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New Adobe mobile app grants godly Photoshop powers for the price of free!

By Zachary Chan - 6 Oct 2015

Adobe launches Photoshop Fix

Today at the Adobe MAX 2015 conference in Los Angeles, Adobe announced just one new mobile app called Photoshop Fix. And yet, if you’re a photographer or work with digital photographs a lot, this is the one app that will probably rule them all. Like most of Adobe’s mobile apps, the company continues to chip away the main features from the desktop version of Photoshop into smaller, function-specific apps and as its name implies, Photoshop Fix is designed to help you retouch photos.

It sports a collection of tools very similar to other photo editing apps such as Snapseed. This include settings adjustments (exposure, contrast, saturation, etc.), smoothening, color picker/painter, defocus effects, vignette masks and even a spot healing tool.

It does however boast one major new tool that is about 90% awesome and 10% creepy. The tool in question is called Liquify. In general, Liquify allows you to change an objects shape by warping, swelling or twirling. You just tap on a central spot, then move your finger around depending on the effect you chose. There is also face detection button that will scan your photo and intelligently map out major facial points that are visible such as eyes, nose, lips, cheeks and chin. You can then tap on each of those points for specific warping tools. The eyes for example can be made bigger or smaller; the lips can be made thinner, thicker or even manipulated to create a smile. All this is done in real time, while conforming to your existing facial features so the edits will still look (somewhat) natural.

Basically, what would have taken a professional photo editor dozens of steps, manual layer and mask adjustments in Photoshop can now be accomplished to some degree of approximation with a few finger swipes in Photoshop Fix on your smartphone or tablet. It is already available on the App Store for iOS, with the Android version coming soon.

Still, the true power of the app doesn’t just lie in its easy to use interface or intelligent detection and precise masking capabilities. There was a reason why I mentioned that this will probably be the one image editing app to rule them all. Photoshop Fix edits are supposedly non-destructive. All your changes are preserved in layers, just like Photoshop proper, though I did note during my preview that there was a button to flatten layers. I'm not sure if they can be brought back if this was the case.

And while the standalone app is free to use, having a Creative Cloud subscription means benefiting from the new CreativeSync technology where you can save your work from Photoshop Fix on your mobile to the Creative Cloud Library for future use in other projects, save to Lightroom for more precise editing or even exported entirely to Photoshop as a proper PSD, complete with layers and edits intact.

Besides Photoshop Fix, Adobe also updated some of its existing mobile photography apps with new features.

Highlights as follows:

  • Brush CC, Color CC, Hue CC and Shape CC will now be combined into one app called Adobe Capture CC. This app can be used to turn any photo into color themes, patterns, brush effects or vector art that are then shared through the Creative Cloud for use in your projects.
  • Photoshop Mix has new blend modes, supports more than 2 layers and more image controls like temperature and overlays.
  • Lightroom mobile now comes with a dehaze filter (useful for Singapore at least a month every year) and is an actual capture tool now, so you can shoot and edit from one app. 
  • A Creative Cloud Photography plan is announced for US$9.90/month. This will give you access to Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC and Lightroom mobile. Along with Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix, you’ll have a complete multi-screen, multi-device workflow. The plan will also include Adobe Portfolio when it is available later this year. Portfolio is a service based on Adobe’s existing Behance services to create simple, effective portfolio websites to showcase your creative work.

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