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Provides: Photoshop on your phone
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: iOS 5 or later
Retail Price: $4.99 for iPhone or $9.99 for iPad.

Imagine the power of Photoshop. Now imagine the power of Photoshop on your phone. Photoshop Touch has been on the iPad for some time, and that's all well and good if you're taking images on your iPad and/or you don't mind transferring images from your iPhone to the iPad, but the reality is that we are probably more likely to be taking images on the iPhone itself. If we need to do something to that image now before we send it out to all of our friends, we need to fix it on our iPhone. Well, now we can. With some exceptions with the profoundly bad Help for Photoshop Touch, Photoshop Touch works mostly amazingly well.

To start off, let me show you an example of an image I took with my phone, unaltered. Below that is what I came up with after altering the image. The third image is a simple example of one of the artistic design choices provided with PS-Touch. What the top image shows is that my iPhone 5 took a fine photo, but nothing outstanding. What I wanted to do was to make it pop a bit more, enhance the ground colors and push the texture on the fence. What the middle photo shows is that I pushed too much on the saturation of the greens at the expense of the rest of the image. This is hard to see when manipulating images one the phone: despite the retinal screen, it's still a small screen. What looked OK on the phone just was too much on a computer screen. The bottom image displays one of many artistic choices, this the "Old Sepia" which came out quite nice with absolutely no futzing on my part. The lighted vignetting was part of the self-generated process.

Besides the complexities to getting as many of the potential adjustments to work on the phone in the first place, we also have to marvel at how well they did on the interface. Well mostly. There are several design decisions that make me scratch my head a bit, but let's look at the basic layout and some of the functioning aspects.

Images can be brought into PS-Touch via your own Photo Library, images you've placed in the Creative Cloud, directly from the Camera, a blank document, and lastly from the Clipboard. Probably the most viable one is from your Photo Library. Uploading and downloading images from the CC can take a LONG time depending on the image size. Taking images directly from the Camera means that you take a photo and without having the option to look at the image and ponder over whether it's a good image or not, you are potentially committing some amount of time before you can take another shot. The blank document is good if you want to do a composite shot and creating an image from the clipboard is also fine.

Once you've opened your image into PST, your awash with options and opportunity. First, I have to admit that I am a Photoshop junkie. I consider myself fairly proficient with PS and have spent way too much time staring at what PS can do (just ask my wife). Looking at how the engineers at Adobe placed so much of the application into PST is truly amazing. I cannot say that it's all great, your thumbs are not the best tool to perform delicate extraction, but if you are patient, you can, to a point. In fact, if there is any limitation, it's a lack of alternate approaches to the same tool that serves PS so well. There are so many ways to do the same thing in PS that makes the program profoundly customizable to each person. In PST, there are not so many variations on how to do anything. Thus, personalization by personalized work flow just is not all that possible.

But let me give you a brief tour, all of the screenshots below are 1/3 size to better fit in this review.

• Top left shows what your image looks like when opened in PS-Touch.
• Top right shows the editing tools. Just about everything in PST has icons and text defining the tools and/or buttons functions, most are fine. However, note the trashcan used to "Clear" an edit. Not my favorite icon here.
• Middle shows you that you can work in either landscape or portrait view (although PST is sluggish in responding to the rotation) and shows the various Adjustments that can be done.
• Bottom left shows that you can also do layers. There is a limitation for how many layers depending on the resolution (size) of the image. Thus, the larger the image, the fewer layers you can have.
• The bottom right shows your marking tools, here you can see the Rubber Stamp Tool, Brush Tool, the Scribble Selection Tool (more on that later), and the Brush Selection tool.

The thing that floored me with PST is how complete it is with the various features you expect in PS. While the location of those features is logical, it's not necessarily intrinsic so you will end up hunting and digging for things you know are there,or should be there, somewhere. For example I had heard that you could use Blending Modes with the layers. I spent an amazing amount of time looking for the Blending Mode feature. Turns out it was right in front of me. To get into layers, you tap the double-layer icon shown below circled with a red circle and to get into blending modes you tap the double-layer icon to it's left circled with a red square. It really is obvious but then again, not so much.

If there is one design flaw with PST, it's that it choses to have the Brush tool as a default Tool. I typically have a standard reflex when working on documents, of tapping the image after performing an operation to make sure that the focus remains on the image I working on. However, by making the Brush Tool the default Tool, it means that every time I tap the image to set the focus, I have a self-made dot on my image. It's not the end of the world as a simple tap on the Undo button (top right corner) undos this and makes it all better. Nonetheless, I do wish they had not selected that as the default Tool.

There is one interesting option available in the preferences called Presentation Mode, ostensibly used when you've hooked your iPhone up to your computer during a presentation, that provides a bright red dot representing where you ACUTALLY TAPED YOUR FINGER ON THE SCREEN. I do recommend you play with this for a bit and see how amazing it is we get anything done on the iPhone. While we think we are placing our fingers on the desired locations, all I can say is, well it's close.

Anyhow, once your image is done to your satisfaction you can save it back to your iPhone's Photos location but only as a JPEG. This means that all your layers will be flattened and no way to fix anything you've done. The alternate choice is to save it to your Creative Cloud account. If you already have one from your CS6 software, you are good to go. But if you don't have one, you can get one for free that provides 2 GB of storage space.

Note that there are two ways to save your images as this point: PSD and PSDX. The former is a standard PDS document meaning that you can then open this with PS on your desktop machine with no issues or problems. The PSDX is if you want to work with the image again on either your iPad or phone later. There is a plugin you can download for free from Adobe for your desktop PS that lets you work with PSDX documents without having to save them as PSD documents.

In short PST is an amazing piece of software. For $4.99 it's a steal. Truth be told, I'd rather work on images in the desktop Photoshop than on my iPhone. However, there are times where that's just not possible and I want to send images off to friends now, not later when I get home.

Nonetheless, this app is in desperate need of more than a tutorial. It needs a basic manual showing what's in the software, where it's located, and how to use it. While some of the features are obvious and easy to find, there is a lot that isn't and those features will go to waste if people can't find and take advantage of them. But I do encourage you to take advantage of Photoshop Touch, it's worth it!

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.