Adobe announces Photoshop Touch apps for Apple iPad

Adobe is bringing an update to its CS5 suite to allow Photoshop to play nice with iOS devices wirelessly, moving us closer to a full Photoshop app for iPad.

The upgrade, CSS 5.5, will feature three Photoshop Touch apps, Eazel, Color Lava and Nav, each of which will allow users to communicate wirelessly with devices like the Apple iPad, with Android and BlackBerry compatibility on the cards too.

Effectively these apps, to be released sometime in May, turn the iPad into a touchscreen control system for you desktop photo editing and even allow you to create new colours and paintings to use in your Photoshop creations.

The first app, Photoshop Touch Nav will allow you to create a control palette on your iPad with all of your favourite tools, create new files, zoom in up to 200 per cent on your images, open documents from your iPad directly on your desktop version of Photoshop. Your PC mouse is already looking enviously at this app.

The second app Eazel, is a pretty nifty finger-painting application on the surface of the iPad's touchscreen and then send them directly to Photoshop, where they'll be rendered at a higher resolution. A cool feature of this app is the ability to create a blend of wet and dry digital paint. You can also control the brush size, colour and opacity by placing all five fingers on the screen at the same time, which will summon the menus.

The final app of the three is called Color Lava allows you to mix colours and experiment, like on a real palette, and save them for use on your Photoshop creations. You can also mix colours when you're away from your iPad and save them for use in Photoshop later.

All three apps will be available to download from the App Store in May for $2, $3 and $5 respectively. As well as these apps, Adobe is releasing a new Photoshop Touch SDK which will allow third party developers to have a crack at making their own tools for Photoshop.

While these tools are infinitely cool, we're still waiting for the full version of Photoshop for iPad that was teased at Photoshop world last month. That's the holy grail.

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