Photoshop’s New Offspring, Adobe’s Next Chapter

Photoshop X mock-up, courtesy of Apple Inc. and Adobe.

Sometimes, it’s easier to design and build a house from scratch rather than renovating an existing home.

What if, instead of using Photoshop’s existing building blocks, they use the newly-introduced Photoshop Touch as blueprint and create the next generation Adobe Photoshop Desktop app.

As Graham Spencer nicely says on his comprehensive MacStories review:

One of the biggest benefits of stripping out unnecessarily complex tools and features for Photoshop Touch, is that it really does feel streamlined, with all the (mostly) unnecessary bloat cut out. It feels fast and snappy for most of the time (a rare exception to this is when applying a heavy artistic effect to your image), and this makes using the app a much more satisfying experience. Additionally, whilst I thought using a finger would make things more difficult in Photoshop, that isn’t really the case. Using things such as the Lasso Selection tool really isn’t that much worse than using something like a trackpad – it may not be as precise as a very good mouse or Wacom Tablet, but it should be fine for most tasks in Photoshop Touch. But I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed using such tools with just my finger on the iPad — I thought it would be frustrating, but it really wasn’t.

Without the physical & computing-power limitation of a tablet, without Photoshop’s excess payload, any touch-inspired future Photoshop product is a better offering than what they have right now. Not to mention their groundbreaking price point: $9.99.

Photoshop Touch is available for $10 for iPad 2 and Android.