Adobe is starting to sort out Photoshop for iPad's lousy feature set

Let me give it to you straight: Photoshop for iPad isn't great. Over the past year, creatives who rely on their iPadOS tablet to take care of photographic business have been promised the moon by Adobe. Instead, we got handfuls of green cheese. It was supposed to have the all of the power and capabilities of the desktop version of the app at launch. Nope: I, along with what I am sure are many others, was disappointed to find that the company that pretty much wrote the book on computer-aided image editing had released an app that was easily outclassed by apps like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, the latter of which has been around since 2014. Happily, Adobe took a baby step towards climbing to the top of the mobile photo editing dog pile by adding a feature to Photoshop for iPad that should have been there since day one: the Subject Select tool.

From The Verge:

This addition marks the first real improvement to Photoshop for iPad since it was released last month to disappointing reviews. The tool should go a long way toward quelling one of the biggest criticisms of the v1 version of the app, which was the lack of a Magic Wand tool.

Aside from Select Subject, Photoshop for iPad is also getting some UI improvements and speed improvements for its Cloud documents. Cloud PSDs, which were introduced with the app and allow users to access their Photoshop files from any device, will now upload and download up to 90 percent faster.

So, that's nice. As I'm already paying for an annual subscription to Adobe's image editing desktop apps and the ability to keep my photo library synced across multiple devices between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom for iOS, I'd very much like to see the company put the work in to make removing Affinity Photo from my iPad a viable option.

Image via Seamus Bellamy