Photoshop for iPad nears launch with ‘key features’ missing

Bloomberg

Adobe Inc is nearing the consumer launch of Photoshop for Apple Inc’s iPads a year after it was officially announced, however the company and early testers have said that the application will lack some key features from the desktop version.
The San Jose, California-based company will hold its annual creative software conference, Max, in early November in Los Angeles and will provide an update on Photoshop for iPad at that time. The mobile app, which was announced to much fanfare and anticipation at the conference in 2018, is still on track to reach consumers by the end of this year, Scott Belsky, chief product officer of Adobe’s Creative Cloud division, said.
The company hasn’t provided an official update on the software launch since last year.
Adobe has been testing Photoshop for iPad under the codename Rocket with a small group of beta testers since earlier this year. Participants have told Bloomberg News that some beta versions don’t include well-established features they expected to be part of the release. They complained about less advanced or missing features around core functionality like filters, the pen tool and custom paintbrush libraries, vector drawing, color spaces, RAW editing, smart objects, layer styles and certain options for mask creation. Their disappointment about these limitations stems from Photoshop’s established reputation as a leading professional photo-editing programme on the desktop. “Feature-wise, it feels like a beefed-up cloud-based version of their existing iPad apps and not ‘real Photoshop’ as advertised,” said someone beta-testing the software, who declined to be named talking about an unreleased app.
“I understand it is based on desktop Photoshop code, but it doesn’t feel like it right now.” Other testers have called the app “rudimentary” and said, in its current state, it is inferior to other apps like Procreate and Affinity on the iPad.
Belsky said that the beta feature set won’t represent the final version for consumers, and the need to collaborate with Apple meant that a lot of features are “coming in hot” ahead of the launch. At launch, he said that Photoshop will still lack some familiar features, but that will only represent version one of the product. “Launching every single feature that was accumulated over 25 years on the iPad on day one would not best serve our customers and the needs they have.” Usage on a desktop and an iPad isn’t “apples to apples,” he said, and Adobe “will definitely expand the capabilities” of Photoshop on iPad over time.
Apple has positioned the new iteration of Photoshop as a selling point for its iPad Pro tablets since the moment the app was announced.