First Exposure: Adobe Photoshop Touch Apps

How has multi-touch technology in devices like your cell phone or tablet computer changed the way you interact with computers? Unquestionably, most of us have experienced multi-touch technology in some capacity since it’s taken over as the mainstream input method for mobile devices. We may not have given it too much thought, but it has greatly transformed the way we view and interact with our images in the past few years. Suddenly, the use of a mouse and keyboard to view, zoom and pan our images seems less intuitive when compared to using our fingers to perform such tasks.

Soon, touch technology will change the way you edit and enhance your images too. Companies such as Adobe have already devised new design ideas in touch technology to extend the functionality and creative environment of the desktop application. Adobe, the front-runner in the digital revolution, continues to exert its ingenuity in this cutting-edge realm with the new Adobe Photoshop Touch Apps. And this is only the beginning.

The Touch Apps Suite incorporates three separate applications—Adobe Nav ($1.99), Color Lava ($2.99) and Eazel ($4.99)—which are designed to work interdependently with Adobe Photoshop on your computer. Adobe Nav integrates with Photoshop, allowing users to customize toolbars and switch active documents from the touch device. Adobe Color Lava is a painter color palette that allows for mixing and creating harmonious color schemes at the point of inspiration. Adobe Eazel, a painter’s app, is used for sketching ideas and recording inspiration on-the-go for later completion in Photoshop.

Adobe Nav
Now that you have a brief overview of the apps, let’s look at them a bit more in depth starting with Adobe Nav. This app was designed to turn your touch tablet device into a Photoshop tool and navigation companion. Nav allows you to select and arrange the tools you use most in Photoshop (fig. 01A) and put them on a grid in the app, enabling easy access to these tools without having to move your cursor across the screen or remembering all of the shortcut keys. To access any of these tools, just tap its icon on the tablet screen and the corresponding tool will activate in Photoshop—it’s that easy. The app also allows you to swap the background and foreground color, including a reset back to default; cycle through the various screen modes; and zoom the active document toward actual pixels with a simple tap on the tablet screen.

It also has a built-in document browser to view all open documents. This feature makes switching active documents very easy because you can see the document thumbnail on the tablet. A pinch zoom gesture on the thumbnail enlarges it to fill the tablet screen, making it easier to view a graphical representation of the document. A double tap will flip the thumbnail from the image view to a document info view that provides you with information such as file size, pixel dimension, document size and resolution, to name a few. In many instances, if you use this app along with a Wacom tablet, you can pretty much set the keyboard and mouse aside for the majority of the editing session.

Adobe Color Lava
The next app in this suite is Adobe Color Lava, a digitized color mixer similar to a painter’s color palette. It enables you to use your fingers to mix and blend color on an empty palette to create a wide variety of shade, tint and hue combinations. This app treats your input in a similar fashion to a brush, with many of its characteristics. Aside from being able to lay down any color on the canvas, there’s also a built-in water well that you can tap, to virtually wet the brush for color blending or clean the brush from color contaminants. The app allows you to create multiple swatch sets of five colors each. Then, when you’re back at the computer, simply link the app to Photoshop, tap the color you want and the corresponding color will show up as the foreground color in the Photoshop toolbar swatch.

This app is very similar to Adobe Kuler (https://kuler.adobe.com), an online color scheme creation Web site. Though similar in context, Color Lava gives you the ability to create and mix exact color schemes at the point of inception. This eliminates the need for you to memorize colors for later usage, especially since often the color you see and the one you remember are different. Best of all, the interplay of colors as you blend with your fingers can result in an accidental discovery of new colors, shades or tints that work to further enhance your project. The final element that seals the deal is the ability to create and store multiple color schemes for later use, so when new inspiration comes, you are ready to review or mix a new set of colors.

Adobe Eazel
The third app in the suite is Adobe Eazel, a blank slate for creative infusion. Eazel was created based on the idea that your creative inspiration comes to you in places other than the office or in front of the computer. Here is simply a blank canvas waiting to tell an exciting story with your vision. The brush tool within this app behaves very similarly to a watercolor brush, where one brush stroke can blend and bleed into another, resulting in a fusion of colors. Users can control the color, size and opacity of the brush with a simple slide of the finger, up or down, on the corresponding control icons.

Since Eazel is more of a painting program, I consulted with a friend of mine who is a traditional artist and painter to better understand the application, and collaboratively, we found some interesting facts that will help you with mastery of technique. For instance, the use of a stylus input device for painting is highly advisable. The stylus enables greater control when painting over tight areas and fine lines; since our fingers can vary in size and shape, app response does as well. Hovering fingers can cause accidental brush applications, which are very difficult to correct. The app only allows the last brush application to be undone—no history states here as in Photoshop, so monitor your brush strokes constantly.

The use of a lower opacity brush offers watercolor painting effects. At the same time, be careful, as low brush opacity has a tendency to turn colors gray. Take caution when a new brush stroke overlaps an existing one because the color can wash over the original stroke beyond the area of expectation, causing uncontrollable color blends. To get the best paint results from Eazel, using fingers only, we found it best to use a stipple, or dot, technique to build areas of opacity and texture in your work, creating a painting from multiple dots of color instead of long brush strokes.

Eazel is not necessarily an app created directly for photography, however, with some creativity it can augment photography and transform it into a mixed-media art form. Use it to construct a new background for an image, changing a pure photograph into an illustration piece that can be used for advertising, on a Web page or simply to satisfy a creative drive (opposite page, top). Best of all, Eazel allows you to create, paint, sketch or illustrate wherever you are with a simple touch, untethering you from the constraints of being in front of the computer.

Here We Go
These apps are only just the beginning of the touch revolution. They were created to extend the capability and function of their desktop software counterpart. Touch apps represent a step in the right direction, if not a bridge, to acclimate you to the idea of using touch input for content creation. In all, these apps represent a new kind of tactile interaction that we haven’t had with digital thus far. Surely as apps mature, they will help return to us the personal touch of analog photography from years past.

Art Suwansang is an award-winning international wedding photographer, educator and lecturer based in Southern California. He lectures for multiple photographic organizations, consults for photographers and companies worldwide, and offers digital photography tutorials through his new Web site, Rule of 3Rds, www.Ro3Rds.com. Additionally, he is an adjunct professor at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica College. Visit his Web Site at www.Wedding64.com.