iPhone App: Photoshop mobile

Welcome to our first iPhone app review. This will be a weekly review of a selected iPhone app that we believe deserves your attention. Even if other tech blogs feature similar articles, we think that one more of this kind is always welcomed: The app store is so bloated with bad quality apps nowadays that every new possible way of discovering new, quality app is useful. Tired of browsing the poorly designed apps store? Let us do it for you! Each week, we’ll discuss one app in detail, and we would like to hear suggestions from you! Have you discovered a little gem? Have you developed it yourself? In any case, send us an email at tips@techhaze.com.

Our criterias, when it comes to jugging an app are the following:

- Design: The iPhone UI is what makes it so unique. An iPhone app should exploit this as much as possible. Functionality and aesthetics are Apple’s main assets.
- Performance: Apps will be tested on the newer iPhone 3GS, which is faster than the previous model thanks to updated hardware. If the app runs slowly on it, chances are it will run even worse on the 3G. Good performance is sign of clever coding.
- Value: What does the app deliver for its money? Is the app actually useful? Don’t forget, some people actually pay for fart apps.

With this in mind, we can begin our first review, which will feature Adoobe’s Photoshop Mobile App.

Overall look and feel

The first thing you’ll notice is that the app has absolutely nothing in common with Photoshop for PC or Mac. You heard that right, no infinite menus, no triple functionality buttons, no palettes and no layers. Yes, photoshop without layers, I know it sounds weird. The interface is well designed, taking advantage of the iPhone beautiful screen. Don’t expect anything special though, the buttons and styles are pretty standard.
You will immediately know your way arround the app. Even my mom would. Everything is very intuitive, but if you indeed manage to get lost, there’s an option in the settings menu that will allow you to turn tips on.

Functionality and performance

So what does this app actually do? To make it short, the most basic stuff the most basic photo editing program would do. You can crop, rotate or flip the picture, adjust its exposure, saturation, tint, transform it into black and white and apply effects like sketch, soft focus, vignette blur, vintage and so on. The quality of the effects isn’t bad. I tested them on a picture i took with a “real” camera, giving the onboard’s camera less than average performance. It’s while trying to rate the quality of the effects that I found the first weak point: There’s no way to zoom into the picture, which can be useful if you want to fine tune the effect. By the way, adjusting effects is done by sliding your finger on the screen from side to side. Slide it to the right, and the effect’s intensity will increase, slide it to the left and it will decrease. Pretty neat.
The effects are applied instantly. No need to wait for a “generating preview” or “applying effects” like on my old Nokia N95.
Additional features include the embedded access to Photoshop.com, which will allow you to store and share your newly edited pictures.

Value and verdict

Photoshop for iPhone is free, which should already put an end to the value debate. What’s more, there are numerous numerous apps on the store that are far from free and that do exactly the same (or less). Yes, CameraBag, it’s you I’m talking about.
To conclude, i would like to underline the fact that this app doesn’t deserve its name: It’s simple and it’s free, which is pretty much the opposite of what the desktop version is. Yes, it’s a marketing stunt, but hey, they could have included a “lite” or something.
To put in a nutshell: If you’re a teenage girl who happens to spend her time taking pictures of herself and want to know what you look like with 18 different sketch effects, or if you are like me, willing to try out the best photo editing app there is for a portable device because you can, look no further.