Fuji X-Pro1

While it may have taken around three years to do so, Adobe is finally giving a sneak-peek at some high-end photo-editing software for the iPad. The app previewed – which seemed to be quite in the beta stages – would be something along the lines of an iPad equivalent of Lightroom, obviously a bit limited with editing, due to horsepower constraints. Tom Hogarty, product manager for Lightroom, previewed an early prototype of the application on Scott Kelby's The Grid.

There's no promise as to when the app will ship or how it will fit into their current RAW image workflow right now, but for now, I'm sure many – myself included – are happy to see a working prototype. Below is a list spelled out by CNET as to some details Hogarty laid out.

• The ability to edit photos taken in raw photo formats, including Lightroom develop-module parameters like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance. • Cloud-synchronized editing so that changes made on a tablet arrive on the same photo on the PC. • The ability to zoom all the way to 100 percent for checking photo focus and details.

Another quote worth noting is in reference to his own, personal desire to be able to sort, flag, and/or reject photos within the app. To this, he said "I spend couple hours computing on the train," he said "I'd love to be able to sort and select images."

Adobe seems to be stepping up their game more and more, especially since the rise of Creative Cloud and seeing their actually working on apps for organizing and editing RAW images on-the-go is another step in the right direction. One possibility I can think of as to how Adobe can minimize CPU strain on mobile devices (which in turn drains the battery faster) is to utilize a feature they're implementing into Lightroom 5, which is "Smart Previews." From our news article on the Lightroom 5 beta:

"This feature creates smaller, lossy .DNG images of your full-sized RAW files on your computer, keeping them as previews in a cache of sort."

If they were to include this ability in the application, you could edit a smaller, iPad optimized .DNG and once the photos are uploaded to your computer, the .xmp information could be transferred over to the full-sized image. It's a rather obvious solution, albeit one which Hogarty didn't quite hit on. It will be interesting to see what features make it and what features are specialized for the mobile workflow. It's worth noting the images shared within this article are of the prototype meaning little to no UI design is implemented, which is why it looks much more complicated than we can expect the final product to be whenever it does go live.

I didn’t buy the iPad with the intent of doing any serious work on it. But, with all the Apps being developed for photography, and being away from my computer with images I wanted to process, I thought I would give it a try. I picked up Photoshop Touch a few months back, but never used it. It’s actually a pretty powerful app, has a smoother UI, and in some ways is easier to use. In other ways its more difficult, mainly due to the limitations of the iPad. Here’s two versions of the same image. The one with the “G7″ right side up was processed in PST. 9 exposures blended together in layers without any other adjustments. The other image was processed in an App I just picked up called “ProHDR”. It contains two exposures layered through what they call “HDR import”, and then filtered through what they call “xpro”. I didn’t play around too much in either of these apps, kind of a one shot trial, but I think both are worth exploring more.