Adobe Announce Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit For Multiple Mobile Devices

With Adobe Color Lava, you can use your fingertips to mix colors on your iPad and create custom swatches and five-swatch themes. Instantly access them in Photoshop CS5—all you need is a network connection between your iPad and computer. Or use the app wherever inspiration strikes, and then bring your colors into Photoshop CS5 when you’re connected. Share colors via email, too.

You can do free-form experimentation on the bus or anywhere—just pick up paint and mash it around on the screen to discover complex, interesting hues at a glance. Then, once you like what you see, you can create a whole color theme, adjust the RGB or HSB values, and take things from there.

When your iPad is connected to your desktop via wifi, you can tap any swatch to make it the foreground color in the Photoshop CS5 color panel.

What’s cool is that as you build your swatch library in Adobe Color Lava, you can use it as an auxiliary dashboard and just tap around to enhance your color palette in Photoshop.

By experimenting and sharing, designers can forge creative connections through Adobe Color Lava. But it’s also a productivity tool: When studio designers have to come up with a visual design language for a project, they can easily show off their color ideas via the theme libraries, and they can use email to share swatches and themes without the tedium of typing up RGB values.

Move any color to the color wheel, and then double-tap it to adjust hue, saturation, and brightness. Not only can you refine individual colors this way, but you can also create your own custom color wheel.

With Adobe Nav and a network connection between your iPad and computer, you can customize the Photoshop CS5 toolbar on iPad to easily access the tools you use most. Browse, reorder, view, and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop documents on iPad. Tap a document on iPad to make it the active document in Photoshop CS5. Disconnect from the network and use iPad to easily share files in person with others.

Adobe Nav reinvents the iconic Photoshop toolbar for the tablet. For the first time, you can customize the toolbar to have only the tools you want—up to 16 appear as big, beautiful icons. So a retoucher who primarily uses four nested tools can now expose them up front on the iPad, and it becomes a delightfully simple tool switcher."

You can see all your open Photoshop files in a grid on this secondary display, so you don’t have to go through the file names in Photoshop or use the Photoshop tabbed view where it’s easy to pick the wrong file. And you can just double tap a document in Adobe Nav to flip it over and see the file data.

Lean back in your desk chair, tap a file in Adobe Nav, and see it come to the front in Photoshop on your desktop display. With your design team gathered around your screen, you can use iPad almost like a remote control—it becomes a presentation tool.

All open Photoshop documents are cached on iPad, so you can run up three flights of stairs and show comps to a creative director or account manager without having to save everything out to JPG. Files in Adobe Nav are high-res, actual size, and you can zoom in and out.

For web designers who are always building a page and then going through several steps in Photoshop to duplicate the file to create the next page, you can simply drag the file over to the + symbol in Adobe Nav, and that makes a copy in Photoshop. It’s a quicker, more intuitive way to work.

With Adobe Eazel, you can use your iPad and your fingertips to paint beautiful works of art. Paint across your entire iPad screen, and easily access the tools you need. Send your artwork directly to Photoshop CS5 from any location—all you need is a network connection between your iPad and computer. Or do all your painting in the app, and share via email.

"You can paint with your fingers or any stylus—the Nomad Brush is quite magical. The paint spreads out as you go and ‘dries’ over a couple of seconds, and what’s really cool is that—as you draw over the top of an existing stroke—Adobe Eazel knows how to bleed paint into that color."

Adobe wanted a unique multitouch solution for navigating the Adobe Eazel tools and functions—something zen-like in its simplicity. The five-finger touch was a breakthrough moment for usability. It takes a bit of learning, but ultimately it’s very natural.

Adobe have put the most commonly used tools on your most usable fingers. So you control color with your index finger, brush size with your middle finger, and opacity with your ring finger. You access settings with your pinky finger. Your thumb flicks to undo or redo, and it slides to erase.

You can send your Adobe Easel painting to Photoshop CS5 instantaneously. You get a higher-res version to work with, and it retains the alpha channel that gives it that transparent quality.

Developers can access the free Adobe Photoshop Touch SDK today for Windows and Mac OS platforms on the Adobe Application Manager at www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop.

Current Photoshop CS5 customers can experience the value of the connection to devices by downloading and installing a free patch available on www.adobe.com or via the Adobe Application Manager, beginning early May, 2011. The Adobe Color Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav applications for Photoshop are also expected to be available in early May 2011, ranging in price, on the iTunes App Store. For more information or to sign up to be notified when the apps become available for purchase, visit www.photoshop.com.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended are available through Adobe Authorised Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales. Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is £548 and £794 for Photoshop CS5 Extended.

Today, with the launch of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product family, Adobe also announced a new flexible subscription-based pricing plan. With subscription pricing customers can use Adobe Photoshop for as little as £28 per month. For more information about Subscription Editions, visit www.adobe.com/go/cssubscription.