or 13″ for that matter) feels extremely cramped when you are used to a 23″ Eizo…
It wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, if they got to where Wacom already is (Cintiq Companion). But, frankly, I find a separate digitizer and screen easier to work with than digitizer-on-screen. Something like the Cintiq is more intuitive at first (you don’t have that awkward week or two of developing coordination), but you do have to block parts of the image with parts of yourself, and since most of retouching is about getting smooth transitions and uniformity, losing the context of what you’re working on under your drawing hand makes under- or over-working the area a lot easier — you have to lift to see if you’re “there” yet.
cool, can’t wait to try this feature.