There’s no question that if you’ve ever worked with images and had a need to customize them in some way for use on your blog or website then you’re familiar with PhotoShop. That’s not to say that everyone has worked with PhotoShop – personally, the price and the complexity of the app (it does way more than what I need) has kept many potential users at a distance.
So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me this week when I learned of the availability of a free PhotoShop app for iPhone – yes I said free! For mobile photography lunatics like myself, this is a real score and you might want to jump on this app quickly before the free status changes (no guarantees here, however, I would gladly pay a buck or 2 for this one and I’m sure others will agree).
So, what can you accomplish with PhotoShop mobile? Here’s a quick list of 10 things you can easily do to your images (note: to begin you must either capture a photo at that time or select one from your gallery):
- Crop – one of the simplest yet handiest actions you can perform on a photo is to crop it… simply drag the crop rectangle, re-size it and save it as a new photo.
- Rotate – Sounds basic, however, what I like about this function is that the user can simply drag the photo to the desired rotation angle rather than simply selecting the standard rotate 90 degrees that you find in most apps.
- Flip – similar to rotate, the user simple drags his finger from side to side until the desired flip effect has been reached. A complete mirror image flip is possible or a slight flip giving a stretched effect to the photo is also possible.
- Color enhancements – Several options are provided including edits to exposure (lighter or darker), saturation (pale to vibrant color change), tint (focus on a specific color range), or create black and white. Again, each effect is controlled by sliding finger side to side for a positive or negative effect. Messing with the saturation can give some really cool effects that any novice will dig!
- Sketch – now some fun stuff as the sketch option can easily be applied to an image providing an “artsy” or water color style effect. Again, a mild or strong effect is easily controlled with a finger swipe over the image… this one is fun!
- Soft focus – another fun effect controlled via finger swipe generates a soft (blurring) on part of the image providing some interesting effects – useful for emphasizing part of an image while the rest is subtly blurred into the background.
- The Cool Stuff – Finally, some amazing and fun effects are provided in the final toolbar option (found to the far right) add a vibrant effect (colors really pop), a “pop” effect that places your image into four quads each having a different color saturation applied (you’ve seen the Einstein poster no doubt with a similar effect), add a border (a cool white border for that 70’s effect works well on black and white photos, Vignette blur provides some interesting blurring to parts of your photo, Warm vintage can give your photo a classic vintage look (similar to sepia effect), or Rainbow option generates a color rainbow effect to your photo… any of these options can be used to provide some fun effects to your images… test and explore all of them.
- Undo or Redo – a friendly tool provided by the app is the ability to undo or redo anything.
- Save – naturally, users have the ability to save their photo after any effect has been applied. Make a change to an image and then simply save as a new image file in your photo gallery.
- Upload – the final and perhaps most important function bundled in PhotoShop Mobile is the ability to upload to your Adobe account. Using the “Settings” tab the user either logs into an existing Adobe account (I already had one from a couple of years ago) or create a new account. Using the upload tool you can then upload all of your new photo creations to your adobe account. – a great way to store or backup your work far later use.
PhotoShop Mobile for iPhone is indeed a fun and useful application that anyone can easily use and enjoy. The app is ideal for spicing up images that you want to upload and share on the fly via Twitter, Twitpic, flickr etc… easily enabling you to set yourself apart from others who are spontaneously sharing their images with their social contacts. The app is a bargain (Free is nice) and provides all the basic functionality one could want in a mobile image manipulation tool. Perhaps the only other option I’d really like to see is the ability to add text and captions to the image… perhaps this will come in a “pro” version. Otherwise, this app is destined to become a Top app in the application store.
Some simple effects applied to a cropped image I captured with writing this article in the coffee shop! More mo-blogged photos from iPhone can be seen HERE